Giovanni de Gamerra was a poet at the Milan theatre in the early 1770s, when he wrote the libretto to Mozart’s Lucio Silla (1772). He took up the same subject in 1802, when he was at the Vienna Court, and called his new work Lucio Cornelio Silla Dittatore. The new text remained a manuscript, and was never handed to Empress Maria Teresa, for whom Gamerra had written other librettos.

A careful reading of the two texts, written on the same subject in a gap of thirty years, offers a rare insight into the evolution of Italian lyrical drama at the dawn of the nineteenth-century; not only the lyrical dramaturgy, but also the internal structure of the libretto radically differ.

2006-2007

Le livret en question

Laurine Quetin

Université de Tours

Lucio Silla (1772), Lucio Cornelio Silla Dittatore (1802), deux livrets écrits par Giovanni de Gamerra