Wikipedia:Today's featured list/August 21, 2020
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Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) composed ten operas, a genre that emerged while he was a court musician in Mantua. His first opera, L'Orfeo, premiered in 1607 and became the first opera still in today's repertoire. The music for seven of his opera projects is mostly lost. Four of these were completed and performed, while he abandoned the others at some point. Libretti have survived for some of them, as well as fragments of the music for L'Arianna and Proserpina rapita. Monteverdi composed operas for a theatre in Venice when he was master of music at San Marco, including Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria in 1640 and L'incoronazione di Poppea in 1643, both of which also remain in the repertoire. (This list is part of a featured topic: Operas by Claudio Monteverdi.)