Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, Vivaldi ranks amongst the greatest Baroque composers and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form into a widely accepted and followed idiom.
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. His output includes operas, concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments, sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music, especially his concertos. He is best remembered today for a work called "Adagio in G minor", attributed to him but largely written by Remo Giazotto, a 20th century musicologist and composer, who was a cataloger of the works of Albinoni.
Remo Giazotto was an Italian musicologist, music critic, and composer, mostly known through his systematic catalogue of the works of Tomaso Albinoni. He wrote biographies of Albinoni and other composers, including Antonio Vivaldi.
The year 1718 in music involved some significant events.
Orlando, usually known in modern times as Orlando furioso, is an opera in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi to an Italian libretto by Grazio Braccioli, based on Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. The first performance of the opera was at the Teatro San Angelo, Venice, in November 1727. It is to be distinguished from an earlier Vivaldi opera of 1714, Orlando furioso, set to much the same libretto, once thought to be a revival of a 1713 opera by Giovanni Alberto Ristori but now considered by Vivaldian musicologists to be a fully-fledged opera by Vivaldi himself.
Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg was a German composer and conductor.
Roberto Regazzi is a notable contemporary violin maker and scholar who received his initiation in the craft from Otello Bignami. Regazzi lives and works in Bologna.
Dramma per musica is a libretto. The term was used by dramatists in Italy and elsewhere between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries. In modern times the same meaning of drama for music was conveyed through the Italian Greek-rooted word melodramma. Dramma per musica never meant "drama through music", let alone music drama.
Erismena is an opera in a prologue and three acts by Francesco Cavalli. First performed in Venice in 1655, it was designated as a dramma per musica.
Griselda is a dramma per musica in three acts that was composed by Antonio Vivaldi. The opera uses a revised version of the 1701 Italian libretto by Apostolo Zeno that was based on Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron. The celebrated Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni was hired to adapt the libretto for Vivaldi. The opera was first performed in Venice at the Teatro San Samuele on 18 May 1735.
Catone in Utica is an opera libretto by Metastasio, that was originally written for Leonardo Vinci's 1727 opera. Following Vinci's success, Metastasio's text was used by numerous composers of the baroque and classical eras for their own operas, including Pietro Torri (1736), Antonio Vivaldi (1737), Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (1753) and J. C. Bach (1761).
Ignazio Pollice was an Italian composer of the Baroque era, from Palermo. He is most famous for his L'innocenza pentita: o vero la Santa Rosalia, which opened the just-built Teatro Santa Cecilia in Palermo in 1693.
La Silvia is an dramma pastorale per musica in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi to an Italian libretto by Enrico Bissari. It was first performed on 28 August 1721 at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan on the occasion of the birthday celebrations of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth Christine, wife of Emperor Charles VI of Austria.
Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt was a Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, Imperial Field marshal and Governor of Mantua.
Peter K. Winkler is an American composer and a musicologist specializing in the theory of popular music. His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater; many of his works involve a synthesis of popular and classical styles.
Pietro Giuseppe Gaetano Boni was an Italian composer.
Demetrio is an opera libretto in three acts by Pietro Metastasio. It was first performed to music composed by Antonio Caldara on 4 November 1731 during celebrations of the name day of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in Vienna. Different composers later used it when composing operas named Alceste, Cleonice and Demetrio, rè della Siria. With over fifty settings it was one of Metastasio's most popular works.
Semiramide is a dramma per musica in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi composed to a libretto by Francesco Silvani.
Diana Vico was an 18th-century Italian contralto who had an active performance career in Europe from 1707 through 1732. Performing primarily in operas, she sang in opera houses in Italy, Germany, and England. She specialized in portraying male characters on stage, and appeared in the world premieres of operas by prominent composers of the Baroque period, including works by Antonio Vivaldi and George Frideric Handel among others.
