Opera buffa

Opera buffa (pronounced [ˈɔːpera ˈbuffa]; plural: opere buffe; Italian for "comic opera") is a genre of opera. It was first used as an informal description of Italian comic operas variously classified by their authors as commedia in musica, commedia per musica, dramma bernesco, dramma comico, divertimento giocoso.

Especially associated with developments in Naples in the first half of the 18th century, whence its popularity spread to Rome and northern Italy, buffa was at first characterized by everyday settings, local dialects, and simple vocal writing (the basso buffo is the associated voice type), the main requirement being clear diction and facility with patter.

The New Grove Dictionary of Opera considers La Cilla (music by Michelangelo Faggioli, text by F. A. Tullio, 1706) and Luigi and Federico Ricci's Crispino e la comare (1850) to be the first and last appearances of the genre, although the term is still occasionally applied to newer work (for example Ernst Krenek's Zeitoper Schwergewicht). High points in this history are the 80 or so libretti by Carlindo Grolo, Loran Glodici, Sogol Cardoni and various other approximate anagrams of Carlo Goldoni, the three Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations, and the comedies of Gioachino Rossini.

Rosa Balistreri

Rosa Balistreri was an Italian singer and musician born March 21, 1927 in Licata, Sicily, and died September 20, 1990 in Palermo. Her hoarse voice charged with melancholy and strong personality made her a Sicilian icon of the twentieth century like the writer Leonardo Sciascia, the poet Ignazio Buttitta and the painter Renato Guttuso who counted all three of her admirers.

Biography

Rosa Balistreri was born in Licata, a town in the province of Agrigento, in western declined Sicily in the late 1920s. Her father was a peddler and, like many Sicilians of the time, couldn't send his children to school. In 1951, after experiencing the Sicily of Leonardo Sciascia's Candido, Rosa left her native village at the age of 24 years for Tuscany and the city of arts par excellence, Florence. Thus in the north away from her land, uprooted, that she started late, at 39, her artistic career through Dario Fo who makes her star in one of his shows, Ci ragiono e canto. Rosa recorded her first two albums the following year, in 1967 and performs at Teatro Carignano in Turin, at Teatro Manzoni in Milan and at Teatro Metastasio of Prato. In 1971, already renowned Rosa Balistreri returns after twenty years of exile in Sicily, where she will resonate the same stamp powerful voice until her death. Often in dramatic style, her songs depict Sicily as her friend Leonardo Sciascia describes: violent, tender, bitter, sweet, full of ambiguities, in short. The Soprano of the South as Ignazio Buttitta nicknamed her, tells misfortunes but also the beauties and mysteries of the three pointed island. She also embodies, as her friends Amalia Rodrigues, Renato Guttuso and Leonardo Sciascia, a generation of artists joining the communist ideology.