The history of French opera from the time of Hector Berlioz includes many talented composers and stage-worthy works, although relatively few have remained in the repertoire. Charles Gounod, who composed Faust (1859; libretto based on Part 1 of Goethe’s play and on Michel Carré’s play Faust et Marguérite) and Romeo and Juliette (1867), among many others, had a unique gift for melody. His works exemplify lyric opera, a French type that is larger than opéra comique yet not so grand as grand opera. Faust originally had spoken dialogue, later set to recitatives by the composer, and was the most frequently performed opera in the last third of the 19th century.

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Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875; libretto after a tale by Prosper Mérimée) underwent a similar journey from opéra comique to lyric opera and became a landmark in the history of French opera. Its brutal realism, broad but convincing characterization, and dazzling pseudo-Spanish ambience shocked its first audiences and strongly influenced the realist movement in Italian opera known as verismo. Carmen, a much greater success than Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de perles (1863; “The Pearl Fishers”), has remained an active part of operatic repertoire everywhere.

The prolific Ambroise Thomas had composed many operas when Paris first welcomed his Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868). Like other French composers of the period, Thomas favoured ornate arias for a new type of lyric-coloratura soprano. One of the most frequently heard of this type is the “Bell Song” from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883). Although Camille Saint-Saëns composed numerous operas, the only work by him to remain in the repertoire is the highly melodic Samson et Dalila (1877). Many of the operas of Jules Massenet, including Manon (1884) and Werther (1892; libretto derived from Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werthers; “The Sorrows of Young Werther”), were phenomenally popular in their day, as was Gustave Charpentier’s Louise (1900; libretto by the composer). The latter has remained in opera house repertories because of its loving, romanticized portrait of bohemian Paris, the sentiment and surface allure, and the popularity of Louise’s hymn to love, “Depuis le jour” (“Since the Day”).

Claude Debussy, who was to have a decisive influence upon 20th-century music, completed only one opera: Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), an almost verbatim setting of Maurice Maeterlinck’s play. Pelléas is notable for the dramatic impact of its harmonic language and for its unity of text and score, as evident especially in the way the composer made the sounds of Maeterlinck’s French an integral element in a shimmering orchestral web. In addition, Pelléas, like Wagner’s operas, uses continuous music without separate numbers. Although Pelléas remains one of the most important operas composed in the 20th century, it has had few descendants. One of those few is Paul Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907; Ariadne and Bluebeard)—like Pelléas, an almost verbatim setting of a Maeterlinck play.

Of the professedly anti-Debussyan group known as Les Six, only Francis Poulenc wrote works that remain in the repertoire. He composed one comic opera, one monodrama (a drama designed to be performed by a single person), and one serious opera of note. The comic opera, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947; “The Breasts of Tiresias”), is a surreal opéra bouffe, the sardonic music of which is humorously appropriate to the text by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The monodrama, La Voix humaine (1959; “The Human Voice,” text by Jean Cocteau), has as its only visible character a distraught young woman conversing by telephone with her lover. Poulenc’s only large serious opera, Dialogues des Carmélites (1957; “Dialogues of the Carmelites,” libretto by Georges Bernanos), employs his unique musical style to tell a moving and tragic story of nuns martyred during the French Revolution.

Later opera in Italy

After Verdi’s triumphs, Italian composers struggled to gain a foothold on the operatic stage. A few who succeeded were Amilcare Ponchielli, with La Gioconda (1876; “The Joyful Girl,” libretto by Arrigo Boito), Pietro Mascagni, whose dazzlingly successful one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana (“Rustic Chivalry”) was performed in Rome in 1890, and Ruggero Leoncavallo, whose Pagliacci (1892; “Players,” libretto by the composer), first staged in Milan, is often paired with Cavalleria. Together they represent the turn toward verismo and set a vogue for raw, violent, melodramatic librettos.

The most important post-Verdian Italian opera composer was Giacomo Puccini, whose works effected a blend of Verdi’s focus on the voice with Wagner’s orchestral innovations. Consequently, Puccini’s works are marked by emotional directness of appeal and colourful, rich orchestration. His first opera was Manon Lescaut (1893), based on the novel by the Abbé Prévost from which the libretto of Massenet’s Manon had been derived. Puccini’s reputation was firmly established with La Bohème (1896; libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, after Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème; “Scenes of the Bohemian Life”), followed by Tosca (1900) and Madama Butterfly (1904), both settings of librettos by Giacosa and Illica which capitalized upon Puccini’s ability to portray sorrowing heroines in music. Returning closer to violent verismo, he next composed an opera to an American theme, La fanciulla del west (1910; “The Girl of the Golden West”). Puccini died before finishing his last opera, Turandot (libretto by Adami and Renato Simoni, based on the Italian writer Carlo Gozzi’s fable of the same name), which was completed by Franco Alfano and produced posthumously in 1926. In Madama Butterfly (set in Japan) and Turandot (based on a pseudo-Chinese fairy tale) Puccini attempted to balance exoticism and colourful orchestration with his melody-centred and emotionally direct style—one that strongly influenced the new genre of scoring for film and, eventually, television.

In the second half of the 20th century, two Italian composers were known for their stage works using contemporary approaches. Luigi Dallapiccola wrote four operas in his distinctive lyrical 12-tone style, influenced by Alban Berg and another Viennese composer, Anton Webern. Dallapiccola wrote the libretto for each of them: Volo di notte (first performed 1940; “Night Flight”), Il prigioniero (first performed 1949; “The Prisoner”), Job (1950), and Ulisse (1968; “Ulysses”). The experimentally inclined Luciano Berio used serial techniques, multimedia resources, and unusual theatrical devices in five theatrical works, which include the operas La vera storia (first performed 1982; “The True Story,” libretto by Italo Calvino) and Un re in ascolto (1984; “A Listening King,” libretto by Calvino).