What was Beethoven's only opera?
Opera in German outskirts of the city. In 1791, he persuaded Mozart to set one of his libretti, "The Magic Flute". This proved to be no ordinary "Singspiel". Though the traditional farcical elements remained, Mozart added a new seriousness, particularly in the music for Sarastro and his priests. Even more than "Die Entführung", the "Magic Flute" pointed the way forward for future German opera. The greatest German composer of the next generation, Beethoven, seized on "The Magic Flute"'s blend of domestic comedy and high seriousness for his only opera, "Fidelio", the story of a devoted wife who saves her husband from political imprisonment.
Opera composers, as well as those of Mozart, Beethoven, and Meyerbeer, continued to dominate the musical stage in England. The only exceptions were ballad operas, such as John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" (1728), musical burlesques, European operettas, and late Victorian era light operas, notably the Savoy Operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, all of which types of musical entertainments frequently spoofed operatic conventions. Sullivan wrote only one grand opera, "Ivanhoe" (following the efforts of a number of young English composers beginning about 1876), but he claimed that even his light operas constituted part of a school of "English" opera,