About the work
Opera seria in three acts by Antonio Vivaldi to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio, first performed in the spring season of 1737 at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona. It counts among the composer's last operas.
Plot
The plot follows the civil war between Cesare and the unbending republican Catone, who has entrenched himself with his daughter Marzia in Utica; Marzia loves Cesare's ally Arbace, torn between loyalty to her father and her own feelings. Metastasio wrote two endings for the story: in the first, Catone dies by his own hand on stage, which drew criticism in Rome. Vivaldi set the later, milder version, in which Catone is prevented from taking his own life and reconciles with Cesare in the end.
Cultural significance
Only the second and third acts of the score survive, considered among Vivaldi's most mature and personal operatic writing; the first act is lost. Metastasio's libretto was also set by Leonardo Vinci, Leonardo Leo and Johann Christian Bach.