Ezio
Music by Josef Mysliveček · libretto by Pietro Metastasio · premiered 1775 · at Teatro di San Carlo
Ezio is an eighteenth-century Italian opera in 3 acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček.
It was the composer's first setting of a libretto by the Italian poet Metastasio that was first performed with music by Pietro Auletta in 1728, one of the most popular of the Metastasian librettos in Mysliveček's day. The story is based on incidents from the lives of the 5th-century Roman emperor Valentinian III and his general Aetius. For a performance in the 1770s, it would only be expected that a libretto of such age would be abbreviated and altered to suit contemporary operatic taste.
The cuts and changes in the text made for the 1775 performance of Mysliveček's opera are not attributable.
All of Mysliveček's operas are of the serious type in Italian language referred to as opera seria.
Text from the Wikipedia article "Ezio (Mysliveček, 1775)", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
About the Composer
Josef Mysliveček (9 March 1737 – 4 February 1781) was a Czech composer. He contributed to the formation of late eighteenth-century classicism in music. Mysliveček provided his younger friend Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with significant compositional models in the genres of symphony, Italian serious opera, and violin concerto; both Wolfgang and his father Leopold Mozart considered him an intimate friend from the time of their first meetings in Bologna in 1770 until he betrayed their trust over the promise of an operatic commission for Wolfgang to be arranged with the management of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. His closeness to the Mozart family resulted in frequent references to him in the…
Text from the Wikipedia article "Josef Mysliveček", licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Other Operas by Josef Mysliveček
- Antigona
- Armida
- Il gran Tamerlano
- Atide (1676)
- Farnace (1727)
- Artaserse (1730)
- Demetrio (1731)
- Adriano in Siria (1732)