Darrell Fancourt performed in opera productions at the Academy, creating the role of Tackleton, the toy merchant, in Alexander Mackenzie's opera "The Cricket on the Hearth", and playing Colas in Mozart's "Bastien und Bastienne", and Benoit in "La bohème". "The Times" thought him "amusing but not noticeably musical" in the last. Even before completing his studies, Fancourt was building a concert career in London, the British provinces and the European continent. "The Times" said of an Aeolian Hall recital in 1912, "Mr. Fancourt has some noble notes in his voice, except when he forces it occasionally ... Schubert's "Tod und das Mädchen"
Comic opera style was widely imitated by their contemporaries (for example, in "Dorothy"), and the creators themselves wrote works in this style with other collaborators in the 1890s. None of these, however, had lasting popularity, leaving the Savoy Operas as practically the sole representatives of the genre surviving today. Only recently, some of these other English light operas have begun to be explored by scholars and to receive performances and recordings. The first opera presented in Russia, in 1731, was a comic opera (or "commedia per musica"), "Calandro", by an Italian composer, Giovanni Alberto Ristori. It was followed by the comic operas