About the work
Artaserse was Christoph Willibald Gluck's first opera, composed on Pietro Metastasio's libretto of the same name. It premiered on 26 December 1741 at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan; Gluck dedicated the work to the Austrian field marshal Otto Ferdinand von Abensperg und Traun.
Plot
At the Persian court, the guard commander Artabano murders King Xerxes and casts suspicion on his son Dareios, who is executed. Artabano's own son Arbace is then wrongly suspected of the murder; his father sentences him to death while secretly planning to save him in order to seize power himself. In the end the truth comes out and Arbace is exonerated.
Cultural significance
Only two arias survive from Gluck's setting. With more than ninety settings, including by Vinci, Hasse, Johann Christian Bach and Arne, Metastasio's text became the most frequently set libretto of the eighteenth century and shaped the opera seria genre lastingly.