#Pietro Metastasio

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Jacopo Amigoni (Italian, 1682-1752) The singer Farinelli and friends From left to right: Pietro Metastasio, Teresa Castellini, Carlo Broschi Farinelli, Jacopo Amigoni, CBF’s dog, and the artist's assistant. National Gallery of Victoria, Australia

Metastasio and Farinelli had been friends since they were young in Italy. Although they worked in different places, they'd write to each other and keep in touch. These friends were together in Spain and were about to say goodbye because they were leaving to go to different places. The singer, Farinelli, asked his friend Amigoni, to paint this picture as a record of their friendship. Farinelli and Metastasio even wrote a song about saying "goodbye."

[operasrsly]

Deh, per questo istante solo ...

Tanto affanno soffre un core, ne si more di dolor!

Deh, per questo istante solo ti ricorda il primo amor, che morir mi fa di duolo il tuo sdegno, il tuo rigor.

Di pietade indegno, e vero. sol spirar io deggio orror. Pur saresti men severo se vedessi questo cor.

Disperato vado a morte, ma il morir non mi spaventa. ll pensiero mi tormenta che fui teco un traditor!

(Tanto affanno soffre un core, ne si more di dolor!)

Ah, for just this moment Remember the first affections, that make me die of grief your anger, your severity.

Unworthy of pity, it is true. I should only inspire horror. Yet you would be less severe if you could see this heart.

Desperate I go to death but death does not frighten me. The thought torments me is that I betrayed you!

(So much a heart can suffer, yet does not die of grief!)

Translation by Theresa M. Patten

[fuckyeahphilippejaroussky]

Philippe Jaroussky sings "Mentre dormi" from Antonio Caldara's "L'olimpiade"

"Mentre dormi, amor fomenti"

Antonio Caldara, "L'olimpiade" Libretto: Pietro Metastasio Premiere: 1733, Vienna Licida's aira

Philippe Jaroussky Emmanuelle Haïm Concerto Köln

(Strana voglia!) E ben riposa. Addio.   Mentre dormi amor fomenti il piacer de' sonni tuoi con l'idea del mio piacer.   Abbia il rio passi più lenti; e sospenda i moti suoi ogni zeffiro leggier.

*Translation*

What can this mean! [aside] Farewell, and may'st thou find thy wish'd repose! Still while you sleep, with pleasing themes May Love inspire your peaceful dreams, And whisper how I'm blest! May yonder stream more silent flow, And every zephyr gentler blow, To sooth my friend to rest. (Translation by John Hoole, 1800)

[classystarfishdreamer]

Tutto pronto per l'evento tanto atteso a Napoli

Lunedì 15 luglio alle ore 17.00 presso la sala della Loggia, l’Associazione Culturale “Noi per Napoli”, con il patrocinio morale del Comune di Napoli presenterà due ospiti. Il tenore Luca Lupoli, autore del nuovo saggio dal titolo “Il Melodramma di Pietro Metastasio, il Primato del Testo” edito dalla casa editrice Pagine e la giornalista, scrittrice, docente di materie letterarie Maria…

[theitcharchives]

Let’s play a lit game. Guess which of these 1700s/early 1800s Italian poets is who

The one who went to work abroad and refused to learn the language his whole life, forcing his imperial employer to learn his, writing all his work of 50+ years in Italian and keeping only a few select also Italian friends;

The one who founded a nowadays still existing academy for scholars and then ditched it when it started veering off path from what he intended;

The one who 99% of the time wrote poems about his imaginary muse, an older woman he supposedly had the hots for since he was a kid;

The one who chose violence and wrote about her emotionally cheating husband fixated on a past lover when everyone else liked to write about frivolous love and picnics;

The one who wrote such an important treatise on the justice system it was used as the basics to reform most European law codes but bailed on his first trip abroad to discuss it and refused to go see the tsarina because Saint Petersburg was too cold;

The three brothers–two who founded a lit circle whose discussions ended in fistfights, the older one paid n.5′s travel expenses and sent the middle one to make sure n. 5 didn’t make a fool of himself in front of the French senpais that had finally noticed them. Middle one failed and went on to England on his own. Youngest one is rumored to be the bio dad of the first Italian novelist, who’s also n.5′s grandkid;

The one who was born poor and worked as a preceptor, fought with his first employers and quit, wrote an extremely successful callout poem about nobility, tutored the guy who became the father figure of First Novelist Guy, and managed to keep his government job through two power shifts because he was just that good of an admin;

