Examples of commissioned incidental music have previously been cited in Beethoven’s music for Egmont, which belongs to the first category just mentioned, and Schubert’s for Rosamunde, which is in the second. The practice spread as a matter of rivalry and prestige to cities without a court but which maintained a municipal theatre (for example, Hamburg and Leipzig) and to other countries with a thriving theatrical interest and ample funds. In Russia, for instance, Mikhail Glinka composed music to Prince Kholmsky (1840), an otherwise obscure drama by Count Kukolnik, and the Shakespeare repertory brought the collaboration of such composers as Mily Balakirev (King Lear, 1861) and Tchaikovsky (Hamlet, 1891).

France and England, having different systems of patronage, produced different results during the 19th century. English theatre music was confined for most of its course to a taste for crude melodrama and burlesque at a low level, apart from a sporadic interest in mostly imported opera and ballet. Arthur Sullivan, however, provided incidental music for Shakespeare plays as well as cultivating, in his collaboration with the author W.S. Gilbert, a native variety of operetta derived from the French model. France fared somewhat better with the popularity of opéra bouffe, and the birth of romantic ballet in Paris also kindled a new kind of theatre interest, even though its musical quality was usually secondary.

Music for Romantic ballet developed in two directions. From the time of the French composer Adolphe Adam’s score for Giselle (1841), ballet composers made rudimentary attempts to express mood and scene, to create dramatic tension, and to characterize personality in music. The general level was somewhat raised by the French composer Léo Delibes in his music for Coppélia (1870) and more especially for Sylvia (1876); the latter was a score that Tchaikovsky came to know and admire. The second feature in many ballet scores of the period was the attempt to compose suitably flavoured music to match the new growth of interest in national and regional dances, which were regularly incorporated into the ballets.

Music in 19th-century ballet reached its peak of achievement with Tchaikovsky, whose instinct for the theatre was probably stronger than his talent for the subtleties of symphonic argument. He treated the art of ballet as worthy of real musical imagination and told a colleague who adversely likened some of his Symphony No. 4 to ballet music: “I cannot understand why the term should be associated with something reprehensible. There is such a thing as good ballet music.” Tchaikovsky demonstrated its possibilities in three original scores for ballet that enjoy continuing universal popularity in the theatre: Swan Lake (first performed 1877); The Sleeping Beauty (1890); and The Nutcracker (1892).

Swan Lake achieved lasting success only after the composer’s death—a fact which accounts for the recurring problems of the relationship of music to choreography, because some of the original musical sequence was changed for the 1895 production at St. Petersburg from which most current versions of the ballet are descended. The two later scores benefitted from detailed choreographic specifications. According to Stravinsky, The Sleeping Beauty is “the convincing example of Tchaikovsky’s great creative power,” and The Nutcracker in its theatre context has a narrative vividness much beyond the limited charm of the concert suite that Tchaikovsky arranged from it.

Adolphe Adam’s contribution to the development of ballet music had its parallel in the sphere of romantic operetta. By incorporating a measure of frivolous vaudeville into the otherwise conventional comedy of Le Châlet (1834), Adam stimulated a popular taste for what became the mainstream of operetta. Its source was in Paris, and it flowed in turn principally to Vienna, to London and thence to North America, submerging the German singspiel and its Scandinavian offshoots but leaving the Spanish zarzuela to cultivate its own regional idiom.

Adam’s enterprise in opening a theatre in 1847 to stage his own works and those of other young composers disdained by the operatic establishment in Paris was brought to a premature end by the political uprising a year later, but Offenbach was poised to take advantage of the subsequent situation. He opened his Bouffes-Parisiens theatre in 1855, whence travelled such immediate hits as Orpheus in the Underworld, La Belle Hélène, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, and La Périchole over almost all of Europe. The Parisian operetta was principally continued to the end of the century by Charles Lecocq and André Messager.

Offenbach meanwhile had paid several visits to Vienna from 1858, when Franz von Suppé was quick to turn the French model to local advantage, notably with Die schöne Galatea (1865; The Beautiful Galatea). The younger Johann Strauss was eventually persuaded to follow this trend by turning the Viennese craze for his waltzes, polkas, and other social dances to theatrical purpose. With the aid of an unusually good libretto, Strauss created the supreme example of Viennese operetta in Die Fledermaus. The Viennese tradition was continued in turn by Franz Lehár and Emmerich Kálmán.

Offenbach’s influence extended southward to Bohemia, where the composer Bedřich Smetana compared his first song-and-dialogue version of The Bartered Bride (1866) to an Offenbach operetta, and Antonín Dvořák composed an outstanding but little-known example in The Peasant a Rogue (1878). Otherwise, no particularly distinguished composer of operetta emerged in southeastern Europe, nor in Poland or Russia, where there were only occasional contacts with forms of musical theatre other than full-scale opera and ballet for the moneyed classes.

The northward spread of the Offenbach model reached England, where it influenced the character of Sullivan’s first operetta, Cox and Box (1867). It led in due course to the success of H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), in collaboration with Gilbert, and the subsequent line of “Savoy operettas” (their collective nickname derived from the London theatre where they were first performed by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Ltd.). England made no other contributions of comparable musical interest to the operetta repertory until it was overtaken in due course by the trend to musical comedy in the 20th century.

English operetta represented by Gilbert and Sullivan nevertheless put down fresh roots in North America after the D’Oyly Carte company first travelled there in 1879, in the wake of a pirated version of H.M.S. Pinafore. The impact of Sullivan’s music in New York and Boston was comparable to that of Offenbach in Vienna. Instead of stimulating an American equivalent, it first opened the way to 20 years or so of European imports to the American stage. The composers Reginald De Koven and Victor Herbert later established a short-lived local counterpart to European operetta, before it was overtaken by the indigenous idiom of American musical theatre noted earlier.

The language of ragtime and early jazz, with its rhythmic syncopation and varying degrees of harmonic innovation within a common musical vernacular, brought the first new element to the idiom of musical theatre (in musical comedy) since the emergence of national folk characteristics in 19th-century Europe. As the trends already described succeeded one another during the 20th century, in and out of fashion, and the musical theatre tried to reconcile the nostalgia for its past heritage with the need to experiment in search of a viable future, the immediate present can be seen to represent only one turn of a larger wheel across seven or eight centuries. The religious rock musical of the contemporary musical scene is but a variant of the mysteries and miracle plays that initiated all our modern forms of musical theatre when Western civilization first groped its way out of the Dark Ages.