Opera Buffa

Opera buffa is the comic counterpart to opera seria: a fast-moving stage work in Italian, populated by servants, merchants and lovers rather than gods and emperors. Its musical signature is the ensemble — duets, trios and especially the long act-ending finales where five, six or seven characters sing at cross-purposes while the orchestra accelerates them toward chaos. Recitative is split between secco (harpsichord and cello only) and accompagnato (full strings) to mark dramatic temperature, and the arias are deliberately tuneful, closer to street song than to seria's high heroic style. Orchestras are modest by 19th-century standards — strings, pairs of winds, occasional horns and timpani.

The form grew out of the 'intermezzo,' short comic skits performed between the acts of serious operas. Pergolesi's 'La serva padrona' (1733) was the breakout independent work; it ignited the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris a decade later and made comic opera a respectable genre. Vienna in the 1780s was the high-water mark, when Mozart's three collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte — 'Le nozze di Figaro' (1786), 'Don Giovanni' (1787) and 'Così fan tutte' (1790) — established that comedy could carry the same dramatic weight as tragedy. The Italian line continued through Rossini ('Il barbiere di Siviglia,' 1816) and Donizetti ('L'elisir d'amore,' 1832) into the 19th century.

The act finale is the format's signature feat: characters enter one by one, each adding a new musical idea, until the orchestra and chorus are managing six or seven simultaneous lines that still make verbal sense. The 20-minute finale of Act II of 'Figaro' is the canonical example. Listen too for the way recitative shifts from clattering harpsichord-only secco into orchestrally accompanied recitative whenever a character has a real emotional turn — Mozart uses the texture change as dramatic punctuation.

If you only watch one work, Mozart's 'Le nozze di Figaro' (1786) compresses everything buffa can do into three hours. For a single excerpt, Figaro's patter aria 'Largo al factotum' from Rossini's 'Il barbiere di Siviglia' is the showpiece audition piece for any comic baritone.

Mozart's 'Così fan tutte' was regarded as morally indecent through the 19th century and was routinely performed with rewritten plots; the original libretto only fully returned to the standard repertoire after World War II. The title means roughly 'they all behave that way' — referring not just to women but, in context, to a universal human weakness.