music theatre
Staged performance of vocal music that deliberately challenges, in style and subject matter, traditional operatic pretensions.
| Its origins can be traced to the 1920s and 1930s, to plays with music like Kurt Weill's Mahagonny-Songspiel (1930) and socially conscious musicals, for example Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), but it came into its own as a movement in the 1960s. It includes not just contemporary opera (such as Alexander Goehr's Naboth's Vineyard, 1968) but also works like Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969). |
