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).