Pergolesi: Lo frate 'nnammorato

Description

Naples, 27 September 1732. A new commedeja pe mmuseca was staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini, by two young and promising authors: Gennarantonio Federico, heir to a generation of Neapolitan theatre poets who had forged the genre in the previous two decades, and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, a composer who was a candidate to conquer a hegemonic position in the city's musical panorama after the departure of some of the masters who had dominated it until then (Pietro Vinci and Johann Adolf Hasse among others). The theatrical backgrounds of both were sparse: Federico had a few comic dramas for the spoken word theatre and two comedies for music to his credit, Pergolesi ventured for the first time in his career with a commedeja. Yet Lo frate 'nnammorato was an exorbitant success, remaining on the programme in the Neapolitan theatre for many weeks and earning a series of revivals over the next twenty years, the first of which – in 1734, again at the Florentines – was overseen by both authors.