The one who was born filthy rich but fucking hated any power hierarchy and any stupid hypocritical enlightened monarch, wrote a fuck you for everyone he could manage including that sellout of n.1 who whored his poetry out to the Austrian tyrants, looked Frederick II the Great right in the eye and found him lacking, loved the French revolutionists at first but decided they’d become filthy tyrants themselves once they started killing everyone and made a mad escape from France, and wrote an autobiography that is frankly fucking hilarious;

N.8 and n.7 fanboy that never properly settled, changing city depending on the government, and preferred self exiling and dying in poverty abroad rather than work for the Austrian occupants that offered him a job;

 The one who stayed up at night to read n.8′s autobiography and then got so excited he wrote a sonnet about it even if he frigging hated sonnets and said he’d never write one. This poor sod was the most depressed sickly guy in the history of Italian literature, tried to run away from home but his overprotective dad busted his plan, had a thousands of pages long notebook, said poetry comes from pain and that half seen things are better than whole things because he was obviously biased by being a wet rag of a man that died young. I still love him;

“Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, fuck you very popular organization, fuck you icon of literature, fuck you main cultural event of my century, and fu–no you’re cool actually–fuck you instead, and fuck you, and what’s this? Schadenfreude? For getting to say the ultimate fuck you to a very popular guy for criticizing my blorbo? Enjoyable. And fuck you. All my friends are important people. Fuck my family.”

[aperint]

Frases Célebres

Frases Célebres #aperturaintelectual #frasescelebresaintelectual

“Si las íntimas preocupaciones de cada cual se leyeran escritas sobre su frente, !cuántos que causan envidia nos moverían lástima!.” Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi “Metastasio” (1698-1782) Compositor, dramaturgo, escritor, libretista, poeta y sacerdote italiano. Sigue Apertura Intelectual en todas nuestras redes: WordPress Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Tumblr Te…

[italian-lit-tournament]

The participating authors for the Italian Lit(erature) Tournament: the general list + a google form to add other proposals

Podesti Francesco - Torquato Tasso reading Jerusalem Delivered to the Estensi court

The start of the Italian Lit(erature) Tournament (first edition) is getting closer, but first I want to post the general list of the authors partecipants.

The principal issue is that every literary canon is constantly changing, with more critical studies over the years. I've thought about it, read and searched, and the solution I found has two parts:

I will take the principal authors from this list, which in turn is based from the studies of Gianfranco Contini and Asor Rosa. The list is too long and many names are only chronicles and essayists, so I'll chose the principal ones, trying to balance between north/south Italy and male/female authors (taking into account that many authors that we study are men). As you will see below under the cut, the list is already pretty long, doing some math the challenge will be 2/3 months long.

Still, I recognise that this isn't 100% unbiased and fair, so I opened a free and quick google form when you can add a maximum of two authors that you don't see in the list. This considerable limit is to avoid having too many names - if in some answers I see more than 2 names, I'll take into account only the first 2 listed.

IMPORTANT! 👇

After much thoughts, I also chose to don't include living authors or authors death only recently (before January 2023). The reason is simply to avoid potential issues in the community, like bashing between fandom or admirers of some specific author, or going too far like offending some people near the author still alive or recently deceased. Maybe if this tournament will end well, a second edition could be made next year and maybe with the addition of living authors! (I'm already thinking to do an italian or european cinema tournament in the future but this is still in the draft).

Under the cut, you will find the list of the authors already part of the challenge, name-surname with the surname in alphabetical order. If you don't see a name that you want to see, use the form to add it!

edit: I added the ones from the surbey so far, all in italics. There are names that have been sent but already on the list.

