About the work
Dramma per musica in three acts by Domenico Sarro, setting Pietro Metastasio's first independent libretto, first performed on 1 February 1724 at the Teatro San Bartolomeo in Naples together with the comic intermezzo 'L'impresario delle Isole Canarie', also written by Sarro and Metastasio. The title role was written for the singer Marianna Benti Bulgarelli, who, as both an actress and Metastasio's confidante, had considerable influence on the libretto.
Plot
The Carthaginian queen Dido falls in love with the shipwrecked Trojan Aeneas, while the Numidian king Iarbas, disguised as an envoy, courts her hand. When Aeneas repels Iarbas's army and Dido tries to persuade him to stay, the ghost of his dead father reminds him of his duty to sail on to Italy. Aeneas departs, and the despairing Dido throws herself onto the flames of her burning city.
Cultural significance
As the first of more than fifty later settings of the same libretto, Sarro's Didone abbandonata helped establish Metastasio's reputation as a librettist, and it was among the last operas staged at the Teatro San Bartolomeo before Naples's oldest opera house closed in 1737. Unusually for the opera seria of its time, the work ends tragically, with no last-minute rescue for its heroine.