Opera buffa

Opera buffa is the Italian comic opera of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, set apart from opera seria by contemporary plots, lower-class characters and ensembles of intrigue. It grew from the short intermezzi performed between the acts of serious operas — *Giovanni Battista Pergolesi*'s "La serva padrona" (1733) is the model — into full-length works by *Domenico Cimarosa*, *Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart*, *Gioachino Rossini* and *Gaetano Donizetti*. Its musical language favours rapid patter, conversational recitative, lyrical arias of genuine feeling and cumulative finales in which the whole cast is drawn into confusion.