ABSTRACT
Just as opera seria and intermezzo had coexisted in eighteenth-century Italy, a clear-cut division between “serious” and “comic” works continued to be the European norm over the next hundred years. Both kinds of stage works continued to evolve in the nineteenth century. France and Spain cultivated primarily comic genres in the 1800s, and England also found the comic approach to be enormously successful, as we will see in the next chapter. Austria produced appealing stage works of both types, but in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany, the focus was largely on serious compositions. The endeavors of Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini, among others, have exercised a direct influence on composers of “popular” stage music clear up to the present day.
