A type of English operatic comedy that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term was one of several used for Italian comic operas of the light intermezzo variety: for instance Pergolesi’s La serva padrona was so described at its first London performance in 1750. Several Italian burlettas were played at Dublin with great success in the 1750s, and Lord Mornington commissioned Kane O’Hara to write an English imitation of one. The result was Midas, the first English burletta, performed privately near Belfast in 1760, and publicly at Dublin in 1762 and at Covent Garden in 1764. It was a burlesque on classical mythology; the music was a pasticcio, partly folksongs and partly tunes from Italian and English operas, with recitative. Its compiler is unknown.
Midas was a great success and was imitated both in Dublin and in the London patent theatres. These early burlettas, in verse throughout and all-sung, satirized the mythological and historical conventions of opera seria, though the music rarely participated in the joke. Prominent examples were The Judgment of Paris (Barthélémon, 1768), The Portrait (Arnold, 1770), The Golden Pippin (J.A. Fisher, 1773) and Poor Vulcan (Dibdin, 1778).
The decline of the burletta began with an adaptation of the burlesque tragedy Tom Thumb, revived at Covent Garden in 1780, a spoken play with added songs from various sources, compiled by J. Markordt. According to George Colman the younger, it was ‘inadvertently announced by the managers … as a burletta’, thus giving the minor theatres a precedent for the evasion of the Licensing Act (1737), which had conferred a monopoly in legitimate drama on the two patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Comedies of all sorts, often with no burlesque element, were now put on at the minor theatres under the general title ‘burletta’, and they departed increasingly from the original model. The orchestra was reduced to a harpsichord or piano. Songs became shorter and scarcer. The dialogue was still supposed to be in rhyme and sung in recitative: in 1812, according to the Theatrical Inquisitor, ‘the tinkling of the piano and the jingling of the rhyme’ were still the distinctive marks of the burletta. But by degrees the recitative became indistinguishable from spoken dialogue. In 1824 Colman told the Lord Chamberlain that a burletta must have at least five or six songs ‘where the songs make a natural part of the piece, and not forced into an acting piece, to qualify it as a burletta’, but even this was an optimistic description. In some of John Barnett’s early stage pieces the few songs, though often highly successful in themselves, were mere ‘music-shop ballads’, introduced irrelevantly into a spoken play for subsequent sale as sheet music.
The term ‘burletta’ did not long survive the repeal of the Licensing Act in 1843, although it was occasionally used later in the century in the USA as a synonym for Burlesque.
FiskeETM
NicollH, iv–v
R.B. Peake: Memoirs of the Colman Family (London, 1841/R), ii, 397ff
E.B. Watson: Sheridan to Robertson (Cambridge, MA, 1926/R), 38ff
E.W. White: The Rise of English Opera (London, 1951/R)
J. Donohue: ‘Burletta and the Early Nineteenth-Century English Theatre’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, i (1973), 29–51
NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY