ABSTRACT
The French legal restrictions governing productions were at last struck down in 1858, and Offenbach immediately created Orphee aux enfers, the first true opera-bouffe. It was initially a two-act work, and its librettists were Hector Cremieux and Ludovic Halevy. Orphee aux enfers was only the first of many opera-bouffe successes for Offenbach. Spain, meanwhile, had developed its own national genre of stage music, the zarzuela. Like several European genres, the zarzuela mixed spoken dialogue with sung numbers. The zarzuela moved from the court to public theaters in the early eighteenth century. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, attention shifted from the zarzuela to other works. Italian opera still predominated, but shorter, comic Spanish shows also arose in the late eighteenth century, such as sainetes and tonadillas. After the Spanish Revolution of 1868, a new genre made an appearance: the genero chico.
