Grand opera · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

Grand opera is the great nineteenth-century French operatic form: five-act dramas on historical subjects, sung throughout, with elaborate staging, ballet, and the largest orchestral and choral resources of any operatic genre.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 47 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Grand opera, premiered between 1819 and 1996. A span of 177 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 Fromental Halévy, Daniel Auber, Giuseppe Verdi, Charles Gounod, and Carlisle Floyd. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Grand opera tradition catalogued here were composed in French, English, and Italian. The works fall principally within the Romantic, Modern, and Early Modern 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 Gustave III by Daniel Auber, Il pesceballo by multiple composers, and Ivanhoe by Arthur Sullivan (1819). These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Grand opera 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 Grand opera tradition include Houston Grand Opera, Salle Le Peletier, and Royal English Opera House. 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 Grand opera 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: Grand opera

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