Serse Serse Serse (; English title: "Xerxes"; HWV 40) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. It was first performed in London on 15 April 1738. The Italian libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from that by Silvio Stampiglia for an earlier opera of the same name by Giovanni Bononcini in 1694. Stampiglia's libretto was itself based on one by Nicolò Minato that was set by Francesco Cavalli in 1654. The opera is set in Persia (modern-day Iran) about 470 BC and is very loosely based upon Xerxes I of Persia. Serse, originally sung by a
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