It was followed by a one-act comic opera, The Telephone (1946).
And he is the subject of a one-act comic opera by Richard Wilson, who toys with that mistranslation and Aethelred's unfortunate reputation.
Mahler, paradoxically, first attained recognition as a composer by completing "Die Drei Pintos," a now obscure three-act comic opera by Carl Maria von Weber.
The two-act comic operetta, set in Edo-era Japan, is a satire of Victorian culture masquerading as a convoluted and kitschy love story.
In a free double bill, Juilliard Opera presents two of Rossini's earliest one-act comic operas: "La Cambiale di Matrimonio" (The Marriage Contract), which dates from Rossini's student years, and "La Scala di Seta" (The Silken Ladder), written shortly afterward.
The scoring of an 1832 Glinka trio for clarinet, bassoon and piano emphasized the country lilt of its melodies, an elegant folk idiom that Stravinsky would echo in his one-act comic opera "Mavra" (1921-22), charmingly performed on Sunday.
In 1946 came the successful one-act comic opera The Telephone, which went on to become a curtain-raiser to The Medium, premiered at Columbia University the same year - his first work to win major American and subsequently international recognition.
Mr. Shapiro was undeterred by his critics and kept writing, but his stature was not helped by the libretto he wrote in 1955 for a one-act comic opera by Hugo Weisgall called "The Tenor".
For those who have never tried fabricating a two- or three-act comic play, I can tell you it takes more than just the ability to write funny, it takes real discipline and mechanical know-how.
When "Le Comte Ory" had its premiere at the Paris Opera in 1828, with the vaudeville altered and expanded by the playwrights into a two-act comic libretto, and six extended musical numbers from "Il Viaggio" recycled into the new score, it was rightly hailed as one of Rossini's wittiest and most seamless and sophisticated works.
But "Sleeping With Straight Men," an affable yet shallow one-act comic drama, is based on the story of the 1995 case of "The Jenny Jones Show," in which a homosexual guest on a daytime talk show was murdered by a heterosexual one.
