Composer of the Week - Monteverdi to Rossini - Italian Opera - Episode 4

Continuing Donald Macleod's exploration of two centuries of Italian opera from Monteverdi to Rossini. This fourth programme delves into the batty world of opera buffa, with lecherous masters and saucy maids gamboling about suggestively in ludicrous plots. First up is Pergolesi's Il serva padrona - 'The Maid as Mistress' - originally designed as light relief between the acts of a 'serious' opera. In the event, it achieved such popularity in its own right that it came to be widely performed as a standalone work, and its serious counterpart was forgotten. Very few people today have heard of Gaetano Latilla, but in his own time he was considered one of the most important composers of Italian opera. His La finta cameriera - 'The Fake Maid' - was one of the few full-length comic operas successfully exported from Naples in the 1730s. Baldassare Galuppi cropped up in Wednesday's programme as a composer of serious opera. Like many composers of the period, he also did comedy; his La diavolessa - 'The She-Devil' - is a delightful work with a completely implausible plot. The curtain comes down with Mozart, who brought the buffa line to an unsurpassable peak of perfection with his three comic operas to librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte.