Arias from Adelaide. Hamburg, 1744

This recording production rebuilds the complex events of a composition by Gennaro D”Alessandro (Neapolitan musician, pupil of Leonardo Leo) believed to be hopelessly lost after the bombing in Dresden during the Second World War: the “Ottone”, opera on the libretto by Antonio Salvi accommodated by Carlo Goldoni. The opera was performed for the first time at the Grimani of S. Giovanni Grisostomo Theatre in Venice in the carnival season from December 26, 1739 to January 31, 1740 in the presence of Frederick Christian Leopold. In 2019 the musicologist Giovanni Tribuzio could finally reconstruct the Ottone thanks to several sources and witnesses. A score from the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena, partially hands down the work by Gennaro D”Alessandro (including the recitatives and ten arias). This new version was, in fact, represented with great success as “Adelaide/Adelaide, Queen of Italy” in 1744 in Prague, Leipzig and Hamburg. To this highly significant finding we have to add the discovery of a precious nucleus of arias, from the private library of composer Everett Burton Helm (now at the Lilly Library in Bloomington and the National Library of Australia in Canberra).