One-act opera · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

The one-act opera is a compact dramatic form that compresses the conventions of full-length opera into a single, sustained musical and dramatic arc. It has attracted composers from every era seeking to explore a single emotional situation in concentrated form.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 24 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag One-act opera, premiered between 1751 and 2016. A span of 265 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 Nicolae Bretan, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Gioachino Rossini, and Anton Rubinstein. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the One-act opera tradition catalogued here were composed in German, Italian, and French. The works fall principally within the Early Modern, Modern, and Romantic 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 Der Ring des Polykrates by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Fin de partie, and La guirlande by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1751). These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag One-act 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 One-act opera tradition include Teatro San Moisè in Venice, Teatro Apolo, and Königliches Opernhaus. 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 One-act 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: One-act opera

An Intermission

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