Serse tragedy and comedy or high and low class characters. The musicologist Charles Burney later took "Serse" to task for violating decorum in this way, writing: "I have not been able to discover the author of the words of this drama: but it is one of the worst Handel ever set to Music: for besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera." Another unusual aspect of "Serse" is the number of short, one-part arias, when a typical opera seria of Handel's time was almost wholly made
History of music in Paris the melody comes all the power of music over the human spirit." To illustrate his point, Rousseau wrote a text for a new one-act opera ("intermède"), "Le devin du village" ("The village soothsayer"), about the love of two simple peasants, which became part of the Academy repertoire for the next sixty years. Over the course of the 18th century, the heroic style of Lully and Rameau quietly disappeared from Paris stages, replaced by the more natural and more romantic Italian style. Another operatic feud began with the arrival of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck in Paris in 1776. He