oct 1, 1760 - La buona figliuola

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Opera of Niccolo Piccinni

The eighteenth-century English novel was, among other things, a celebration of social mobility. Ever since, the Pamela motif has been a stock-in-trade of bourgeois fiction, in which a humble girl finds her prince, count, or millionaire.

Based on Samuel Richardson's Pamela... Richardson's idealistic moral: That virtues and emotions can be practiced by all and can break down artifical barriers of class and rank.

For aristocrats, "Love Conquers All" is socially ominous

Operas eventually divied into those in which people die (tragic) and those in which they marry (comic)-- but both, increasingly, do so for love, not duty,. Comic opera could now begin to go beyond the farce situations of the intermezzosand carry a serious or uplifting message of its own. That seirous message offered a competing set of class values: the aspirations of those whose power had begun to threaten that of hereditary privilege.

opera semiseria/ comedie larmoyante. In both, the happy ending was reached by way of tears and therefore carried ethical weight.

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