This new kind of opera can be compared to the most important new literary genre that grew up at the same time. This was the novel, which — together with the symphony — counts as the Enlightenment’s greatest artistic legacy to more recent times.

Precursors of the novel go back to ancient Rome, but the genre did not really capture the European imagination until around 1750. Among the best-known early novels are Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the tale of a rather ordinary young man and his adventures in town and country, and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a domestic drama that manages to be sexually explicit, sentimental, and moralistic all at the same time. Rousseau wrote several very popular novels; Voltaire wrote Candide. At the end of the century, Jane Austen began her subtle explorations of the social forces at work on the hearts of her very sensitive (and sensible) characters in novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and others. These novels are still alive and well in Hollywood and on PBS.

Sharp, realistic observation of contemporary life and sensitive depiction of feeling — these are the ideals shared by late eighteenth-century opera and the novel. Within a few years of their publication, both Tom Jones and Pamela were turned into major operas, one French, the other Italian.

In Mozart, opera buffa found a master equal to Jane Austen in the sensitive response to feeling and action. In his opera Don Giovanni, for example, the three women involved with the hero — the coquettish country girl, Zerlina; the steely aristocrat, Donna Anna; and the sentimental Donna Elvira — are depicted and distinguished from one another in music with the greatest psychological insight and sympathy. One can come to feel that the same qualities are reflected in Mozart’s symphonies and concertos.