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1711 J. Addison Spectator No. 18. ¶1 It is my Design in this Paper to deliver down to Posterity a faithful Account of the Italian Opera.

1764 K. O'Hara Midas ii. 43 Air XVIII. To an Italian Opera tune.

1802 C. Wilmot Irish Peer on Continent (1920) 39 We have been to the Opera Buffa or the Italian Opera.

1817 Examiner No. 486. 253 This lady at the Italian Opera is respectable: on the English stage she was formidable.

1883 Cent. Mag. Nov. 158/2 Americans..have grown up with Italian opera, which for more than half a century has kept the field.

1985 J. Kerman Musicol. 53 Under the Italianate composer J.A. Hasse (‘Il Sassone’) and his wife the prima donna assoluta Faustina Bordoni, Dresden was just then becoming the German centre for modern Italian opera.

2000 J. Rosselli in J. Potter Cambr. Compan. Singing vii. 85 Patterned songs—airs— did not, as in Italian opera of the same period, stop the action to dwell on an ‘affect’ or emotional state for seven or eight minutes.