Dante Alighieri

Sibilla Aleramo

Vittorio Alfieri

Cecco Angiolieri

Pietro Aretino

Ludovico Ariosto

Matteo Bandello

Anna Banti

Giambattista Basile

Giorgio Bassani

Cesare Beccaria

Maria Bellonci

Pietro Bembo

Matteo Maria Boiardo

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giordano Bruno

Dino Buzzati

Italo Calvino

Andrea Camilleri

Giosuè Carducci

Guido Cavalcanti

Carlo Collodi

Vittoria Colonna

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Giacomo da Lentini

Caterina da Siena

Alba de Céspedes

Cielo (Ciullo) d'Alcamo

Edoardo De Filippo

Federico de Roberto

Grazia Deledda

Umberto Eco

Beppe Fenoglio

Marsilio Ficino

Dario Fo

Ugo Foscolo

Veronica Franco

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Natalia Ginzburg

Carlo Goldoni

Antonio Gramsci

Francesco Guicciardini

Tommaso Landolfi

Giacomo Leopardi

Carlo Levi

Primo Levi

Carla Lonzi

Niccolò Machiavelli

Alessandro Manzoni

Giovanbattista Marino

Giovanni Meli

Pietro Metastasio

Eugenio Montale

Elsa Morante

Alberto Moravia

Anna Maria Ortese

Giuseppe Parini

Goffredo Parise

Giovanni Pascoli

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cesare Pavese

Francesco Petrarca

Luigi Pirandello

Angelo Poliziano

Luigi Pulci

Salvator Quasimodo

Gianni Rodari

Lalla Romano

Amelia Rosselli

Umberto Saba

Emilio Salgari

Jacopo Sannazaro

Goliarda Sapienza

Leonardo Sciascia

Matilde Serao

Gaspara Stampa

Mario Rigoni Stern

Italo Svevo

Antonio Tabucchi

Torquato Tasso

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Giovanni Verga

Giambattista Vico

Renata Viganò

Elio Vittorini

Giuseppe Ungaretti

[garland-on-thy-brow]

[L'Olimpiade, Pietro Metastasio]

René Girard is looking at this opera.

[lesser-known-composers]

Gian Francesco de Majo

Work: Alessandro, dramma per musica in three acts, first performance 1766, Hoftheater, Mannheim.

Libretto: Mattia Verazi after Pietro Metastasio, Alessandro nell'Indie

Aria di Poro: Vedrai con tuo periglio

Poro, king of India: Marie-Belle Sandis

Orchestra: Nationaltheaterorchester Mannheim

Conductor: Tito Ceccherini

[cinquecolonnemagazine]

Melodramma e poesia si incontrano al Maschio Angioino

Al Maschio Angioino, presso la sala della Loggia, l’Associazione Culturale Noi per Napoli, con il patrocinio morale del Comune di Napoli presenta i lavori del tenore Luca Lupoli, autore del nuovo saggio dal titolo "Il Melodramma di Pietro Metastasio, il Primato del Testo"", edito dalla casa editrice “Pagine", la giornalista, scrittrice, e della docente di materie letterarie Maria Cuono autrice di Tutto con il cuore, la nuova versione di Verso l’orizzonte, edito dalla casa editrice Kimerik". Interverranno alla presente kermesse culturale in qualità di relatori il M° Olga De Maio soprano, il dottor Ermanno Corsi,Direttore e giornalista RAI, il professor Ettore Massarese, la dottoressa Lydia Tarsitano. Modera la dottoressa Daniela Merola, giornalista e scrittrice. La silloge poetica intrisa di sentimenti e personaggi “La mia silloge poetica è rivolta sia ad un pubblico giovanile che adulto, in cui si affrontano temi vari, che vanno dalla guerra, all’abbandono dei cani. È un testo molto scorrevole intriso di sentimenti, dall’amicizia, l’amore, ai ricordi di vita vissuti intensamente, alle paure, ai segreti, alle dediche a persone che hanno fatto parte della mia vita come mia madre, il più grande punto di riferimento, ed a personaggi del mondo dello spettacolo conosciuti durante le loro esibizioni” afferma Maria Cuono. Il saggio su Metastasio al Maschio Angioino ”Questo secondo lavoro editoriale è un saggio storico-culturale incentrato sulla figura del drammaturgo Pietro Metastasio, dopo quello dedicato all’ Opera ed alla figura del compositore partenopeo Mario Persico, pubblicato l’anno scorso con Aletheia Editore, risale ad un periodo della mia vita in cui stavo terminando gli studi e in cui ho deciso di dedicare il suo tempo”, sostiene Luca Lupoli, autore del recente saggio su Metastasio. L’opera, basata su un’accurata analisi dei carteggi di Metastasio, introduce una delle figure più importanti del panorama teatrale Settecentesco: Pietro Metastasio, poeta e librettista italiano, considerato uno dei maggiori esponenti del melodramma, una forma di opera lirica caratterizzata dalla fusione di musica e dramma. Il testo Il testo spazia attraverso il pensiero e la personalità dell’autore, conoscibili grazie alle sue famose lettere, note come i carteggi di Metastasio, attraverso cui è possibile una comprensione più approfondita delle sue relazioni personali e professionali e delle sue idee estetiche. Metastasio è stato il fautore dell’importanza della predominanza del testo sulla musica, tanto da poter poi definire il concetto di teoria metastasiana. L’opera è arricchita dalle ricerche biografiche, bibliografiche e delle fonti condotte dal soprano M° Olga De Maio, con la prefazione del Prof. Ettore Massarese, rinomato regista, attore, docente di Letteratura Teatrale Italiana e Discipline dello spettacolo presso l’Università Federico II di Napoli, mentre la bella grafica della copertina è stata ideata e realizzata dal Prof. Giuseppe De Maio, docente di Arte e grafico. Foto di Didier da Pixabay Read the full article

