Opera seria

Opera seria was a term coined to designate an Italian form of musico-theatrical entertainment from which comic scenes had been dropped. The expression means literally “serious opera”; it came into being as a result of reforms proposed by such Italian dramatists as Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750), who felt that greater importance should be attached to the Aristotelian precept against commingling the two genres of comedy and tragedy in a single work. Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782) subsequently added…