Sai che il tuo amore [from the opera La Nitteti]. [Copyist musical manuscript score]
Lucca: 1759.
Oblong quarto (229 x 297 mm). Notated in black ink on 9-stave rastrum-ruled paper. 22 pp.
Scored for alto voice, strings, flutes, and unfigured basso continuo.
Inscribed at head of first page to celebrated castrato Gaetano Guadagni (1728-1792), who sang the role of Sammeto in the 1759 Lucca producion of Nitteti "In Lucca Nello Nitteti 1759 = Dal Sigr. Guadagni."
Moderate foxing and soiling to outer margins of first page; small circular manuscript label with "59" to upper inner margin of title.
No published editions of the opera appear to have been published in the 18th century. Other manuscript holdings of portions of the opera are held at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, Parma, Mantova, Dresden and, in the U.S. at the University of California, Berkeley. We have not located any other holdings of the present aria, which appears to be from Act I, scene vi.
La Nitteti, an opera seria in three acts to a libretto by Metastasio, was first performed in Reggio nell'Emilia at the Pubblico on 29 April 1757 and later in Lucca at the Teatro di Lucca on 11 September 1759.
Italian composer Traetta "was trained between 1740 and 1750 at the Conservatorio di S Maria di Loreto, Naples, where his teachers were Porpora (until 1741) and Durante. His Stabat mater, probably written around 1750, shows contrapuntal mastery and a penchant for sombre, chromatic choral writing. In accordance with local custom, he presumably proved his talents for the stage by writing comic operas for the smaller Neapolitan theatres before receiving a commission to write Il Farnace for S Carlo in 1751. He continued to write both serious and comic opera throughout his life. In Rome and Naples during the early 1750s he came into contact with the commanding figure of Jommelli, to the production of whose Ifigenia in Aulide at S Carlo in 1753 he contributed five arias. In 1757–8 he had no fewer than five Metastasian operas performed in Rome and northern Italian cities including Venice, which became his base. ... The castrato Gaetano Guadagni, for whom the role of Orpheus had been created, was the first Orestes, and his scene with the Furies compares favourably with, and is indebted to, Gluck's similar scene in Orfeo. Artistic relations between the two composers went further: Gluck directed a performance of Traetta's Ifigenia at Florence in 1767, and he had not forgotten its music when he came to write his own Iphigénie en Tauride at the end of his career. When Burney visited him in 1772 Gluck had his niece sing arias by Traetta which he accompanied. Traetta was stimulated by Gluck's dramatic vision. ... Arteaga summed up his achievements by speaking of the ‘talents and the learning of the always beautiful and sometimes sublime Traetta." Daniel Heartz, Marita P. McClymonds, and George W. Loomis in Grove Music Online
An interesting manuscript, in all likelihood directly related to Guadagni's performance of the opera in Lucca in 1759.
Item #40904
Price: $900.00 other currencies