* 1711 – The London première of Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel, the first Italian opera written for the London stage.

* 1711: Rinaldo, Handel's first opera for the London stage, premiered

* February 24 – Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel, the first Italian opera written for the London stage, premieres in that city.

Within a large and varied musical output, Handel was a vigorous champion of Italian opera, which he had introduced to London in 1711 with Rinaldo.

Godfrey is depicted in Handel's opera " Rinaldo " ( 1711 ) as Goffredo.

In 1984, she sang the title role of Handel's opera seria Rinaldo ( directed by Frank Corsaro ), the first Handel opera ever performed at the Met.

Rinaldo ( HWV 7 ) is an opera by George Frideric Handel composed in 1711.

Some of the magical and exotic atmosphere of Romance informed tragedies for the stage, such as John Dryden's collaborative The Indian Queen ( 1664 ) as well as Restoration spectaculars and opera seria, such as Handel's Rinaldo ( 1711 ), based on a magical interlude in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.

Arias from the opera Rinaldo ( opera ) | Rinaldo, Byrne Collection

Podleś made her Metropolitan Opera debut on February 14, 1984, singing the title role in Handel's Rinaldo, but only for a few performances that year ( from which only two were in the Met's House ), and was notably absent from the Met for more than 24 years, since then pursuing her career elsewhere and performing regularly at all other major opera houses in Europe and America.

It was Handel's third London opera, intended to follow the success of Rinaldo after the unpopular Il pastor fido.

Armida was translated into German and widely performed, especially in the northern German states, where it helped to establish Salieri's reputation as an important and innovative modern composer It would also be the first opera to receive a serious preparation in a piano and vocal reduction by Carl Friedrich Cramer in 1783.

Les Danaïdes followed in the tradition of reform that Gluck had begun in the 1760s and that Salieri had emulated in his earlier opera Armida.

* December 26 – Teatro alla Scala in Milan opens its operatic carnival season with Josef Mysliveček's new opera Armida.

He also made an arrangement of Mysliveček's aria " Il caro mio bene " ( from the opera Armida of 1780 ).

On 11 January the opera L ' Armida, by Barberini house composer Marco Marazzoli, was presented in his honor and Marazzoli composed a work Le pretensioni del Tebro e del Po to commemorate recent events.

In 2005 her opera Armida, an opera for television, premiered on Channel Four in the United Kingdom ).

) She has since turned to Bellini, whose opera `` Beatrice Di Tenda '' in a concert version with the American Opera Society introduced her to New York last season.

After all, the opera has juicy music to sing and the goodies are well distributed, with no less than six leading parts.

She has been made the heroine of a tragedy by François Ponsard, Agnès de Méranie, and of an opera by Vincenzo Bellini, La straniera.

A complete opera composed in 1769 ( presumably as a culminating study ) La vestale ( The Vestal Virgin ) has also been lost.

His late opera based on William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff ossia Le tre burle ( Falstaff, or the Three Tricks ), ( 1799 ) has found a wider audience in modern times than its original reception promised.

It has played in opera houses around the world.

The complete opera has rapidly entered the repertoire as one of the landmarks of contemporary music and, like Wozzeck, remains a consistent audience draw.

Since its original 1973 Broadway production, the musical has enjoyed professional productions in the West End, by opera companies, in a 2009 Broadway revival, and elsewhere, and it is a popular choice for regional groups.

The musical has also become part of the repertoire of a few opera companies.

The piece has also become a popular choice for amateur musical theatre and light opera companies.

The term ballad opera has also been used to describe musicals using folk music, such as The Martins and the Coys in 1944, and Peter Bellamy's The Transports in 1977.

Patrick Stoddart of The Times wrote: " The millions who watch Coronation Street – and who will continue to do so despite Lord Rees-Mogg – know real life when they see it ... in the most confident and accomplished soap opera television has ever seen ".

In 2010, American Idiot became the first punk rock opera to make it to Broadway where it has garnered two Tony Awards.

Since the Renaissance the myth of Diana has often been represented in the visual and dramatic arts, including the opera L ' arbore di Diana.

The tale has been adapted to various media, most notably the opera Hänsel und Gretel ( opera ) | Hänsel und Gretel ( 1893 ) by Engelbert Humperdinck and a stop-motion animated feature film based on the opera.

No really adequate recording has been made of Schmidt's second and last opera Fredigundis, of which there has been but one " unauthorized " release in the early 1980s on the Voce Label of an Austrian Radio broadcast of a 1979 Vienna performance under the direction of Ernst Märzendorfer.

In 1768, when court intrigue prevented the performance of La Finta Semplice ( K. 51 ) for which a twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had composed 500 pages of music, Mesmer is said to have arranged a performance in his garden of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne ( K. 50 ), a one-act opera, though Mozart's biographer Nissen has stated that there is no proof that this performance actually took place.

