Chamber opera.

A term used to designate 20th-century operas of small and relatively intimate proportions using a chamber orchestra. Examples include Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916), Hindemith’s Cardillac (1926, revised 1952), Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) and Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954). The term has also been applied, retrospectively, to small-scale 18th-century works such as Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (1733).

See Opera, §VI, 6.