Opera buffa appeared as a distinctive musical form in Naples in the early 1730s in the works of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36). Comic interludes, intermezzi, had appeared earlier, one-act musical entertainments performed during the intermissions of operas whose stories were taken mostly from classical mythology and ancient history. As the seventeenth century ran its course, subjects were also drawn from feudal times and from the Renaissance, as well as the exotic Middle and Far East; serious and comic elements were sometimes combined in these operas. Operas became more complicated, and they became lengthy; audiences wanted relief. Intermezzi were a response to these conditions; as musical interludes, they evolved into comic operas whose settings were contemporary and whose characters were not gods and goddesses or princes and princesses but people from the same world as the audiences who attended opera. Having appeared in Italy as an alternative to serious opera, comic opera made the musical scene in opera houses across Europe. In Italy comic opera appeared as opera buffa, in France as opéra comique, in England as ballad opera, in Germany as Singspiel, and in Spain as tonadillas. The fact that comic opera appeared throughout Europe during the eighteenth century suggests that this type of musical entertainment might have had shared impulses, and this was indeed the case. To understand how and why comic opera appeared throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, it is necessary to consider the origins of opera as a musical form. It is also necessary to understand the social and cultural milieu of the world that gave rise to opera.

The first opera, Jacopo Peri's Dafne (1597), came out of exchanges of the Camerata de’Bardi, an elite circle of Florentine humanists who wanted to revive in their own time what some Greek sources indicated was a musical component of classical drama: choruses and dialogue declaimed in a semi-musical form of speech. The members of the Florence Camerata who laid the foundations for opera were participating in the central enterprise of the Italian Renaissance: the recovery of classical antiquity. Renaissance humanists not only emulated the artistic and literary forms of antiquity, they identified with and absorbed the elite values of classical civilization.