Dramma per musica · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

Dramma per musica, literally "drama for music", is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian designation for serious opera, the libretto-genre out of which opera seria would crystallise.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 31 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Dramma per musica, premiered between 1636 and 1825. A span of 189 years separates the earliest from the most recent, which gives the modern reader a useful longitudinal view of how the genre evolved over time. The principal composers represented under this heading include Christoph Willibald Gluck, Francesco Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Gioachino Rossini, and Antonio Vivaldi. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Dramma per musica tradition catalogued here were composed in Italian and German. The works fall principally within the Baroque, Classical, and Unknown traditions. For the listener encountering the genre for the first time, the language and era of a particular work usually offer the most useful first orientation: a Romantic opera in Italian will sound and behave differently from a Baroque opera in French, even where the genre tag is the same.

Representative works from this genre catalogued by OperaPedia include Armida by Gioachino Rossini, Cesare e Cleopatra by Carl Heinrich Graun, and Il Cid della Spagna by Giuseppe Farinelli (1636). These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Dramma per musica refers to in practice. As always, the full encyclopaedia entries set out the synopsis, the principal voice categories required, the premiere details, and the production history through to the present day.

Houses associated in this catalogue with premieres in the Dramma per musica tradition include Teatro San Carlo, Teatro delle Dame, and Teatro Regio Ducale. The clustering of a genre at a particular venue is rarely accidental: it reflects the resident orchestra's strengths, the kind of singers under contract, and the audience's established appetite for a particular kind of evening.

The complete list of catalogued operas in the Dramma per musica tradition is set out below in chronological order of premiere. Each title is linked to a full editorial entry; each composer is linked to a full biographical entry. We invite the curious reader to follow those internal links rather than treating the present page as a destination. The encyclopaedia is intended above all to encourage cross-reading among related works.

Complete Catalogue: Dramma per musica

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