page_title: Opera in English
section_title: 18th and 19th centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Opera in English / 18th and 19th centuries
caption_attribution_description: Richard D'Oyly Carte, W. S. Gibert, and Arthur Sullivan together again for Utopia, Limited, after a long quarrel.
context_page_description: The history of opera in the English language commences in the 17th century.
context_section_description: Following Purcell, the popularity of opera in England dwindled. A revived interest in opera occurred in the 1730s, which is largely attributed to Thomas Arne both for his own compositions and for alerting Handel to the commercial possibilities of large-scale works in English. Arne was the first English composer to experiment with Italian-style all-sung comic opera, unsuccessfully in The Temple of Dullness (1745), Henry and Emma (1749) and Don Saverio (1750), but triumphantly in Thomas and Sally (1760). His opera Artaxerxes (1762) was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria in English and was a huge success, holding the stage until the 1830s. His modernized ballad opera, Love in a Village (1762), was equally novel and began a vogue for pastiche opera that lasted well into the 19th century. Arne was one of the few English composers of the era who, although imitating many elements of Italian opera, was able to move beyond it to create his own voice. Charles Burney wrote that Arne introduced "a light, airy, original, and pleasing melody, wholly different from that of Purcell or Handel, whom all English composers had either pillaged or imitated".
  Besides Arne, the other dominating forces in English opera at this time was George Frideric Handel, whose opera serias filled the London operatic stages for decades, and influenced most home-grown composers, such as John Frederick Lampe, to write using Italian models in imitation of him.
  Throughout the second half of the 18th the most popular English genre proved to be ballad opera. Some notable composers include Arne's son Michael Arne, Dibdin, Linley Jr., Arnold, Hook, Shield, the tenor Michael Kelly, Stephen Storace and Mozart's favourite pupil Attwood. The most successful composer of the late Georgian era was Henry Bishop, whose song Home! Sweet Home! from the opera Clari, or the Maid of Milan is still popular today.
  While throughout the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th composers had been influenced mainly by Italian opera, later in the century Meyerbeer's grand operas and, further later, Wagner's operas came to be regarded as the major models for imitation.
  The beginning of the Victorian era saw a short but particularly intense period of creativity, roughly up to the 1850s, partially thanks to the keen interest in music of the Queen and of Prince Albert.
  The Romantic operas of Michael Balfe (the only one whose fame spread throughout Europe), Julius Benedict, John Barnett, Edward Loder, G. A. Macfarren and William Wallace achieved great popularity both in Great Britain and Ireland.
  John Barnett made a serious attempt to follow in the footsteps of Carl Maria von Weber with his opera The Mountain Sylph (1834), often mistakenly claimed as the first sung-through (i.e. completely sung) English opera, which was his only major success (and was later parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan in Iolanthe).
  
  Among the main lanes in London for the production of English language opera in those times were Drury Lane, the Princess's Theatre and the Lyceum. The King's Theatre and the Covent Garden, which were the two major opera houses of the city, featured mostly Italian and French opera (the latter usually translated into Italian). This was a source of continuous vexation for English composers who, until late in the century, had to see their works translated into Italian to be performed on those stages.
  Moreover, the constant presence of a foreign language opera season in the city meant that the operas of indigenous composers had constantly to compete with those of the great Italian composers, as well as those of Weber, Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy and Gounod (the last three usually performed in Italian at the Covent Garden), which continued to dominate the musical stage in England. Beside Balfe, whose operas were translated into German, French and Italian (The Bohemian Girl as La Zingara, for Trieste), the only other composers to gain so renown on the Continent and to have their operas translated into a foreign language were Benedict (into his native German) and Wallace (also in Ge
caption: from left to right: the Savoy impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte with W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Sullivan in a drawing by Alfred Bryan, 1894
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