However, it was not until the appearance of Claudio Monteverdi in Venice that baroqueopera reached its peak, and the art form that began as entertainment for the aristocracy became available to popular audiences.
The ballad opera eventually led to the singspiel, the German comic opera with spoken dialogue, which was to reach its highest development in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
These operas, although somewhat limited in melodic invention, fused in their plots the natural and the supernatural and paved the way for the grandiose music dramas of Richard Wagner, who also wrote his own librettos.
Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 to 1750 (see Dates of classical music eras for a discussion of the problems inherent in defining the beginning and end points).
Baroque music would see an expansion in the size, range and complexity of performance, as well as the establishment of opera as a type of musical performance.
Opera, invented in the late Renaissance, became an important musical form during the Baroque, with the operas of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), Handel, and others.
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