(It.: ‘half-serious opera’).
An intermediate genre first identified during the early 19th century. The term was originally applied mainly to Italian equivalents of the French post-revolutionary ‘pièce de sauvetage’ such as Paer’s Camilla (1799) or Simon Mayr’s Le due giornate (1801), sometimes labelled ‘drammi eroicocomici’. Later it was extended to comedies, akin to the French comédie larmoyante, that contain a strong element of pathos. The range of characters is generally wider than in opera buffa, but the same types prevail, the basso buffo being often more dangerous than his purely comic counterpart (as in Rossini’s La gazza ladra, 1817). During the Romantic period opera semiseria usually has a pastoral setting, its heroine being a village maiden whose innocence, at first called into question, is finally vindicated amid general rejoicing. Examples include Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix (1842) and Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo (1833). Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831) has all the attributes of the genre except the basso buffo; hence its description as a ‘melodramma’ tout court. Opera semiseria shares with opera buffa the tradition of ‘recitative secco’. A late example is Mercadante’s Violetta (1853). Thereafter the term lapses, but it is noteworthy that in 19th-century Italian revivals Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787) was frequently described as an opera semiseria.
E. Masi: ‘Giovanni de Gamerra e i drammi lagrimosi’, Sulla storia del teatro nel secolo XVIII (Florence, 1891), 28–354
M. Ruhnke: ‘Opera semiseria und dramma eroicomico’, AnMc, no.21 (1982), 263–74
J. Commons: ‘Donizetti e l’opera semiseria’, Gaetano Donizetti: Bergamo 1992, 181–96
JULIAN BUDDEN