Quick-fire opera history timeline Please note that this is an accessible version of the timeline. Return to the FutureLearn plaform if you would like to open the interactive timeline.

1598 Dafne with music by Jacopo Peri and text by Ottavio Rinuccini is often identified as the first opera. It was performed during Carnaval celebrations in Florence. Today the music is mostly lost, though the text survives.

1625 The first performance of an opera by a woman. Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero was a comedy-ballet performed for a visiting nobleman to the Medici court in Florence.

1637 The first public opera performance. The opening of the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice marked the beginning of opera being staged for a paying audience instead of being exclusively a private entertainment for aristocrats.

1656 The first opera in English was performed. The Siege of Rhodes was based on a text by an impresario, William Davenant, which was set to music by five different composers. It was premiered at a small private theatre at Davenant’s home.

1689 Premiere of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in Chelsea in London. No score in Purcell’s own hand survives. What’s more, even the date of the premiere is unclear and may actually have been in 1687 or 1688.

1735 The first season of opera was mounted at Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, directed by George Frideric Handel. The Theatre Royal (the forerunner of today’s Royal Opera House) had opened two years earlier in 1732, primarily as a theatre for spoken drama.

1825 The first opera performance in Italian in north America. A family troupe of singers led by the famous Spanish tenor Manuel Garcia arrived in New York and performed a season of opera that began with Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia.

© King’s College London, 2017

1843 Premiere of Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer at the Semper Oper in Dresden, conducted by the composer.

1853 Premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. This is now one of the most often performed operas in the world – but Verdi himself described the premiere as “a fiasco” and said “only time would be the judge” whether the failure was the singers’ fault or his own.

1876 The opening of Richard Wagner’s opera house at Bayreuth (the “Festspielhaus”). At this theatre – for the first time anywhere – the lights in the auditorium were always dimmed for performances and the orchestra was hidden below the stage.

1881 The first time electric lighting was used in an opera house. The new Savoy Theatre in London installed state-of-the-art electric lights – but at first there was only enough power to light part of the opera house, and the management still chose to light the auditorium rather than the stage.

1892 Royal Italian Opera was officially renamed Royal Opera House. This small change had a major impact: for the first time the company could perform operas in their original languages (French, or German, for instance) rather than in Italian translation.

1901 The first recordings of opera were made. Work on the so-called Mapleson Cylinders began in 1901 when Lionel Mapleson, the librarian of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, installed recording equipment in the opera house. The phonographs he made are some of the earliest surviving sound recordings.

1918 Premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The opera was part of a triple-bill of new one-act operas by Puccini marketed as Il trittico (the triptych). It was the first opera premiere in the world following the signing of the Armistice that ended the First World War.

1922 The death of the last castrato. The castrato voice had fallen out of fashion in the early 19th century, but castrati continued to be employed in the Vatican’s choirs. Soprano castrato Alessandro Moreschi became the star singer in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel from the 1890s and even made recordings late in his career. He died aged 63 in Rome in 1922.

1931 The first complete, live, nationwide radio broadcast of opera. A matinee performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hänsel und Gretel was broadcast from New York’s Metropolitan Opera as family entertainment on Christmas Day. It was the first broadcast in a series still running today.

1955 The first African-American singer performed with the Metropolitan Opera. The contralto Marian Anderson sang the part of Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in a performance that was a crucial first step towards overcoming racial segregation in opera in mid-20th- century America. Anderson went on to be a major figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

1987 The first Royal Opera House Big Screen performance. Vast crowds were able to watch Placido Domingo perform in Puccini’s La bohème free of charge, on a huge outdoor screen in London’s Covent Garden Piazza.

2006 The first live broadcast of an operatic performance to cinemas. The Metropolitan Opera’s “The Met: Live in HD” series began with Mozart’s The Magic Flute, transmitted live to cinemas in north America and internationally. Since then the Met’s own series has expanded hugely – and similar series have been established both by other opera houses and by theatres and dance companies.

2011 Premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole at Royal Opera House in London.