Five months after the release of Tommy, The Kinks released another concept album, Arthur ( Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire ) ( September 1969 ), written by Ray Davies ; though considered by some a rock opera, it was originally conceived as the score for a proposed but never realised BBC television drama.

His compositions were written in the popular Italian opera style of the 19th century, which exploit the double bass in a way that was not seen beforehand.

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

Though it was Rossini's first opera, written when he was thirteen or fourteen, the work was not staged until the composer was twenty years old, premiering as his sixth official opera.

The libretto, a version of Pierre Beaumarchais ' stage play Le Barbier de Séville, was newly written by Cesare Sterbini and not the same as that already used by Giovanni Paisiello in his own Barbiere, an opera which had enjoyed European popularity for more than a quarter of a century.

Much is made of how quickly Rossini's opera was written, scholarship generally agreeing upon two or three weeks.

Later in life, Rossini claimed to have written the opera in only twelve days.

The German title of the book by Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888 and published in 1889, is Götzen-Dämmerung, a pun on the title of Wagner's opera.

Sullivan's first foray into comic opera was Cox and Box ( 1866 ), written with librettist F. C. Burnand for an informal gathering of friends.

" Heart of Oak " was originally written as an opera.

The composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote regularly for the musical saw, including several obbligato parts in his comic opera Ubu Rex, and Canadian composer Robert Minden has written extensively for the musical saw.

The role of the hero was usually written for the castrato voice ; castrati such as Farinelli and Senesino, as well as female sopranos such as Faustina Bordoni, became in great demand throughout Europe as opera seria ruled the stage in every country except France.

The first opera written in Russian was Tsefal i Prokris by the Italian composer Francesco Araja ( 1755 ).

The countertenor is commonly encountered in opera, sometimes singing parts written for castrati – men neutered at a young age specifically to give them a higher singing range.

In the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy the households of nobles had musicians to provide music for dancing and the court, however with the emergence of the theatre, particularly opera, in the early 17th century, music was increasingly written for groups of players in combination, which is the origin of orchestral playing.

An opera on Nurmi, written by Paavo Haavikko and composed by Tuomas Kantelinen, debuted at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium in 2000.

His two forenames were patriotic musical tributes: " Reinhard " referred to the tragic hero from Amen ( an opera written by his father ), and " Tristan " stems from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

Joplin had long-standing ambitions for the synthesizing for the worlds of ragtime and opera, to which end the opera Treemonisha was written.

" Alabama Song " was written and composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1927, for their opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ( Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny ); " Back Door Man " was written by Willie Dixon and originally recorded by Howlin ' Wolf.

Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer entitled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he would, however, never complete ; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already written over a hundred opera or concert reviews and an additional fifty critiques of music composition.

Musical versions include the 1966 TV musical with songs by Moose Charlap, and Judi Rolin in the role of Alice, a Christmas 2007 multimedia stage adaptation at The Tobacco Factory directed and conceived by Andy Burden, written by Hattie Naylor, music and lyrics by Paul Dodgson and a 2008 opera Through the Looking Glass by Alan John.

" There is a waltz in the second act finale of the opera " Una Cosa Rara " written by Martin y Soler in 1786.

His works are frequently performed in opera houses throughout the world and, transcending the boundaries of the genre, some of his themes have long since taken root in popular culture – such as " La donna è mobile " from Rigoletto, " Va, pensiero " ( The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves ) from Nabucco, " Libiamo ne ' lieti calici " ( The Drinking Song ) from La traviata and the " Grand March " from Aida.

In these early Baroque operas, broad comedy was blended with tragic elements in a mix that jarred some educated sensibilities, sparking the first of opera's many reform movements, sponsored by Venice's Arcadian Academy which came to be associated with the poet Metastasio, whose libretti helped crystallize the genre of opera seria, which became the leading form of Italian opera until the end of the 18th century.

Just as intermedi had once been performed in-between the acts of stage plays, operas in the new comic genre of " intermezzi ", which developed largely in Naples in the 1710s and ' 20s, were initially staged during the intermissions of opera seria.

Basses have a long history in opera, having been used in opera seria in supporting roles, and sometimes for comic relief ( as well as providing a contrast to the preponderance of high voices in this genre ).

