Opera in German outskirts of the city. In 1791, he persuaded Mozart to set one of his libretti, "The Magic Flute". This proved to be no ordinary "Singspiel". Though the traditional farcical elements remained, Mozart added a new seriousness, particularly in the music for Sarastro and his priests. Even more than "Die Entführung", the "Magic Flute" pointed the way forward for future German opera. The greatest German composer of the next generation, Beethoven, seized on "The Magic Flute"'s blend of domestic comedy and high seriousness for his only opera, "Fidelio", the story of a devoted wife who saves her husband from political imprisonment.
Agrippina (opera) hypocritical; Claudius is pompous, complacent, and something of a buffoon, while Poppaea, the first of Handel's sex kittens, is also a liar and a flirt. The freedmen Pallas and Narcissus are self-serving and salacious. All, however, have some redeeming features, and all have arias that express genuine emotion. The situations in which they find themselves are sometimes comic, but never farcical—like Mozart in the Da Ponte operas, Handel avoids laughing at his characters. In "Agrippina" the "da capo" aria is the musical form used to illustrate character in the context of the opera. The first four arias of the work