Opera in German
The world's first opera was "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's "Dafne" is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza "Il pomo d'oro" for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", "Seelewig", which foreshadows the "Singspiel", a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. "Seelewig" was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.
Opera
Opera originated in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri's mostly lost "Dafne", produced in Florence in 1598) and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. In the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe (except France), attracting foreign composers such as George Frideric Handel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his "reform" operas in the 1760s. The most renowned figure of late 18th-century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially "The Marriage of Figaro" ("Le nozze di Figaro"), "Don Giovanni", and "Così fan tutte", as well as "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" ("The Abduction from the Seraglio"), and "The Magic Flute" ("Die Zauberflöte"), landmarks in the German tradition.