Houses & Companies | Composers & Their Librettists | Late Baroque | Opera

During the early eighteenth century a few composers enjoyed regular close collaboration with a favourite librettist, such as Fux with Pariati, or both Vinci and Porpora with the young Metastasio. However, such examples were rare, and instead it was common for a popular libretto created for one major Italian opera centre to be adapted for the needs of other composers working all over Europe. Some texts were consequently used many times across several decades, such as the Florentine librettist Antonio Salvi’s Arminio, which was first set by Scarlatti (1703), but it was also set by Caldara (1705), Hasse (1730), Handel (1737) and Galuppi (1747). In fact, all of Handel’s London opera libretti were adapted from Italian sources. Although some were recent revisions of relatively new texts by Metastasio, most were surprisingly old during an era that craved newness in its fashionable entertainments, and several were modelled on operas that Handel probably encountered while he was in Italy, either during his youth or on his later travels recruiting singers for London. Many composers set the same opera, each with their own variations in arias and alterations to recitative, and often even with the same title!

Houses & Companies | The Arcadian Academy | Late Baroque | Opera

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