This study of Vivaldi's late operas grew out of an interest not so much in Vivaldi but in Baroque opera in general. On examining the position of research into this genre a few years ago, it appeared that most of the important composers in this field had been investigated to some degree, with the exception of Vivaldi. As Mario Rinaldi has shown in his survey of Vivaldi research, the vocal works were neglected until the last few years, and despite the impetus provided by the tercentenary of his birth in 1978, the balance has not yet been restored. Considering the popularity of his instrumental works, it seemed rather unfair that his theatrical music should be virtually ignored (an interesting comparison can be made here with Haydn), and so the present work aims to throw some light onto this side of his activities. For practical reasons it was impossible to take into account all the surviving operatic fragments scattered throughout the libraries of Europe. However, as all the most important manuscripts are housed in Turin, these formed the basis of this study, with the addition of six arias from Ercole su'l Termodonte in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire National de Musique, Paris. Further restrictions, however, were still necessary, and so, as many of the later works use librettos by leading figures such as Zeno and Metastasio, these mature operas, dating from 1727 onwards, seemed the most obvious on which to concentrate. One opera, Griselda, has been singled out for particular attention on account of the available information concerning the adaptation of Zeno's libretto, and Vivaldi's score of this work has recently been reproduced in the Garland Series of facsimiles of Italian opera. Most of the work that has been done on the operas so far has tended to approach them from the point of view of the concertos, constantly drawing parallels between the two styles. There are, obviously, many connections, but, for the most part, this investigation has tried to view them as dramatic works in their own right--the way in which Vivaldi, as a man of the theatre, would surely have regarded them. --from Preface.

This study of Vivaldi's late operas grew out of an interest not so much in Vivaldi but in Baroque opera in general. On examining the position of research into this genre a few years ago, it appeared that most of the important composers in this field had been investigated to some degree, with the exception of Vivaldi. As Mario Rinaldi has shown in his survey of Vivaldi research, the vocal works were neglected until the last few years, and despite the impetus provided by the tercentenary of his birth in 1978, the balance has not yet been restored. Considering the popularity of his instrumental works, it seemed rather unfair that his theatrical music should be virtually ignored (an interesting comparison can be made here with Haydn), and so the present work aims to throw some light onto this side of his activities. For practical reasons it was impossible to take into account all the surviving operatic fragments scattered throughout the libraries of Europe. However, as all the most important manuscripts are housed in Turin, these formed the basis of this study, with the addition of six arias from Ercole su'l Termodonte in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire National de Musique, Paris. Further restrictions, however, were still necessary, and so, as many of the later works use librettos by leading figures such as Zeno and Metastasio, these mature operas, dating from 1727 onwards, seemed the most obvious on which to concentrate. One opera, Griselda, has been singled out for particular attention on account of the available information concerning the adaptation of Zeno's libretto, and Vivaldi's score of this work has recently been reproduced in the Garland Series of facsimiles of Italian opera. Most of the work that has been done on the operas so far has tended to approach them from the point of view of the concertos, constantly drawing parallels between the two styles. There are, obviously, many connections, but, for the most part, this investigation has tried to view them as dramatic works in their own right--the way in which Vivaldi, as a man of the theatre, would surely have regarded them. --from Preface.

Bd. 2: Musical examples.

Great was the interest among Vivaldians and opera-lovers when a score of a large portion of Vivaldi's lost opera Motezuma (1733) was unexpectedly discovered among manuscripts from the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin returned to Berlin from Kiev in 2000. The find was providential, since in recent decades practically all of Vivaldi's performable operatic music has been presented to the public. The newly discovered work has thus given a much-needed fillip to everyone concerned with Vivaldi's operas. Scholarly discussion was initiated in an international symposium held at the De Doelen concert hall in Rotterdam in June 2005 alongside the work's first modern performance. From the start, it was planned that the papers read at the symposium, augmented by essays commissioned from other scholars, would be gathered into a book centring on Motezuma. The starting point for the contributions, all of which appear in English, is Steffen Voss's 'Vivaldi's Music for the Opera Motezuma, RV 723'. This focuses on the opera itself: its origins, transmission, dramaturgy and music. Reinhard Strohm follows with 'Vivaldi and His Operas, 1730-1734: A Critical Survey': a chronicle of Vivaldi's operatic activities during the creative period surrounding Motezuma. Strohm's essay enables one to identify more clearly what is typical - for Vivaldi and for its period - in Motezuma, and what is less typical. Micky White and Michael Talbot then offer a sidelight on Venetian opera from the same period by charting the chequered career of a nephew of Vivaldi in 'Pietro Mauro, detto 'il Vivaldi': Failed Tenor, Failed Impresario, Failed Husband, Acclaimed Copyist'. Briefly, during the late 1730s, Mauro's career in opera mirrored Vivaldi's own at a humbler level, and a scandal in which the former became embroiled may even have had repercussions for his uncle. We move next to the world of librettos and dramaturgy. The 'American' dimension of the opera is explored in Jurgen Maehder's 'Alvise Giusti's Libretto Motezuma and the Conquest of Mexico in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Seria'. To choose an American subject for an opera seria was a novelty at the time, and the libretto for Motezuma casts an interesting light on contemporary attitudes towards the Conquista and towards the indigenous civilizations that it brought to a brutal end. Carlo Vitali's essay 'A Case of Historical Revisionism in the Theatre: Some Undeclared Sources for Vivaldi's Motezuma' probes more deeply into the libretto's historical antecedents. Melania Bucciarelli, in 'Taming the exotic: Vivaldi's Armida al campo d'Egitto', explores the treatment of an Ottoman theme in a Vivaldi opera of the period leading up to Motezuma. In a sense, the Ottoman empire formed a prototype of 'alterity' on which later operatic depictions of non-European peoples could draw, while also supplying a test-bed for the treatment of topical subjects during a tense period of intermittent warfare with the Sublime Porte. The next two contributions redirect the focus towards the music of Motezuma. Kurt Markstrom, in 'The Vivaldi-Vinci Interconnections, 1724-26 and beyond: Implications for the Late Style of Vivaldi', considers the interaction in the operatic arena between Vivaldi and his brilliant contemporary Leonardo Vinci, who briefly burst on to the Venetian scene in the 1720s before his premature death in 1730 robbed the all-conquering Neapolitan style of one of its heroes. Markstrom shows how Vivaldi was both influenced by, and an influence on, Vinci. Michael Talbot's essay 'Vivaldi's 'Late' Style: Final Fruition or Terminal Decline?' ponders whether there is any objective basis in positing a 'late' style in Vivaldi's case and, if so, where its boundaries lie. His conclusion is that there is indeed a late style, beginning in the second half of the 1720s and divisible into two sub-periods, with Motezuma close to the end of the first. 'Final fruition' is an apt description of the first sub-period, 'terminal decline' (with qualifications) of the second. Fittingly, the concluding essay, Frederic Delamea's 'Vivaldi in scena: Thoughts on The Revival of Vivaldi's Operas', confronts the world of present-day staged performance. Why, this author asks, do we commonly pay such respect to notions of historical fidelity in the musical realization of the operas, while we trample so brutally on authenticity in the matter of stagecraft and production. This essay promises to become a seminal text for an ongoing debate.