About the work
Demofoonte is a three-act opera seria setting Pietro Metastasio's dramma per musica, one of his most frequently used librettos with more than 70 known settings. Niccolò Jommelli composed the first of four settings he would make of the text over his career; it premiered on 13 June 1743 at the Teatro degli Obizzi in Padua.
Plot
In the kingdom of Thrace, an oracle demands that a virgin be sacrificed to Apollo every year, and King Demofoonte has exempted only his own daughter. Unknown to him, his son Timante is secretly married to Dircea, with whom he has a young son. When the king arranges Timante's marriage to the Phrygian princess Creusa and the lot falls on Dircea herself for the sacrifice, marriage, succession and reasons of state collide in a seemingly unresolvable conflict — until the true identities of those involved are finally revealed.
Cultural significance
Jommelli returned to the material three more times by 1770, evidence of his lasting engagement with Metastasio's text and of a personal style contemporaries noted for its 'bipartite' arias and expressive, orchestrally accompanied recitative. The 1743 Padua version was still being staged in Lodi in 1754 and in London in 1755; one of Jommelli's later settings was revived by Riccardo Muti in Salzburg, Paris and Ravenna in 2009.