[fuckyeahphilippejaroussky]

"Gelido in ogni vena" Giovanni Battista Ferrandini, "Siroe" Libretto: Pietro Metastasio

Countertenor + piano accompagniment: Philippe Jaroussky Live on France Inter Nov 2023 Cosroes' aria (Act III, scene V)

Gelido in ogni vena Scorrer mi sento il sangue, L'ombra del figlio esangue M'ingombra di terror.

E per maggior mia pena Vedo che fui crudele A un'anima innocente, Al core del mio cor.

** I feel my blood congealing run Thro' ev'ry vein, in ev'ry part, And the pale ghost of my dear son, Strikes dread and terror to my heart.

And still to add to greater woe, The loyal innocent I've slain, Of cruelty at length I know, I, on myself, have fix'd the stain.

Gelido in ogni vena" is an aria from a libretto by Pietro Metastasio*. It appears in two distinct operas: "Siroe" and "Farnace". (Farnace: 1927, "Gelido in ogni vena" was set to music by almost every composer in Baroque and beyond. The approaches are very different and interesting to hear. They range from Vinci's approach which is more pleasing than it is gripping to Vivaldi's soul-crushing benchmark of what a baroque aria can be.

The fellow Venetian Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (*1710) has a yet different approach. It's not quite clear when his version was composed, only that it happened before 1758. The dread that befalls Cosroe when he imagines seeing his deceased son whom he (justly) feels he has wronged that makes his blood run cold with fear and guilt, Ferrandini illustrates with fragile diminished jumps and subtle harmonic shifts and chromatics as Cosroe's world is coming apart at the seams, shifting and shaking while he tries to somehow smoothen the cracks and live on. More personal and intimate than Vivaldi's, Ferrandini's interpretation is sublime by its own merit.

*) (this seems more likely even though some sources credit Antonio Maria Lucchini, but it seems that his version didn't contain "Gelido ...")

The full da capo aria can be found on Philippe Jaroussky's album "Forgotten Arias" [x]. On the radio, live, he gives us a two-minute slice.

The full radio podcast is still available here: [x]

Translation Source: Siroe, re di Persia. Drama per musica 1736, British Library [x]

[classystarfishdreamer]

Il nuovo saggio di Luca Lupoli accolto nella prestigiosa e storica Biblioteca del Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella di Napoli.

La  prestigiosa e storica Biblioteca del Conservatorio San Pietroa Majella di Napoli, rappresentata dall’instancabile opera di abnegazione,passione e competenza della Responsabile,la Dottoressa Tiziana Grande, ha accolto  tra le sue preziose opere in questi giorni il saggio su Metastasio, Il Melodramma di Pietro Metastasio il Primato del Testo” di Luca Lupoli ,con le ricerche biobliografiche…

[drjacquescoulardeau]

POPULAR SUCCESS FOR L’OLIMPIADE

JOSEF MYSLIVEČEK MAKES L’OLIMPIADE MELODRAMATIC

This topic, and its standard timeline and suspense architecture was used vastly on Italian opera stages in the 18th century. Josef Mysliveček is one composer, the latest then, who used the topic, subject, drama, and suspenseful crime story to entertain the vast opera audience in Italy at the time from Naples to Venice and many other cities. The story was used by Vivaldi (1734) and Pergolesi (1735) on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio (1733) before Mysliveček The first composer to deal with the libretto was Antonio Caldara in a production in Vienna, Austria in 1733.

The topic is inspired by ancient Greek stories and is in a way a romantic drama that ends well. It brings together a newborn supposedly exposed to the sea by order of his father, a king of course; a fraudulent public fight in which the official contender appoints a friend of his to fight in his place to make sure he will win the prize; the prize is the daughter of the king who had his son exposed to the sea, quite a gentleman that king, even in Ancient Greece. You can imagine the embroglio in the city when the rigged public fight was revealed, and then when the real identity of the main culprit was revealed by accident just minutes before he was executed for his fraud, standing there in a white robe on Jupiter’s altar, the executing tools already brandished by order of his own real but unknown father. And the gentleman of a king does not even seem polite enough to excuse himself, to say he was sorry for his totally inhumane decisions in his life. Luckily in all the cases I have been able to listen to, the music saves the story.

