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• Personalities
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

1598–1659, Italian Venetian-born librettist Gian Francesco Busenello had a particular talent for the commercial operas that became fashionable in Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century. Busenello possessed a certain cynical realism about life that served him and his composers well when it came to insights into human behaviour. Busenello was never judgemental in his treatment of his ...

• Major Operas
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

than mythology. The action takes place in Rome in ad 65. The eponymous heroine is the mistress and, later, wife of the Emperor Nero. The libretto was by Busenello, who took his text from the annals of the ancient Roman historian Tacitus (ad 55–120). The opera received its first performance in Venice in 1643. Poppea was written when ...

• Personalities
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

instrumental accompaniment, eloquently expressed his sadness at the untimely demise of his young friend and sometime student. Introduction | Early & Middle Baroque | Opera Personalities | Gian Francesco Busenello | Early & Middle Baroque | Opera ...

• Classical
• Early Baroque

The revival and imitation of ancient theatrical genres in sixteenth-century Italy bore fruit in seventeenth-century England and France in the works of the great dramatists of those countries: William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In Italy, however, the sixteenth-century innovations in spoken drama were followed in the next century not by a great national ...