Opera buffa · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

Opera buffa is the eighteenth-century Italian comic opera tradition that produced the Mozart and Da Ponte trilogy and gave the world the dramatic ensemble finale, in which all the principal voices come together to resolve, or further complicate, the comedic action.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 38 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Opera buffa, premiered between 1630 and 1981. A span of 351 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 Gaetano Donizetti, Antonio Salieri, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi, and Stephen Storace. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Opera buffa tradition catalogued here were composed in Italian, German, and English. The works fall principally within the Classical, Romantic, 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 Der Rauchfangkehrer by Antonio Salieri, Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamace by Antonio Salieri, and Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri. These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Opera buffa 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 Opera buffa tradition include Teatro Nuovo, Teatro San Bartolomeo, and Burgtheater. 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 Opera buffa 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: Opera buffa

An Intermission

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