And imagine the main culprit, the “champion” who asks his friend to fight for him, is thus trying to conquer the daughter of the local king who is in love with his own friend and who is loved by this very friend. He is trying to steal the love of his friend, after having abandoned the woman he loved in his country, Crete, in order to come to Greece to be able to conquer this daughter of a barbaric father. A French Revolution is definitely needed in this opera topic. Luckily, Beaumarchais and Mozart were supposed to come soon and were already there when Mysliveček produced his version of the tale in 1778 since Beaumarchais produced his play “Le Mariage de Figaro” in Paris in 1778. Mozart composed his “Marriage of Figaro” in 1786 in Vienna, Austria, premiere performance on May 1st, announcing, a century before the Chicago massacre, the famous Labor Day of May 1st still celebrated today. Once a Freemason, always a Freemason.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2024

Baroque Music,  *  Fraud,  *  Newborn Infant,  * ópera,  *  Rigged

[italian-lit-tournament]

The participating authors for the Italian Lit(erature) Tournament: the general list WITH the new ADDITIONS + the link to the google form to add the last proposals

John William Waterhouse - The Decameron

The Italian 🔥Lit(erature) Tournament is approaching and new names have been submitted in addition to the ones from the original list! This post is only to remember that the google form will remail open for a while to add the last proposals, plus other few details 👇

You can find the first part of the rules here and link to the survey to add new names here!

Under the cut you'll find the usual list but with the addition of the names from the survey so far, all in italics. Other names that have been submitted but already present on the first list remain in a regular font.

There are 13 new names, of the 18 submitted (5 of them already present as written above).

Dante Alighieri

Sibilla Aleramo

Vittorio Alfieri

Cecco Angiolieri

Pietro Aretino

Ludovico Ariosto

Matteo Bandello

Anna Banti

Giambattista Basile

Giorgio Bassani

Cesare Beccaria

Maria Bellonci

Pietro Bembo

Matteo Maria Boiardo

Giovanni Boccaccio

Giordano Bruno

Dino Buzzati

Italo Calvino

Andrea Camilleri

Giosuè Carducci

Guido Cavalcanti

Carlo Collodi

Vittoria Colonna

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Giacomo da Lentini

Caterina da Siena

Alba de Céspedes

Cielo (Ciullo) d'Alcamo

Edoardo De Filippo

Federico de Roberto

Grazia Deledda

Umberto Eco

Beppe Fenoglio

Marsilio Ficino

Dario Fo

Ugo Foscolo

Veronica Franco

Carlo Emilio Gadda

Natalia Ginzburg

Carlo Goldoni

Antonio Gramsci

Francesco Guicciardini

Tommaso Landolfi

Giacomo Leopardi

Carlo Levi

Primo Levi

Carla Lonzi

Niccolò Machiavelli

Alessandro Manzoni

Giovanbattista Marino

Giovanni Meli

Pietro Metastasio

Eugenio Montale

Elsa Morante

Alberto Moravia

Anna Maria Ortese

Giuseppe Parini

Goffredo Parise

Giovanni Pascoli

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Cesare Pavese

Francesco Petrarca

Luigi Pirandello

Angelo Poliziano

Luigi Pulci

Salvator Quasimodo

Gianni Rodari

Lalla Romano

Amelia Rosselli

Umberto Saba

Emilio Salgari

Jacopo Sannazaro

Goliarda Sapienza

Leonardo Sciascia

Matilde Serao

Gaspara Stampa

Mario Rigoni Stern

Italo Svevo

Antonio Tabucchi

Torquato Tasso

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Giovanni Verga

Giambattista Vico

Renata Viganò

Elio Vittorini

Giuseppe Ungaretti

[garland-on-thy-brow]

[Catone in Utica, Pietro Metastasio]

I am not sure if the reference is intentional, but this part always strikes me as recalling Velleius Paterculus:

"But, when [Cassius and Brutus] had once left Rome and Italy behind them, by deliberate agreement and without government sanction they had taken possession of provinces and armies, and under the pretence that the republic existed wherever they were, they had gone so far as to receive from the quaestors, with their own consent, it is true, the moneys which these men were conveying to Rome from the provinces across the sea" (Velleius Paterculus, Roman History II.62)

So not only Catone in Utica is haunting La morte di Cesare, but Cassius and Brutus are haunting Catone in Utica (while in turn being haunted by Cato).

I just think it is cool how the link between their names is so strong that in a lot of media about Cassius and Brutus they end up highkey haunted by Cato and trying to build a sort of "collective Cato" out of themselves.