In 1907, Puccini made his final revisions to the opera in a fifth version, which has become known as the " standard version ".

However, the opera has been acclaimed for its incorporation of advanced harmonic language and rhythmic complexity into the Italian operatic form.

In addition, one aria from the opera, Ch ' ella mi creda, has become a staple of compilation albums by operatic tenors.

With the possible exception of Giacomo Puccini, no composer of Italian opera has managed to match Verdi's popularity.

The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689.

* Motezuma, 1733 opera by Antonio Vivaldi ( until recently known under the title Montezuma )

More recently Sir Harrison Birtwistle has emerged as one of Britain's most significant contemporary composers from his first opera Punch and Judy to his most recent critical success in The Minotaur.

In the 2000s, ABC began to revitalize the primetime soap opera format with shows such as Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Brothers & Sisters, Ugly Betty, Private Practice and most recently Revenge and Ringer, which they co-produced with CBS for the CW.

Along with other contemporary works, such as Giovanni Paolo Marana's Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the opera was inspired by a contemporary interest in the perceived " exotic " culture of the Ottoman Empire, a nation which had only recently ceased to be a military threat to the Austrian Empire.

Gioachino Rossini had recently retired and Vincenzo Bellini had died shortly before the premier of Lucia leaving Donizetti as " the sole reigning genius of Italian opera ".

The theatrical / operatic possibilities of Schoenberg's score have been realized by at least two major ensembles: the Opera Quotannis, which staged a version of Pierrot lunaire ( with singer Christine Schadeberg ) at the New School for Social Research in 1995 and, more recently, the internationally acclaimed contemporary music sextet eighth blackbird, which premiered a " cabaret opera " dramatizing the Schoenberg cycle in 2009.

On his return to Paris, the recently completed La damnation de Faust was premiered at the Opéra-Comique, but after two performances, the run was discontinued and the work was a popular failure ( perhaps owing to its halfway status between opera and cantata ), despite receiving generally favourable critical reviews.

More recently, the space opera series Firefly used an explicitly Western theme for its portrayal of frontier worlds.

Most recently, David DiChiera rewrote the play as another opera entitled Cyrano, which was produced first by Michigan Opera Theater and then by the Opera Company of Philadelphia ( February 2008 ).

Until recently in the British House of Commons it was required that a member raising a point of order while the House is voting be wearing a hat so they could be easily seen, and two opera hats ( the kind associated with stage magic ) were kept in the House for members to don on such occasions.

The opera house / theatre was recently renovated by California Progress, Inc., along with the adjacent Finke Building, to save this historical landmark.

More recently, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has written an opera about Rudel called L ' amour de loin, with a libretto by Amin Maalouf, which was given its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 and its US premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2002.

Before the premiere of Yeomen, Sullivan had recently been lauded for the successful oratorio The Golden Legend and would produce his grand opera, Ivanhoe, only 15 months after Yeomen.

More recently, electronic libretto systems have begun to be used in some opera houses, including New York's Metropolitan Opera, Milan's La Scala and the Crosby Theatre of the Santa Fe Opera, which show the words on individual screens attached to the backs of the seats so as to not interfere with the visual aspects of the performance.

Other college groups include Fitzwilliam Baroque Ensemble, the recently formed Ensemble CB3, and Fitzwilliam Chamber Opera, the university ’ s only college-based opera society.

Wexford's Theatre Royal opera house was recently replaced by the Wexford Opera House and it hosts the internationally recognised Opera Festival every October.

The department also presents an opera every year and recently performed a Stephen Paulus oratorio about the Holocaust entitled " To Be Certain of the Dawn ", jointly with choirs and orchestra from Saint Cloud State University in Europe in May 2008.

He has recently appeared as the undertaker Archie Shuttleworth in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street

Nevertheless, the station has recently returned to leading the ratings against WLII and WAPA, with its soap opera block dominating in the 7 to 10 p. m. time period.

The plot involves George Schneider, a recently widowed writer who is introduced to soap opera actress Jennie Malone by his press agent brother Leo and her best friend Faye.

In 1885 Herbert became romantically involved with Therese Förster ( 1861 – 1927 ), a soprano who had recently joined the court opera for which the court orchestra played.

Quite recently, the phenomenon has begun to affect the theatrical stage, for instance in the production of Baroque opera.

The last one is one of his most famous works and has been twice as adapted an opera, by Aare Merikanto and by Leevi Madetoja, and to film four times, most recently in 1999 by Aki Kaurismäki.

In 1953, he had his own short-lived NBC situation comedy on TV, Bonino, in which he appeared as a recently widowed Italian-American opera singer trying to rear six children.