Some of the major opera composers were Gluck, Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Opera became steadily more international and varied in style, Italian opera seria mixing with French opera comique and German singspiel amongst many other operatic genres. He made the orchestra more integral by developing “recitativo accompagnato”, recitative supported by full orchestra rather than just continuo. In the mid 1700s Willibald Christoph Gluck took opera in new directions, expanding the structure, harmony and narratives away from the highly formalised forms that had dominated the previous 150 years. Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas are two of the most commonly heard works today. The H.I.P (Historically Informed Performance) movement pushing many of these works back into the repertory. For much of the 20th Century, Baroque works were seldom performed but there has been something of a popularity boom over the last few decades. Some of the major opera composers of this period were Antonio Vivaldi, Handel and Jean-Baptiste Lully. This form of opera came to the fore in wealthy courts across Europe, royalty frequently patrons of composers, but it rapidly became an art form that appealed to all classes, George Friedrich Handel’s work, for example, wildly popular in England. Both these composers were working in Italy, and it was Italian opera that would dominate what is now known as the Baroque period spanning from around 1600 to the 1740s. Unfortunately little of Peri’s score survives so Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607 takes the crown as the earliest work that you are able to hear. The first musical theatre work that we might define as an opera today was Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, composed in the late 1590s.
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