Pietro Metastasio

Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi, known as Metastasio, was one of the most influential opera librettists of his age. Born in Rome in 1698 and dying in Vienna in 1782, he wrote in Italian during the late Baroque and early neoclassical periods. His importance lies in giving opera seria a polished literary form that many European composers set to music for more than a century.

He was the son of a papal soldier from Assisi and a woman from Bologna, and as a child he showed a striking gift for improvising verse. In 1709 the scholar Gian Vincenzo Gravina took him in, gave him the Hellenized surname Metastasio and trained him for law. Gravina made the boy improvise for hours on end, which damaged his health; a journey south and a change of guardian, Gregorio Caroprese, improved matters. After Gravina died in 1718 Metastasio inherited a fortune, which he spent quickly while building a reputation in Naples.

In 1721 he wrote his first music-related work, an epithalamium, and in 1722 the serenata Gli orti esperidi, sung by Farinelli. The singer Marianna Bulgarelli, known as la Romanina, persuaded him to devote himself entirely to the opera libretto, and in her Roman household he wrote a run of dramas performed across Italy. In 1729 he accepted the post of court poet in Vienna, where he spent the rest of his life. Between 1730 and 1740 he produced his best-known works, some written in a matter of days under heavy pressure.

His style is marked by clarity, musical verse and a focus on emotion, working with stock love plots and conventional situations that served the music. Composers as varied as Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Hasse and Mozart set his texts, and his works were translated into many languages. The taste for bel canto and castrato singers that shaped his theatre waned toward the end of the eighteenth century, as Gluck's reforms and a new orchestral style took hold. His legacy lies chiefly in Italian opera seria, whose model lasted into the nineteenth century.