Comic opera
It quickly made its way to France, where it became opéra comique, and eventually, in the following century, French operetta, with Jacques Offenbach as its most accomplished practitioner.
In 1749, thirteen years after Pergolesi's death, his La serva padrona swept Italy and France, evoking the praise of such French Enlightenment figures as Rousseau.
Early proponents included the Italian Egidio Duni, François-André Philidor, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, André Grétry, François-Adrien Boïeldieu, Daniel François Auber and Adolphe Adam.
As in the French opéra comique, the singspiel was an opera with spoken dialogue, and usually a comic subject, such as Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782) and The Magic Flute (1791).
After the turn of the 20th century, Franz Lehár wrote The Merry Widow (1905); Oscar Straus supplied Ein Walzertraum ("A Waltz Dream", 1907) and The Chocolate Soldier (1908); and Emmerich Kálmán composed Die Csárdásfürstin (1915).
Zarzuela returned to its roots in popular Spanish tradition in works such as the sainetes (or Entr'actes) of Don Ramón de la Cruz.
Another successful comic opera, The miller who was a wizard, a cheat and a matchmaker, text by Alexander Ablesimov (1779), on a subject resembling Rousseau's Devin, is attributed to Mikhail Sokolovsky.
Later, Modest Mussorgsky worked on two comic operas, The Fair at Sorochyntsi and Zhenitba ("The Marriage"), which he left unfinished (they were completed only in the 20th century).
The libretto is by Elena Polenova, based on a folk-drama, Tsar Maksimilyan, and the work premiered on June 20, 2001, at the Mariinski Theatre, St Petersburg.
Jessie Bond wrote, The stage was at a low ebb, Elizabethan glories and Georgian artificialities had alike faded into the past, stilted tragedy and vulgar farce were all the would-be playgoer had to choose from, and the theatre had become a place of evil repute to the righteous British householder.... A first effort to bridge the gap was made by the German Reed Entertainers.
[4]Nevertheless, an 1867 production of Offenbach's The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (seven months after its French première) ignited the English appetite for light operas with more carefully crafted librettos and scores, and continental European operettas continued to be extremely popular in Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, including Les Cloches de Corneville, Madame Favart and others into the 1880s, often adapted by H. B. Farnie and Robert Reece.
[3] F. C. Burnand collaborated with several composers, including Arthur Sullivan in Cox and Box, to write several comic operas on English themes in the 1860s and 1870s.
In 1875, Richard D'Oyly Carte, one of the impresarios aiming to establish an English school of family-friendly light opera by composers such as Frederic Clay and Edward Solomon as a countermeasure to the continental operettas, commissioned Clay's collaborator, W. S. Gilbert, and the promising young composer, Arthur Sullivan, to write a short one-act opera that would serve as an afterpiece to Offenbach's La Périchole.
"Mr. R. D'Oyly Carte's Opera Bouffe Company" took Trial on tour, playing it alongside French works by Offenbach and Alexandre Charles Lecocq.
Eager to liberate the English stage from risqué French influences, and emboldened by the success of Trial by Jury, Carte formed a syndicate in 1877 to perform "light opera of a legitimate kind".
In the United States, Victor Herbert was one of the first to pick up the family-friendly style of light opera that Gilbert and Sullivan had made popular, although his music was also influenced by the European operetta composers.
[6] Others who wrote in a similar vein included Reginald de Koven, John Philip Sousa, Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml.
In Canada, Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann and George Frederick Cameron composed in the Gilbert and Sullivan style of light opera.
Several works are variously called operettas or musicals, such as Candide and Sweeney Todd, depending on whether they are performed in opera houses or in theaters.
In addition, some recent American and British musicals make use of an operatic structure, for example, containing recurring motifs, and may even be sung through without dialogue.
