The rediscovery of the dramatic music of Antonio Vivaldi, which started in the last quarter of the last century and is today in full swing, has restored to us the image of an all-round composer, up to a point where if one could – paradoxically – take no account of the instrumental production to which he owes his universal fame, he would neverless deserve a place among the leading figures in Italian opera seria between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, alongside composers of the calibre of Francesco Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti and Leonardo Vinci.
Between 1713 and 1741 Vivaldi set to music at least forty or so librettos (over eighty, if one adds revivals and operatic productions that took place without his knowledge or direct involvement). The musical sources known at present comprise, in contrast, a mere 27 manuscript scores, almost all of which are completely preserved in the Mauro Foà and Renzo Giordano collections of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria of Turin, plus around 270 loose operatic arias. The Critical Edition of the Dramatic Music of Antonio Vivaldi, undertaken by the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini of Venice in collaboration with Casa Ricordi, which was launched at the start of the 1990s with the publication of Il Giustino, edited by Reinhard Strohm, thus represents a priority for modern-day research into the music of the Red Priest.
The edition aims to carry forward the monumentum of Vivaldian studies by placing at the disposal of performers and scholars critical texts that are unexceptionable as regards formal accuracy and methodological rigour, and to win due recognition for the value of Vivaldi’s dramatic works, which illustrate to perfection the transition between ‘Venetian Baroque’ style and thought and the more modern, ‘enlightened’ and international poetico-musical dimension of the so-called ‘Metastasian’ age.
The publication plan is articulated in four categories: complete or near-complete operas; incomplete preserved operas; loose operatic arias, ordered by vocal register and presented in alphabetical order of their respective incipits; serenatas.
Critical Editions available
I. Complete Operas
La Dorilla RV 709
Edited by Ivano Bettin
La fida ninfa RV 714
Edited by Marco Bizzarini and Alessandro Borin
Giustino RV 717
Edited by Reinhard Strohm
La Griselda RV 718
Edited by Marco Bizzarini and Alessandro Borin
Il Teuzzone RV 736
Edited by Alessandro Borin and Antonio Moccia
Tito Manlio RV 738
Edited by Alessandro Borin
IV. Serenatas
La Gloria e Imeneo RV 687
Edited by Alessandro Borin
Serenata a 3 RV 690
Edited by Alessandro Borin
Remaining Editorial Plan
I. Complete Operas
Arsilda, regina di Ponto RV 700
L’Atenaide RV 702
Il Bajazet RV 703
Il Farnace RV 711
L’incoronazione di Dario RV 719
L’Olimpiade RV 725
Orlando finto pazzo RV 727
Orlando furioso RV 728
Ottone in villa RV 729
Rosmira fedele RV 731
La verità in cimento RV 739
II. Incomplete preserved Operas
Armida al campo d’Egitto RV 699
Catone in Utica RV 705
Il Farnace RV 711
Motezuma RV 723
La virtù trionfante dell’amore e dell’odio, ovvero Il Tigrane RV 740
Tito Manlio RV 778
Orlando furioso RV 819
III. Operatic Arias
IV. Serenatas
La Senna festeggiante RV 696