Die Fledermaus and Tamerlano are both part of what genre of classical music?
Tamerlano Tamerlano ("Tamerlane", HWV 18) is an opera seria in three acts written for the Royal Academy of Music theatre company, with music by George Frideric Handel to an Italian text by Nicola Francesco Haym, adapted from Agostin Piovene's "Tamerlano" together with another libretto entitled "Bajazet" after Nicolas Pradon's "Tamerlan, ou La Mort de Bajazet".
Origins of opera The art form known as "opera" originated in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it drew upon older traditions of medieval and Renaissance courtly entertainment. The word "opera", meaning "work" in Italian, was first used in the modern musical and theatrical sense in 1639 and soon spread to the other European languages. The earliest operas were modest productions compared to other Renaissance forms of sung drama, but they soon became more lavish and took on the spectacular stagings of the earlier genre known as intermedio.