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The Italian word opera means "work", both in the sense of the labor done and the result produced. The Italian word in turn derives from the Latin opera.Opera is also the Latin plural of opus, with the same root, but the word opera was a singular Latin noun in its own right, and according to Lewis and Short, in Latin "opus is used mostly of the mechanical activity of work, as that of animals ...
Another was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose texts were set to music in 122 operas, twenty of them on his work Faust. He also personally wrote eight librettos for singspiel. [267] Fifty-six operas were also composed on texts by Friedrich von Schiller. [268] Other writers who also inspired numerous operas were Victor Hugo and Aleksandr Pushkin ...
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.
The music of Florence is foundational in the history of Western European music.Music was an important part of the Italian Renaissance.It was in Florence that the Florentine Camerata convened in the mid-16th century and experimented with setting tales of Greek mythology to music and staging the result—in other words, the first operas, setting the wheels in motion not just for the further ...
The first of the great operas of Janáček's late maturity, based on an Ostrovsky play about religious fanaticism and forbidden love in provincial Russia. [183] 1921 The Love for Three Oranges (Sergei Prokofiev). A comic opera based on a fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi. [184] 1922 Der Zwerg (Alexander von Zemlinsky).
The new form of opera also borrowed, especially for the librettos, from an existing pastoral poetic form called intermedio; it was mainly the musical style that was new. [21] The instrumentation for an opera from the Camerata composers (Caccini and Peri) was written for a handful of gambas, lutes, and harpsichord or organ for continuo .
The second season of The Gilded Age, airing now on HBO, follows the drama of two warring New York City opera houses—and was inspired by real-life events.Above, Taissa Farmiga, Carrie Coon, and ...
Before such elements were forced out of opera seria, many libretti had featured a separately unfolding comic plot as sort of an "opera-within-an-opera". One reason for this was an attempt to attract members of the growing merchant class, newly wealthy, but still not as cultured as the nobility, to the public opera houses .