List of major opera composers
Wikimedia list of persons by occupation (P166)
This list provides a guide to opera composers, as determined by their presence on a majority of compiled lists of significant opera composers. (See the "Lists Consulted" section for full details.) The composers run from Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first ever opera in late 16th century Italy, to John Adams, one of the leading figures in the contemporary operatic world. The brief accompanying notes offer an explanation as to why each composer has been considered major. Also included is a section about major women opera composers, compiled from the same lists. For an introduction to operatic history, see opera. The organisation of the list is by birthdate.
Major opera composers
1550–1699
Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) Florentine who composed both the first opera ever, Dafne (1598), and the first surviving opera, Euridice (1600).
Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) Generally regarded as the first major opera composer. In Orfeo (1607) he blended Peri's experiments in opera with the lavish spectacle of the intermedi. Later, in Venice in the 1640s, he helped make opera a commercially viable form with Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, one of the earliest operas in the present-day operatic repertoire.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of major opera composers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.