Opera włoska we Wrocławiu (1725–1734) i jej związki z innymi ośrodkami muzycznymi

Abstract

ITALIAN OPERA IN WROCŁAW (1725-1734) AND ITS LINKS WITH OTHER MUSIC CENTRES In the years 1725-1734, there was an Italian opera troupe performing in Wrocław, which was composed almost entirely of well-known Italian artists. At the beginning, its repertoire mimicked those of Italian theatres operating in Venice, Vienna, Florence, Genoa and Prague. Later on, however, the operas staged by Treu and Bioni, the music directors of the Wrocław opera, were also performed by other European theatres. The owner of the theatre in Prague and the originator of the idea to set up a theatre in Wrocław was Count Anton von Sporck, an imperial governor and a friend of Silesian aristocracy. It was on his initiative that a meeting with Antonio Vivaldi was arranged and the performers he recommended were invited to Wrocław. Thanks to the extensive contacts of Wrocław’s impresarios and bandmasters, the city’s virtuoso singers travelled throughout Europe, and outstanding musicians, stage designers and ballet masters were hired. The fame and high standards of Wrocław’s theatre caused its chief conductor, Daniel Gottlieb Treu (Daniele Teofilo Fedele), a pupil of Vivaldi, to write the history of the theatre, which was published in Hamburg (1740) by Johann Mattheson in Grundlage einer Ehren-Phorte. During the nine-year long operation of the theatre, a total of 45 operas were premiered, and their librettos are partly extant in the collection of Wrocław’s University Library (the Silesian-Lusatian Section) and at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan. Recently, a previously unknown copy of the opera Il Daphni by Spanish composer Emanuele d’Astorga, currently in the collection of the Sapieha Library, part of the collection of the Wawel Royal Castle Museum, has been discovered. The staging by the theatre in Wrocław of eminent baroque operas, performed by outstanding artists, puts them among the most interesting events in the European opera in the 18th century. : Italian theatre, Wrocław, baroque, opera, Daniel Gottlieb Treu