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Opera buffa is a genre of opera. It was first used as an informal description of Italian comic operas variously classified by their authors as commedia in musica, commedia per musica, dramma bernesco, dramma comico, divertimento giocoso.
Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous operas in Italian were written by foreign composers, including Handel, Gluck and Mozart. Works by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are amongst the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world.
Carlo Coccia was an Italian opera composer. He was known for the genre of opera semiseria.
Giuseppe Persiani was an Italian opera composer.
Comédie larmoyante was a genre of French drama of the 18th century. In this type of sentimental comedy, the impending tragedy was resolved at the end, amid reconciliations and floods of tears. Plays of this genre that ended unhappily nevertheless allowed the audience to see that a "moral triumph" had been earned for the suffering heroes and heroines.
Dramma giocoso is a genre of opera common in the mid-18th century. The term is a contraction of dramma giocoso per musica and describes the opera's libretto (text). The genre developed in the Neapolitan opera tradition, mainly through the work of the playwright Carlo Goldoni in Venice. A dramma giocoso characteristically used a grand buffo scene as a dramatic climax at the end of an act. Goldoni's texts always consisted of two long acts with extended finales, followed by a short third act. Composers Baldassare Galuppi, Niccolò Piccinni, and Joseph Haydn set Goldoni's texts to music.
Margherita d'Anjou is an opera semiseria in two acts by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The Italian libretto was by Felice Romani after a text based on legends around the English Wars of the Roses by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt. The title role is the Queen Margaret of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays, who also appears in Richard III. Margherita d'Anjou is the first opera by Meyerbeer to mix historical events and personages with fictional characters and situations, as his French grand operas Les Huguenots, Le prophète and L'Africaine were later to do. It is the fourth of Meyerbeer's Italian operas and was his first international success.
La zingara is an opera semiseria in two acts by Gaetano Donizetti, set to a libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola after La petite bohémienne by Louis-Charles Caigniez, which was itself derived from a work of August von Kotzebue.
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines is an opera in three acts by Jack Beeson written in 1975 to a libretto by Sheldon Harnick after the 1901 play of the same name by Clyde Fitch. The play had previously been adapted for a 1916 silent film.
Filippo Galli was an Italian opera singer who began his career as a tenor in 1801 but went on to become one of the most acclaimed basses of the bel canto era, with a voice known for its wide range, extreme agility, and expressivity, and a remarkable gift for acting.
Fernando Corena was a Swiss bass who had a major international opera career from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. He enjoyed a long and successful career at the Metropolitan Opera between 1954 and 1978, and was a regular presence at the Vienna State Opera between 1963 and 1981. His repertoire encompassed both dramatic and comic roles in leading and secondary parts, mainly within Italian opera. He was highly regarded for his performances of opera buffa characters and is generally considered one of the greatest basso buffos of the post-war era. He was heralded as the true successor to comic Italian bass Salvatore Baccaloni, and in 1966 Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The New York Times that he was "the outstanding buffo in action today and the greatest scene stealer in the history of opera".
L'inganno felice is an opera in one act by Gioachino Rossini with a libretto by Giuseppe Maria Foppa.
Enzo Dara was an Italian basso buffo. Opera News described him as "one of the most famous Italian basses on the opera stage [known for] portraying a cluster of touchstone roles that highlighted his natural gifts for comedy, rapid-fire patter and bel canto technique." He is particularly admired for his performances in operas by Rossini.
A bass is a type of classical male singing voice and has the lowest vocal range of all voice types. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, a bass is typically classified as having a vocal range extending from around the second E below middle C to the E above middle C (i.e., E2–E4). Its tessitura, or comfortable range, is normally defined by the outermost lines of the bass clef. Categories of bass voices vary according to national style and classification system.
Giuseppe Fioravanti was an Italian opera singer active during the first half of the 19th century. Although one of the most important and popular basso buffos of his generation, there is only a relatively small amount of information available about his life. He had a highly fruitful partnership with the Teatro Nuovo in Naples and is best known today for creating roles in the world premieres of numerous operas by Gaetano Donizetti.
Giuseppe Lillo was an Italian composer. He is best known for his operas which followed in the same vein of Gioachino Rossini. He also produced works for solo piano, a small amount of sacred music, and some chamber music.
Melchiorre Luise was a leading exponent of the operatic basso buffo repertoire.
Don Checco is an opera in two acts composed by Nicola De Giosa to a libretto by Almerindo Spadetta. It premiered on 11 July 1850 at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples. Don Checco was De Giosa's masterpiece and one of the last great successes in the history of Neapolitan opera buffa.
Almerindo Spadetta was a prolific opera librettist active in Naples. He worked as a stage manager at the Teatro San Carlo, Teatro Nuovo, and Teatro del Fondo in Naples for over 40 years and wrote numerous libretti for composers associated with those theatres. His most enduring work was the libretto for Nicola De Giosa's Don Checco, one of the last great successes in the history of Neapolitan opera buffa.
Luigi Pacini was an Italian opera singer who appeared on the principal stages of his native country as well as in Spain and Austria in a career that spanned over 30 years. He began his career as a tenor but in 1805 started singing bass roles and rose to prominence in that repertoire. Amongst the numerous roles he created in world premieres were Geronio in Rossini's Il turco in Italia and Parmenione in his L'occasione fa il ladro. Pacini was born in the Province of Pistoia and died in Viareggio where in his later years he taught singing at the conservatory founded by his son, Giovanni Pacini.
References
- ↑ Sadie, Stanley, ed. (1980). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vl 2. London: Macmillan. p. 453. ISBN 1-56159-174-2.