Milada Jonášová and Tomislav Volek
The publication contains papers presented during the course of the fifth international musicology conference on Italian operas in the lands of the Bohemian Kingdom in the 18th century, which was held in the Centre of Baroque Culture in Český Krumlov. The extensive opening study by Wolfgang Hochstein (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg) examines Hasse’s setting of Metastasio’s libretto Il Demofoonte on the basis of its performance in the Court Theatre in Dresden in 1748. Many other composers, and also theorists, aestheticians, and writers have also been inspired by Metastasio’s libretto. In particular, many of them have been captivated by the text of the aria “Misero pargoletto”, sung by Timante, the supposed son of King Demofoonte. Settings of this aria or of the entire libretto are discussed by Lucio Tufano (Università Palermo), Álvaro Torrente a Ana Llorens (Universidad Madrid), Raffaele Mellace (Università Genova), Steffen Voss (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München), and Roland Dieter Schmidt-Hensel (Staatsbibliothek Berlin). Manfred Hermann Schmid (Universität Tübingen) chooses a broader theme: the ways in which divine prophecies (oracles) were set to music from Demofoonte down to Mozart’s Idomeneo. Milada Jonášová focuses on seven arias, which Mozart composed on the texts from the libretto Demofoonte by Metastasio. The unique approach of the composer Niccolò Jommelli, who composed as many as four different settings of the libretto Demofoonte, is described in the article by Tarcisio Balbo (Istituto di Studi Vecchi-Tonelli Modena). The advanced Prague Opera Society also staged its own version of Demofoonte in the Kotzen Theatre in 1771, with a setting by Jan Evangelista Koželuh, which is dealt with in the paper by Kamila Hálová (Italian Embassy Prague). Tomislav Volek tries to find the reasons for the unusual historical fact that Hasse did not compose any operas for the Italian opera society in Prague, and in spite of this many of his arias have been preserved in Czech archives. The volume is considerably enhanced by the inclusion of an extensive catalogue of the librettos and musical sources for all the operatic settings of Demofoonte in the 18th century that are known of. This is one of the outcomes of the research undertaken by Ana Llorens, Gorka Rubiales, and Nicola Usula, the members of the team working on the ERC project “DIDONE. The Sources of Absolute Music: Mapping Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera”, led by Álvaro Torrente at Madrid University. The publication is completed by photodocumentation from the conference and from the performance of Hasse’s opera Il Demofoonte, which was staged at the Festival of Baroque Art by Ondřej Macek and his ensemble Hof-Musici.
L’opera italiana nei territori boemi durante il Settecento V. Praha: Academia, 2020, 344 s.
ISBN: 978-80-200-3152-5
This book can be purchased at the Academia bookshop.
