Pietro Metastasio’s Operatic Storm Texts and Musics for Didone abbandonata, Alessandro nell’Indie, Artaserse, Adriano in Siria, and Demofoonte

Abstract

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.