«Non ho scritto una tragedia, ma un drama per le scene di Venezia»: i libretti di Adriano Morselli per il San Giovanni Grisostomo (1688-1692)

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This paper examines a series of drammi per musica written by Adriano Morselli during the last years of his own career as librettist for the Teatro di S. Giovanni Grisostomo in Venice: Amulio e Numitore (1689), Pirro e Demetrio (1690) and L’incoronazione di Serse (1691), with music by Giuseppe Felice Tosi; La pace fra Tolomeo e Seleuco (1691) and L’Ibraim sultano (1692), with music by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo. Investigating a series of topoi and dramaturgical devices that place this works in the wake of the writing conventions of late seventeenth-century Venetian opera, the paper takes into consideration the dramatic models employed by the poet, with their direct influences from the classical French theatre. This allows us to consider Morselli’s libretti as an example of a poetic trend, only partially studied by theatrologists and musicologists, which flourished in Venetian opera during the last quarter of the 17th century.