Giuseppe Saverio Mercadante: Didone abbandonata (Die verlassene Dido)
Dramma per musica in zwei Akten
Libretto nach Pietro Metastasio von Andrea Leone Tottola
Premiere: 18.01.1823 in Turin, Teatro Regio
Critical edition by Paolo Cascio / Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2018​

Scenic performance. Sung in Italian with German surtitles.

Saverio Mercadante led the way for the baroque opera to transform into the Romantic operatic drama Italy was to become famous for. Conductor and pioneer Alessandro De Marchi is repeatedly delighted to find that operas by Mercadante and his contemporaries «display the musical ideas of this period of Italian music to full effect only in historically informed performances. The sound becomes more subtle, the musicians are in a chamber music frame of mind when they play historically informed performances, which allows the vocal language to come into its own.» Moreover, Mercadante’s «Didone abbandonata» also demonstrates «that a classical libretto by Viennese court poet Metastasio still had plenty of substance for a composition even in the 19th century.»

«Didone abbandonata» contains all that sets a Romantic Italian operatic drama apart: great scenes with cantabile and cabaletta for all the main characters, rousing composed ensembles, exciting duets and grand final scenes. The suicide of the Carthaginian Queen Dido, abandoned by Aeneas and betrayed by Jarba, is only a short recitative in Metastasio’s libretto. In contrast, Mercadante composed it as a great death scene. Conversely, he still made use of the long-established recitatives of the baroque tradition. Sizzling both in terms of content and vocal style, «you can hear throughout the entire work where one opera world ends and a new opera world begins», de Marchi teases the love triangle set in Carthage, which will be staged in Innsbruck by star director Jürgen Flimm.