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Farnace

Music by Josef Mysliveček · libretto by Antonio Maria Lucchini · premiered 1767 · at Teatro di San Carlo

Farnace is an 18th-century Italian opera in 3 acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček.

It was composed to a libretto by the Italian poet Antonio Maria Lucchini that is best known from a setting by Antonio Vivaldi first produced at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice for the carnival operatic season of 1727. For a performance in the 1760s, it would only be expected that a libretto of such age would be abbreviated and altered to suit contemporary operatic taste; this libretto was unusually old, even older than all but one of the librettos by Metastasio that continued by be set in the 1760s.

The cuts and changes in the text made for the 1767 performance of Mysliveček's opera are not attributable.

Indeed, they are quite extensive; not a single one of Lucchini's original aria texts was re-set by Mysliveček. However, it is the same cut libretto of Farnace, with small variants, used by the Neapolitan Davide Perez in his opera for the Regio Teatro of Turin in the 1751 Carnival, and repeated in Rome at the Torre Argentina Theater the following year, and in Messina (Regio Teatro della Munizione) and Naples (Teatro di San Carlo) in 1753 and again in 1757.

Text from the Wikipedia article "Farnace (Mysliveček)", 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.

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Other Operas by Josef Mysliveček