Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

[MARTELLO, Pier Jacopo]. L'APOLLO GELOSO Per Musica rappresentato nel teatro di Corte Per divertimento di queste serenissime Duchesse Il Carnovale dell’ Anno 1708. In Modona: Per Bartolomeo Soliani Stampator Ducale, [1708]. £495

​

8vo, pp. 47, [1] blank, including first leaf with woodcut arms of the Duke of Modena; woodcut initial and tailpieces; aside from occasional spotting, clean and fresh; in contemporary carta rustica covered with dark purple gilt brocade paper; some light wear but still a striking copy.

​

Rare printing of this libretto by the Bolognese dramatist and essayist Pier Jacopo Martello (1665-1727), to accompany its performance at the Teatro di Corte in Modena during Carnival of 1708, to music by Giacomo Antonio Perti (1661-1756).

​

This was the third production of L’Apollo geloso: it was first performed in Bologna in August 1698, and then later in the same year in Parma, under the title Gli amori d’Apollo in Tessaglia. It was one of several libretti Martello wrote for Bolognese operas in the 1690s, before he diverted his attention to tragedy; he travelled alongside other Italian dramatists to Paris in 1713, and published a set of dialogues on ancient and modern tragedy in Paris the following year. A revision of this, Della tragedia antica e moderna, appeared in Rome in 1715, incorporating a new dialogue on opera, which showed ‘Martello on the side of reform, pressing the claims of the mythological plot above the historical and satirizing opera-house abuses’ (Grove).

​

Among the singers in the Modena performance were he Bolognese lyric soprano Margherita Salicola (1660-1717), and, early in her career, Vienna Mellini as Eurydice. 

​

SBN (IT\ICCU\MODE\054816) locates a single copy, at the University of Modena, where the is also a copy of the 1698 Bologna printing, alongside those in the University of Bologna, the Biblioteca Marcuelliana in Florence, and the Biblioteca nazionale centrale in Rome; not in OCLC. 

 

[ref: 2683 ]