Operetta

Оперета

Audio: Operetta

Operetta is a light musical-theatre genre with spoken dialogue, a witty plot, dances, and catchy melodies. The “lighter sister” of opera and the forerunner of the musical.

Operetta took shape in mid-19th-century Paris thanks to Jacques Offenbach (Orpheus in the Underworld), and reached its “golden” flowering in Vienna with Johann Strauss II (Die Fledermaus), while Franz Lehár (The Merry Widow) ushered in its “silver age”. Unlike opera, here musical numbers alternate with spoken scenes.

The genre blends satire, the lyric waltz, the can-can, and a brilliant finale. Operetta was the direct forerunner of the American musical. In Ukrainian musical theatre the traditions of the light genre were developed by 20th-century composers, with plots often drawn from folk life and humour.

Cultural Versus

Operetta

Sub-category:: classical

Operetta is a light musical-theatre genre with spoken dialogue, a witty plot, dances, and catchy melodies. The “lighter sister” of opera and the forerunner of the musical.

36%similarity

Dodecaphony

Sub-category:: classical

Dodecaphony is a compositional technique in which all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale are used in a predetermined order (the row). Developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the early 1920s; Josef Matthias Hauer had independently published a similar system in 1919.