Singspiel in the context of "Operas"

Opera is a form of Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another.

Opera is a key part of Western classical music, and Italian tradition in particular. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as Singspiel and Opéra comique. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style, and self-contained arias. The 19th century saw the rise of the continuous music drama.

A number opera (Italian: opera a numeri; German: Nummeroper; French: opéra à numéros) is an opera consisting of individual pieces of music ('numbers') which can be easily extracted from the larger work. They may be numbered consecutively in the score, and may be interspersed with recitative or spoken dialogue. Opera numbers may be arias, but also ensemble pieces, such as duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets or choruses. They may also be ballets and instrumental pieces, such as marches, sinfonias, or intermezzi. The number opera format was standard until the mid-19th century and most opera genres, including opera seria, opera buffa, opéra comique, ballad opera, Singspiel, and grand opera, were constructed in this fashion.

The replacement of numbers with more continuous music began in operas by Jommelli, Traetta, Gluck, and especially Mozart, whose late operas Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni contain several segments in which different numbers are unified by bridge passages to form a musical whole. This trend became even more striking in the operas of the German composers Beethoven, Weber, and Meyerbeer, while their Italian and French contemporaries Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Auber retained the number opera style.

A shtick is a comic theme or gimmick. The word is borrowed from Yiddish: שטיק, romanized: shtik, related to German: Stück, Polish: sztuka, Russian: штука, romanized: štúka, all ultimately from Proto-Germanic: *stukkiją, all meaning 'piece', 'thing' or 'theatre play'; Theaterstück is the German word for 'play' (and is a synonym of Schauspiel, lit. 'viewing play', in contrast to Singspiel).‍

The English word piece is sometimes used in a similar context: for example, "a musical piece". In a stand-up comedy context, a near-equivalent term is a "bit". Another variant is "bits of business" or just "bits". Shtick may refer to an adopted persona, usually for comedy performances, that is maintained consistently (though not necessarily exclusively) across the performer's career. In this usage, the recurring personalities adopted by Laurel and Hardy through all of their many comedy films—although they often played characters with different names and occupations—would qualify as their shtick. A comedian might maintain several different shticks of this sort, particularly if appearing in a variety show encouraging development of multiple characters, such as Saturday Night Live.

Die Entführung aus dem Serail (German: [diː ʔɛntˈfyːʁʊŋ ʔaʊs dɛm zeˈʁaɪ]) (K. 384; The Abduction from the Seraglio; also known as Il Seraglio) is a singspiel in three acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The German libretto is by Gottlieb Stephanie, based on Christoph Friedrich Bretzner's Belmont und Constanze, oder Die Entführung aus dem Serail. The plot concerns the attempt of the hero Belmonte, assisted by his servant Pedrillo, to rescue his beloved Constanze from the seraglio of Pasha Selim. The work premiered on 16 July 1782 at the Vienna Burgtheater, with the composer conducting.

The ballad opera is a genre of English comic opera stage play that originated in the early 18th century, and continued to develop over the following century and later. Like the earlier comédie en vaudeville and the later Singspiel, its distinguishing characteristic is the use of tunes in a popular style (either pre-existing or newly composed) with spoken dialogue. These English plays were 'operas' mainly insofar as they satirized the conventions of the imported opera seria. Music critic Peter Gammond describes the ballad opera as "an important step in the emancipation of both the musical stage and the popular song."

The Magic Flute (German: Die Zauberflöte, pronounced [diː ˈtsaʊbɐˌfløːtə] ), K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. It is a Singspiel, a popular form that included both singing and spoken dialogue. The work premiered on 30 September 1791 at Schikaneder's theatre, the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, just two months before Mozart's death. It was Mozart's last opera. It was an outstanding success from its first performances, and remains a staple of the opera repertory.

In the opera, the Queen of the Night persuades Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter Pamina from captivity under the high priest Sarastro; instead, he learns the high ideals of Sarastro's community and seeks to join it. Separately, then together, Tamino and Pamina undergo severe trials of initiation, which end in triumph, with the Queen and her cohorts vanquished. The earthy Papageno, who accompanies Tamino on his quest, fails the trials completely but is rewarded anyway with the hand of his ideal female companion Papagena.

The German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) is best known for his operas, of which he wrote 10 between 1798 and 1826. His first four exist in various states: Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins (de) (comp. 1798) is completely lost; two fragments survive for Das Waldmädchen (1800); the libretto to Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (1803) is lost; and only three numbers from Rübezahl (comp. 1804–05) survive. Weber's mature operas—Silvana (1810), Abu Hassan (1811), Der Freischütz (1821), Die drei Pintos (comp. 1820–21), Euryanthe (1823), Oberon (1826)—all survive intact; they were all performed within his lifetime, except Die drei Pintos which was posthumously completed by Gustav Mahler. His contributions to the genre were crucial in the development of German Romantische Oper (German Romantic Opera) and its national identity, exhibiting much influence on Richard Wagner. Der Freischütz, his most famous and significant work, remains among the most revered German operas.

After his family moved to Munich in 1798, the 13 year old Weber began study with Johann Nepomuk Kalcher, under whose supervision he wrote his first opera, the Singspiel Die Macht der Liebe und des Weins; the work was never performed. Two years later in Freiburg, he embarked on his second opera, Das Waldmädchen, to a libretto by Carl von Steinsberg, whose traveling company premiered it the same year. The two surviving fragments of the work show little sophistication, although it received moderate success. Weber's next opera, Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn, was written in Salzburg under the supervision of Michael Haydn to a libretto by Josef Türk after Carl Gottlob Cramer's popular novel of the same name. Premiered in 1803 in Augsburg, the work did not match the novel's popularity and was subsequently forgotten. In 1804 Weber was appointed Kapellmeister at the Breslau Opera and worked with a libretto by the theatre's director Johann Gottlieb Rhode (after a story by Johann Karl August Musäus), to produce Rübezahl. The work was never performed and the three extant fragments show little improvement in his craft. After his two-year tenure, Weber spent time in modern-day Pokój, Opole Voivodeship and eventually moved to Stuttgart where he began Silvana.

Romantische Oper (German for 'romantic opera') is a genre of early nineteenth-century German opera, developed not from the German Singspiel of the eighteenth-century but from the opéras comiques of the French Revolution. It offered opportunities for an increasingly important role for the orchestra, and greater dramatic possibilities for reminiscence motifs – phrases that are identified with a place, person or idea and which, when re-used in a work, remind the listener of the place, person or idea in question.

Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz (1821) inaugurated the genre, which increasingly became associated with a distinctively German national style, as exemplified by composers such as Heinrich Marschner (e.g. Der Vampyr and Hans Heiling), Albert Lortzing (e.g. Undine) and Louis Spohr. Themes explored included nature, the supernatural, the Middle Ages and popular culture, specifically folklore. Musically, German folk music also served as an inspiration. Spoken dialogue continued to be used between musical numbers.