Biagio Marini, Madrigali et Symfonie
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Pietro Metastasio’s Operatic Storm
Texts and Musics for Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte
Ana Llorens (ed)
- Pages: 480 p.
- Size:178 x 254 mm
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2024
- € 95,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-60436-7
- Paperback
- Available
- ISBN: 978-2-503-60437-4
- E-book
- Available
A catalogue of the sources of five of Metastasio’s most successful drammi per musica – Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte – this volume offers their most complete chronology up to date, as well as a full relation of the printers and theatres in which these texts became alive.
BIO
Ana Llorens holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is ‘Juan de la Cierva–Incorporación’ postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and the scientific director of the European Research Council project ‘DIDONE: The sources of absolute music’, within which the research contained in this volume has been carried out. She is specialised in the analysis of large corpora and, since 2019, board member of the Spanish Society of Musicology.
Summary
Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782) can be considered as the most renowned operatic dramatist of eighteenth-century Europe. His drammi per musica travelled all around Europe – and beyond – throughout the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. Courts, palaces, and public theatres were eager to perform his dramas, and so hundreds of composers set them to music, sometimes on more than one occasion.
This volume lets the surviving textual and musical traces speak for themselves. As a catalogue of the sources of five of Metastasio’s most successful titles – Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte –, it offers their most complete chronology up to date, as well as a detailed presentation of the printers and the theatres in which these texts became alive. In the case of the majority of these works, thousands of manuscripts and copies attest to more than one hundred complete musical versions and over two hundred and fifty productions. They may thus rightly be considered witnesses to the operatic fever that took Europe by storm in the Enlightenment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword, by Álvaro Torrente
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
List of institutions
Introduction
1. Didone abbandonata (1724–1832)
Ana Llorens and Gorka Rubiales Zabarte
2. Alessandro nell’Indie (1730–1831)
Ana Llorens and Valentina Anzani
3. Artaserse (1730–1850)
Ana Llorens and Gorka Rubiales Zabarte
4. Adriano in Siria (1732–1828)
Ana Llorens and Tatiana Aráez Santiago
5. Demofoonte (1733–1821)
Ana Llorens, Gorka Rubiales, and Nicola Usula
Bibliography
Main bibliographic tools
Indices
I. Chronological indices
Ia. Chronological index: by years and cities
Ib. Chronological index: by date and title
II. Onomastic index – composers
III. Onomastic index – printers
IV. Index of theatres