The upstart MyNetworkTV, a sister company of Fox, launched a line of prime time telenovelas ( a genre that is similar to a soap opera in terms of content ) upon its launch in 2006, but ended its use of the format in 2007 after disappointing ratings.

Each increased the number of weekly episodes transmitted by at least one, further defining soap opera as the leading genre in British television.

After that ANT1 abandoned the soap opera genre and focused on comedy series and weekly dramas.

Twin Peaks was a primetime soap opera that poked fun at the genre.

Prokofiev's greatest interest, however, was opera, and he composed several works in that genre, including The Gambler and The Fiery Angel.

* Operetta – a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter.

Mozart was a versatile composer, and wrote in every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata.

The audience at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, the birthplace of Offenbach's operettas ( 1860 ) Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter.

Many of the originally pornographic French ( and Viennese ) operettas were later played in a toned-down, " classical " version, which is how audiences today are mostly presented with the genre — in an opera house with opera singers, rather than in a private theatre with courtesans in the lead roles.

Trial, a comic treatment of an English courtroom, was an unexpected hit, outrunning La Périchole, and becoming the first step in Carte's scheme to establish a new genre of English comic opera.

As the originating language of opera, Italian dominated that genre in Europe ( except in France ) well through the 18th century, and even into the next century in Russia, for example, when the Italian opera troupe in Saint Petersburg was challenged by the emerging native Russian repertory.

Opera buffa ( Italian, plural: opere buffe ; English: comic opera ) is a genre of opera.

Comic characters had been a part of opera until the early 18th century, when " opera buffa " began to emerge as a separate genre.

His talent in the genre is obvious, but opera is the most expensive of all classical forms, and Berlioz in particular struggled to arrange stagings of his operas, due in part to the unwillingness of conservative Paris opera companies to perform his work.

In some forms of opera, such as Singspiel, opéra comique, operetta, and semi-opera, the recitative is mostly replaced by spoken dialogue.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach created operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers, as well as the opera Les Contes d ' Hoffmann ; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust ; and Bizet composed Carmen, which, once audiences learned to accept its blend of Romanticism and realism, became the most popular of all opéra comiques.

Later commentators have asserted that Carmen forms the bridge between the tradition of opéra comique and the realism or verismo that characterised late 19th-century Italian opera.

Gluck turned his back on Italian opera seria and began to write opéra comiques.

Following this he began on two new projects, an opera by Scribe based on the biblical story of Judith, and an opéra comique, Le pardon de Ploërmel, ( also known as Dinorah, the title given to the Italian version performed at London ) to a libretto by Jules Barbier.

Mignon is an opéra comique ( or opera in its second version ) in three acts by Ambroise Thomas.

After writing the opera L ' opéra d ' Aran, Bécaud toured Europe and continued recording a string of pop music hits, including Tu le Regretteras.

These Singspiele were comedies mixing spoken dialogue and singing, influenced by the similar genres of the ballad opera in England and the opéra comique in France.

The opéra bouffe Gonzague is another essay in the old opera bouffe style.

Although originally reserved for less serious works, the term opéra comique came to refer to any opera that included spoken dialogue, including works such as Bizet's Carmen that are not " comic " in any sense of the word.

As in the French opéra comique, the singspiel was an opera with spoken dialogue, and usually a comic subject, such as Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio ( 1782 ).

The popular Faust ( 1859 ) by Charles Gounod started life as an opéra comique and did not become a grand opera until rewritten in the 1860s.

The term opéra comique is complex in meaning and cannot simply be translated as " comic opera ".

Dauvergne's opera, with a simple plot, everyday characters, and Italianate melodies, had a huge influence on subsequent opéra comique, setting a fashion for composing new music, rather than recycling old tunes.

While it was not Verdi's first grand opera for Paris ( the first being his adaptation of I Lombardi in 1847 under the new title of Jerusalem ), the libretto which Verdi was using had been written about 20 years before at the height of the French grand opera tradition, which " meant that Verdi was writing his first ( original ) opéra at a point at which the genre was in a state of flux ".

Manon Lescaut is an opera or opéra comique in 3 acts by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber to a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and, like Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Massenet's Manon, is based on the Abbé Prévost's novel Manon Lescaut.