Free Republic

Antonio Vivaldi's desperate final year was spent far from home, trying to establish himself in Vienna. He was banned from his artistic stronghold in Ferrara because word was out that this ordained priest had a longstanding relationship with his leading soprano. In his native Venice — scene of many feast-and-famine episodes — Vivaldi had long been considered washed up. Financially strapped, he sold bundles of concertos in Vienna, but his ambitions, there and most everywhere in his professional life, lay in opera. After those hopes died in 1741, so did he. Though he is known among both mainstream and crossover...

DÜSSELDORF (dpa) — An opera presumed lost when Antonio Vivaldi died 265 years ago is to have a controversial premiere on a German stage Wednesday [21 September] after a legal battle over the rediscovered score. Motezuma was last performed in Venice in 1733 and is believed to be the first Baroque opera with an American theme: the Aztec emperor Montezuma. The score belongs to a Berlin library, the Sing-Akademie, which published it on the Internet and asserted copyright. Initially judges agreed, but later an appeal court cancelled an injunction against the performance in a former factory as part of the...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A small part of a newly identified choral work by baroque Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi was played for the first time in about 250 years on Tuesday after being uncovered by an Australian academic. Janice Stockigt of the University of Melbourne said the 11-movement "Dixit Dominus" for choir and soloists, which she uncovered in Dresden this year, would be played in full in the German city next year. Stockigt said the work had previously been attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi, a Venetian contemporary of Vivaldi, since it first appeared in Galuppi's name in Dresden's Catholic Court Church in...