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
Mikhail Sokolovsky (composer) revived. Sokolovsky's contemporary, composer Yevstigney Fomin later revised the music of the opera adding an overture to it. Under the reign of autocratic Czar Nicholas I of Russia, verses of Sokolovsky that were critical of Nicholas's predecessors were often sung at anti-Nicholas rallies. Mikhail Sokolovsky (composer) Mikhail Matveyevich Sokolovsky ( (1756—after 1795) was a late 18th-century Russian opera composer, conductor and violinist. Sokolovsky played the violin in the orchestra of the Maddox Theatre in Moscow. It is known that he also taught singing at the university. The music of the renowned-in-its-day opera "The miller who was a wizard, a cheat