Talk:Opera seria

Comment
"His finest work however is Giulio Cesare (1724), a tour de force of superb vocal and orchestral writing, possibly the finest opera seria of all."

This appears to be POV. Should it just be deleted, or can it be fixed in some way?


 * It's definitely POV. If someone said it and can be sourced, it could be included as a quote.  Antandrus  (talk) 03:35, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

The age of opera seria
This section could, I think, be better organized. It seems to over-emphasize Handel at the expense of other composers. Some of the material might perhaps be moved to the page on Handel.

--Gheuf 08:11, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Category "Opera seria"
Isn't it uuseful to have the "opera seria" category for this article? People who browse the category page might find it useful to see a link to this article, right? Cheers, Matthias Röder 08:46, 22 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes. This article is linked to Category:Opera seria and I have put a link here as well to the category. -- Kleinzach 09:13, 22 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Excellent! Maybe I should have checked before annoying everyone! Sorry... Matthias Röder 09:19, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

My revert
I reverted this edit, as I don't think such a list is really suitable for this general article on opera seria - might I suggest a List of aria types as preferable? BTW, I hope my fairly recent revamp of this article is OK with everyone. Moreschi If you've written a quality article... 14:25, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Rossini?
A few days ago I left a new question at Category talk:Opera seria, which in hindsight cannot have been the best place to have posted it. I'm now moving the discussion at it stands at present to here, and leaving a note at the Category talk page referring to here for any further discussion: According to the article on Opera seria, which goes only up to 1800, By the final decade of the century opera seria as it had been traditionally defined was essentially dead, and the political upheavals that the French Revolution inspired swept it away once and for all. And no mention of Rossini is made anywhere in that article.

However, without trying to find all Rossini operas that might be included in this list, I do notice both Semiramide and Tancredi. Are these, and possibly any others, correctly classified as opera seria? Milkunderwood (talk) 05:10, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm no expert at all in this classification caper, but it:Opera seria mentions Rossini specifically, and de:Kategorie:Opera seria also includes those two works. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, that's interesting to know - I appreciate your looking those up. Possibly an editor familiar with our en:Opera seria article may want to look at the Italian and German articles. (I had originally come here wondering if I was incorrect in thinking that Ermione might be classified as "opera seria", and apparently I was.) Milkunderwood (talk) 09:07, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I had never bothered with reading it before now, but in my copy of the Scimone Ermione on Erato, there's a longish essay originally written in Italian by Bruno Cagli, which discusses opera seria and Rossini's place in that tradition with several of his operas, including Tancredi, Aureliano, and Bianca e Falliero - (Semiramide isn't mentioned). Then the essay goes on to mention Rossini's gradual break from that tradition with Otello, Armida, Mose in Egitto, and La Donna del Lago before coming to a discussion of Ermione.

So perhaps the article on Opera seria needs to be not quite so definitive in its statement quoted above in my original post here. A bit more research might turn up some alternative views, or perhaps a somewhat looser definition of the characteristics of the genre. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:27, 24 November 2011 (UTC)


 * The only reference to Bruno Cagli I find here in Wikipedia is in a reference crediting him for the New Grove article on Geltrude Righetti, FWIW. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:34, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

Milkunderwood (talk) 17:22, 28 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Plenty of Rossini scholars, including Philip Gossett. refer to Tancredi, Maometto II, Ermione, Semiramide (and others) as opere serie and do not necessarily accept the 1790s as a hard and fast cut-off date. See Chapter 3 of David Littlejohn's The ultimate art: essays around and about opera, for example. Another good source is The Cambridge companion to Rossini. Another source is a review of the critical edition of the Ermione score in the Opera Quarterly (Oxford University Press): "Ermione was a product of Rossini's Neapolitan period, during which he attained the status of the leading composer of opera seria in Italy". Voceditenore (talk) 18:49, 28 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your fast response. I'm the rankest amateur, not a musician at all, but am merely trying to catalog a collection of recordings; and I have no access to print sources. Hopefully someone with knowledge of Rossini and opera seria will expand on the article, and put a qualifier on the sentence I quoted at the top of this post. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:07, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. I think most of this article was written by Moreschi. It's good, but oversimplifies the history of opera seria/dramma per musica. As you've pointed out, the cut off date is too early. In fact McClymonds and Heartz (in Grove) note an increase in the genre in the 1790s, especially in Venice, just when our article says the form had been killed off. The later 'opera seria' obviously evolved beyond the form in the mid 18th century, but that's the case with all opera genres. 19th century composers of opera seria/dramma per musica include not only Rossini but also Francesco Bianchi, Simon Mayr, Giovanni Pacini, Ferdinando Paer, Gaspare Spontini — and Antônio Carlos Gomes who takes us up to the 1860s. Given the problems writing about opera genres on WP — see the mess at the List of opera genres, where I have removed my name as maintainer — I'm not going to attempt to correct this article. -- Klein zach  00:36, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Mapeh
Classical opera Opera seria Opera buffa 222.127.54.85 (talk) 20:37, 14 November 2022 (UTC)