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These had spoken dialogue and short, punchy, witty songs leading to swifter narratives and many more laughs. These racy works had none of the noble, heroic narratives of the mainstream Handellian opera of the time and were instead biting, satirical pieces featuring predominantly lower class characters.

Handel turned later in his life towards the English choral tradition and turned out a huge number of English language oratorios, some of which have since been pinched back to the opera house such as Semele, 1743.Īn interesting outlier in all this is The Beggar’s Opera, 1728, by John Gay and the various accompanying ballad operas. Otherwise it was left to George Frederic Handel to dominate the British stages and his operatic works were almost entirely written in Italian.

The best known today is Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, 1692, a hacked apart version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the earliest work that remains is Louis Grabu’s Albion and Albanius, 1685 (which can also stake its claim to being the earliest “full length” English language opera). The semi-opera, a decidedly British form, harkens back to Davenant’s quasi-musical creations being spoken plays with musical episodes tacked on. Purcell then gave up on the fully-sung opera and wrote semi-operas for the rest of his career.

One of Blow’s students, Henry Purcell, would soon create the crowning achievement of the English Baroque operatic movement in Dido and Aeneas, 1689. As with many other British composers of the period, Blow was heavily associated with the church (a hallmark of British music that has continued to this day) and ecclesiastical anthems make up the bulk of his output. This would be Blow’s only contribution to the stage. Venus and Adonis is held as the earliest existing English language opera, a through-composed work though still in some ways a masque in form. Locke was one of the composers of The Siege of Rhodes and his masque (a popular form of court entertainment involving acting, singing and dancing) Orpheus and Euridice of 1673 made a decisive push towards making music an integral part of the plot (something that wasn’t really true of the traditional masque).īlow’s Venus and Adonis followed on from this, premiering around 1683 as a private performance for the King. If French opera was created by Jean-Baptiste Lully by borrowing liberally from Italian opera, then British opera was truly kicked off by Matthew Locke and John Blow who borrowed from Lully and the French. Francesco Cavalli’s Erismena possibly the first foreign language opera to be translated into English in 1674. In part because of this, opera did begin to be imported.

However, after all his time exiled in France, King Charles had developed a taste for the music of the court of Louis XIV. But, it wasn’t really a case of the flood gates opening, in fact it took some twenty years before a true English opera was created. With the fall of Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II in 1660, opera in Britain was briefly allowed to develop as more than just a sneaky way to get plays performed.

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