RARE OPERA BY SCARLATTI TO RECEIVE FIRST MODERN-DAY PERFORMANCE AT ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM SUNDAY

Alessandro Scarlatti

Boston's famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum – home to the largest unsolved and most infamous major art heists in history – is to play host to what is believed to be the first modern staging of 17th century Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti's 1697 3-act dramma per musica “La Caduta de'Decemviri,” performed by the period ensemble known as ACRONYM and a young operatic cast featuring countertenor Daniel Moody.

The opera, which set in ancient Rome, details the plight of the Plebeian Verginia (Virginia) – made a political pawn through the duplicitous machinations of the Appio Claudio (Appius Claudius) and his ruling counterparts, the Decemvirs (a ten-man committee chosen to draw up Roman law) – after she rejects the former's advances.

Whilst the opera has remained until now, unstaged in any modern venue, the score itself was published by Harvard in 1980 in a compilation of the composer's operatic works. La Caduta... is the first of several collaborations between Scarlatti and librettist Silvio Stampiglia.^[1]

The performance at the Museum will serve to draw further attention to a recent, temporary acquisition on the same subject via the arrival of Botticelli's “Story of Virginia,” scheduled to arrive from Bergamo's Accademia Carrara four days following the premiere, on Valentine's Day, to be included in the Gardner's forthcoming exhibition on the artist, "Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes" (which runs from 14 February until 19 May, 2019 in the museum's Hostetter Gallery.) The impending arrival marks the first time the master's “Story of Virginia” has set foot on U.S. soil.

The Story of Virginia by Italian Early Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, 1500-1504

The latter event is being heavily touted by the museum as a multi-layered historical event – not only is the first modern performance of Scarlatti's opera - itself based on the same subject matter as Botticelli's never-before-seen-in-America masterpiece a major coup for the Gardner – it marks the first time Botticelli's painting will “reunite” with the master's “Story of Lucretia,” acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner herself in 1894, who subsequently brought the painting to Boston – in effect, introducing into the United States the nation's very first Botticelli.

Listen below to the overture of Scarlatti's La Caduta, performed by the period ensemble Charivari Agréable:


Footnotes:

^[1]Stampiglia provided libretti for eight of Scarlatti's operas, including L'Eraclea (1700), Tito Sempronio Gracco (1702), Turno Aricino (1704), Lucio Manlio L'Imperioso (1706) and L'amor Generoso (co-librettist, Giuseppe Papis, 1714.)

For further information on the exhibit "Botticelli: Heroines + Heroes," or to purchase an exhibition catalogue, visit www.garndermuseum.org

-Rose.

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