About the work
Didone abbandonata is a three-act opera seria on Pietro Metastasio's first libretto in the serio genre, first set by Domenico Sarro in Naples in 1724 and set to music more than sixty times by the nineteenth century. Niccolò Jommelli's first setting premiered on 28 January 1747 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.
Plot
The Trojan hero Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen Dido fall in love, but the gods have decreed that Aeneas must leave her to found Rome. As the Moorish king Iarba courts Dido and eventually plots treachery, Aeneas commits himself irrevocably to his destiny. Devastated by the loss of her lover and her city, Dido finally throws herself into the flames of burning Carthage — an unusually tragic ending for an opera seria.
Cultural significance
Jommelli reworked the opera in 1749 for the Viennese court theatre; Metastasio himself praised this version as 'full of grace, depth, novelty, harmony and, above all, expression'. A further revision followed in 1763 for the Stuttgart court theatre, of which only the harpsichord part survives in fragments; this third version was recorded in 1995 by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra under Frieder Bernius.