Opéra comique · Operatic Genre & Catalogue

Opéra comique, despite its name, is not necessarily comic in subject. It is the French operatic form distinguished by spoken dialogue between musical numbers, and it served as the principal vehicle for new French opera through much of the nineteenth century.

The OperaPedia catalogue currently records 57 operas identified by the source data with the genre tag Opéra comique, premiered between 1726 and 2007. A span of 281 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 Jacques Offenbach, André Grétry, Charles Lecocq, Edmond Audran, and Adolphe Adam. Each of those composers maintains a full biographical entry on the site, linked from the list below.

Operas in the Opéra comique tradition catalogued here were composed in French, German, and Italian. The works fall principally within the Romantic, 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 Djamileh by Georges Bizet, Guillaume Tell by André Grétry, and Jean de Paris by François-Adrien Boïeldieu. These entries are good starting points for readers wishing to gain a concrete sense of what the genre tag Opéra comique 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 Opéra comique tradition include Théâtre Feydeau, Palace of Versailles, and Gatchina Palace. 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 Opéra comique 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: Opéra comique

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