And in the midst of these crushing trials he was expected to compose a comic opera!
He had been there twenty years, and he had never before heard of such singing in comic opera.
It was not till a comic opera came along that Eileen was able to take the theatre seriously.
The scene was certainly a strange one—as strange as if taken from a comic opera.
But the idea of a full-length comic opera in two acts and with a concluding finale was still relatively new when the first of these operas was performed in 1787.
Hiller concedes in his autobiography that this was not his initial intention in composing comic opera.
Kerzhentsev even stated that comic opera was still needed, although he conceded that this might prove a stiff challenge.
