Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Pietro Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.
René Jacobs is a Belgian musician. He came to fame as a countertenor, but later in his career he became known as a conductor of baroque and classical opera.
Antonio Caldara was an Italian Baroque composer.
Antonio Alessandro Boncompagno Stradella was an Italian composer of the middle Baroque period. He enjoyed a dazzling career as a freelance composer, writing on commission, and collaborating with distinguished poets, producing over three hundred works in a variety of genres.
Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani was an Italian composer and violinist. He worked in the court at Innsbruck as a violinist at least between 1656 and 1660. Between 1672 and 1676 he was director of the court music at Innsbruck, which, after the extinction of the Tyrolean Habsburgs, had come under the control of the emperor. Although in publications of 1678 Viviani still described himself as holding this position, it seems more likely that he was in fact in Venice working on his arrangement of Francesco Cavalli’s Scipione affricano and his own opera Astiage, which were both performed in Venice that year. Also that year, Viviani directed an oratorio at the Oratorio di San Marcello in Rome with Arcangelo Corelli and Bernardo Pasquini. He was probably elevated to the nobility in the same year, since he subsequently designated himself ‘Nobile del Sacro Romano Imperio’. Between 1678 and 1679 and 1681 and 1682 he was in Naples as director of a troupe of opera singers, and while he was there he performed some of his own operas and oratorios. In 1686 he was maestro di cappella to the Prince of Bisignano. From January 1687 to December 1692 he was maestro di cappella of Pistoia Cathedral.
The year 1667 in music involved some significant events.
Antonio Maria Abbatini was an Italian composer, active mainly in Rome.
Anna Renzi was an Italian soprano renowned for her acting ability as well as her voice, who has been described as the first diva in the history of opera.
Il pomo d'oro is an opera in a prologue and five acts by the Italian composer Antonio Cesti with a libretto by Francesco Sbarra (1611-1668). It was first performed before the imperial court in a specially constructed open-air theatre Vienna in 1668. The work was so long it had to be staged over the course of two days: the Prologue, Acts One and Two were given on July 12; Acts Three, Four and Five on July 14. Originally planned to mark the wedding of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and Margaret Theresa of Spain in 1666, the production was rescheduled to mark the Empress's 17th birthday in 1668. The staging was unprecedented for its magnificence. The designer Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini provided no fewer than 24 sets and there were plenty of opportunities for spectacular stage machinery, including shipwrecks and collapsing towers.
Orontea is an opera in a prologue and three acts by the Italian composer Antonio Cesti with a libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini.
Carlo Francesco Pollarolo was an Italian composer, organist, and music director. Known chiefly for his operas, he wrote a total of 85 of them as well as 13 oratorios. His compositional style was initially indebted to the opera tradition of Giovanni Legrenzi and Carlo Pallavicino, but he moved beyond this style with innovations to the compositional structure of the aria characterized by expanded forms and orchestral elaborations. His early work used three part strings in the Legrenzi and Pallacino tradition of orchestration, but his mid and later works had developed into a richer orchestration of five strings parts and expanded instrumentation of brass and woodwinds. He was the first Venetian opera composer and one of the earliest Italian composers to use the oboe in his opera orchestrations.
Giovanni Felice Sances was an Italian singer and a Baroque composer. He was renowned in Europe during his time.
The Innsbruck Festival of Early Music is a festival of historically informed performances of music from the late Renaissance, Baroque and early Classical periods which takes place annually in Innsbruck, Austria. It was founded in 1976.
L'Argia is an opera in a prologue and three acts composed by Antonio Cesti to a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni. It was first performed in the court theatre at Innsbruck on 4 November 1655 to celebrate the visit of Queen Christina of Sweden who was on her way to exile in Rome. Over the next 20 years it had multiple performances in Italian cities including Venice and Siena where it inaugurated Siena's new opera house in 1669. Its first performance in modern times took place at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music in 1996. Set on the Island of Cyprus in ancient times the opera's convoluted plot, full of disguises and mistaken identities, revolves around the amorous misadventures of Selino who has been pursued to Salamis by his deserted wife Princess Argia.
Giovanni Filippo Apolloni was an Italian poet and librettist. Born in Arezzo, he has sometimes been referred to as "Giovanni Apollonio Apolloni", but the second given name is spurious. He served as the court poet to Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Austria at Innsbruck form 1653 until 1659. On his return to Italy he entered the service of Cardinal Volumnio Bandinelli. After Bandinelli's death in 1667 Appolloni was in the service of the Chigi family in Rome and Siena for the rest of his life. He wrote the librettos for a number of operas, the most well-known of which were Antonio Cesti's L'Argia and La Dori, as well as several oratorios and the texts for cantatas by both Cesti and Alessandro Stradella.
La Dori, overo Lo schiavo reggio is a tragi-comic opera in a prologue and three acts composed by Antonio Cesti to a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni. It was first performed in the court theatre at Innsbruck in 1657. The story is set in Babylon on the shores of the Euphrates and is a convoluted tale of mistaken identities—a female protagonist who disguised as a man eventually regains her lost lover, and a man disguised as a woman who causes another man to fall in love with him. In several respects it resembles the plot of Cesti and Apolloni's earlier opera L'Argia and foreshadows Apostolo Zeno's libretto for Gli inganni felici (1695) and Metastasio's libretto for L'Olimpiade (1733). The first Italian staging of La Dori was in Florence in 1661 for the wedding of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It subsequently became one of the most popular operas in 17th-century Italy. The opera was revived three times in the 20th century, beginning in 1983.
Francesco Sbarra was an Italian poet and librettist. Born in Lucca, he spent most of his career in Austria where he wrote the librettos for entertainments and operas at the courts of Archduke Ferdinand Charles in Innsbruck and Emperor Leopold I in Vienna.
Xavier Sabata Corominas is a Spanish operatic countertenor.
Aurelio Aureli was an Italian librettist.
