Serse January, the third by 6 February, and Handel put the finishing touches to the score on 14 February. "Serse" was first performed at the King's Theatre, Haymarket on 15 April 1738. The first production was a complete failure. The audience may have been confused by the innovative nature of the work. Unlike his other operas for London, Handel included comic ("buffo") elements in "Serse". Although this had been typical for 17th-century Venetian works such as Cavalli's original setting of the libretto, by the 1730s an "opera seria" was expected to be wholly serious, with no mixing of the genres of
Royal Patriarchal Music Seminary of Lisbon had passed he was already recruiting Italian opera singers and others to establish a professional opera company within the court's structure. Among several others, probably the most important of these was the Neapolitan-trained organist and composer, Davide Perez who in 1752 was appointed as "mestre de capela" at the Royal Chapel and music master to the royal princesses. Within of that same year, he opened within the palace building a new theatre called the "Teatro do Forte" which he had created by converting the room in which foreign ambassadors had once been presented. A number of operas by Perez, Johann