Opera After Verdi, the sentimental "realistic" melodrama of verismo appeared in Italy. This was a style introduced by Pietro Mascagni's "Cavalleria rusticana" and Ruggero Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" that came to dominate the world's opera stages with such popular works as Giacomo Puccini's "La bohème", "Tosca", and "Madama Butterfly". Later Italian composers, such as Berio and Nono, have experimented with modernism. The first German opera was "Dafne", composed by Heinrich Schütz in 1627, but the music score has not survived. Italian opera held a great sway over German-speaking countries until the late 18th century. Nevertheless, native forms would develop in spite of this
Comic opera 18th century. In the 19th century, Russian comic opera was further developed by Alexey Verstovsky who composed more 30 opera-vaudevilles and 6 grand operas (most of them with spoken dialogue). Later, Modest Mussorgsky worked on two comic operas, "The Fair at Sorochyntsi" and "Zhenitba" ("The Marriage"), which he left unfinished (they were completed only in the 20th century). Pyotr Tchaikovsky wrote a comic opera, "Cherevichki" (after Nikolai Gogol, 1885, 1887 Moscow). Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed "May Night" 1878–1879 and "The Golden Cockerel" 1906–1907. In the 20th century, the best examples of comic opera by Russian composers were Igor Stravinsky's "Mavra" (1922)