Just six weeks after the success of Il Trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata is a disaster at its premiere in Venice

Hector Berlioz completes his 4-hour opera The Trojans (not performed as a complete work until 1890)

The opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod, has its premiere in Paris

Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde has its premiere in the Munich court theatre

Richard Wagner's opera The Mastersingers of Nuremberg has its premiere in Munich

Das Rheingold, with its premiere in Munich, is the first part of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle to be staged

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, is commissioned for the Cairo opera house, part of the process of Egypt becoming westernized

Modest Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov has its premiere in St Petersburg

Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus has its premiere in Vienna

Georges Bizet's opera Carmen has its premiere in Paris and meets at first with a lukewarm response

Richard Wagner's sequence of four operas, The Ring of the Nibelungen, has its first complete performance at Bayreuth

Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin's poem, has its premiere in Moscow

Alexander Borodin dies without finishing his opera Prince Igor (completed later by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov)

Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello has its premeiere at La Scala in Milan

The Australian soprano Nellie Melba makes her operatic debut as Gilda in Rigoletto in Brussels

The French chef Auguste Escoffier creates and names a dessert in honour of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba

Giacomo Puccini has his first success when his opera Manon Lescaut opens in Turin

In Falstaff Giuseppe Verdi writes his last opera, and his only comedy since the early days of his career.

Hansel and Gretl, an opera by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck, has its premiere in Weimar

The tenor Enrico Caruso makes his debut in his home town of Naples

Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème has an unsuccessful premiere in Turin

The Australian soprano Nellie Melba forms the Melba Grand Opera Company as a touring venture in the USA

Giacomo Puccini's Tosca brings in the new century with a January premiere in Rome

Gustave Charpentier's opera Louise has Paris premiere at the Opéra-Comique

Vast crowds line the streets for the Milan funeral of a national hero, the 87-year-old composer Giuseppe Verdi