Comic opera and humour, Offenbach's works were intended solely to amuse. Though generally well crafted and full of humorous satire and grand opera parodies, plots and characters in his works were often interchangeable. Given the frenetic pace at which he worked, Offenbach sometimes used the same material in more than one opera. Another Frenchman who took up this form was Charles Lecocq (1832–1918). The singspiel developed in 18th-century Vienna and spread throughout Austria and Germany. As in the French "opéra comique", the "singspiel" was an opera with spoken dialogue, and usually a comic subject, such as Mozart's "Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Mateo Falcone (opera) Mateo Falcone (opera) Mateo Falcone ("Матео Фальконе" in Cyrillic; "Mateo Fal'kone" in transliteration) is a one-act opera composed by César Cui during 1906–1907. (Actually, Cui designated the genre of this work as "dramatic scene.") The libretto was adapted by the composer from Prosper Mérimée's like-named story from 1829 and Vasily Zhukovsky's verse rendering thereof. It was premiered on 14 December 1907 (Old Style), at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (the work was given along with the composer's early one-act comic opera, "The Mandarin's Son"). The premiere production of "Mateo" was a failure; the work never became part of the standard