(It.: ‘jocular drama’).
Term used on Italian librettos in the second half of the 18th century to designate a comic opera. It was used as early as 1695, by G.C. Villifranchi (preface to L’ipocondriaco), and became established as a descriptive term when regularly used, from 1748 onwards, by Carlo Goldoni. Its common use was for the type of libretto favoured by Goldoni and his followers in which character-types from serious opera (parti serie) appeared alongside the standard peasants, servants, elderly buffoons and others traditional to comic opera (parti buffe), often with intermediate characters (in mezzo carattere). Notable early examples are Goldoni’s Il filosofo di campagna (set by Galuppi in 1754) and La buona figliuola (set by Egidio Duni in 1756 and by Niccolò Piccinni in 1760); Haydn set three Goldoni dramma giocoso texts, Il mondo della luna, Le pescatrici and Lo speziale. It is however unlikely that the dramma giocoso was considered a distinct musical genre, or indeed a musical genre at all, at the time. Certainly it was used interchangeably with other genre descriptions; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, for example, is described on the libretto as a dramma giocoso and on the score as an opera buffa. There is reason to think that librettists favoured the term for their texts but that composers more often thought of their comic works simply as opere buffe.
D. Heartz: ‘Goldoni, Don Giovanni and the Dramma Giocoso’, MT, cxx (1979), 993–8; repr. in Mozart’s Operas (Berkeley, 1990), 195–205
D.N. Marinelli: Carlo Goldoni as Experimental Librettist: the Drammi giocosi of 1750 (diss., Rutgers U., 1988)
T. Emery: Goldoni as Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the Drammi giocosi per musica (New York, 1991)