About the work
Divertimento teatrale in two parts by Antonio Salieri to a libretto by Giovanni Gastone Boccherini after Miguel de Cervantes's novel 'Don Quixote', first performed on 6 January 1771 at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Salieri and Boccherini combined opera buffa and ballet into an unusual hybrid for its time, with dance scenes choreographed by Jean-Georges Noverre.
Plot
At the wedding of the wealthy farmer Gamace, the knight-errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza stumble into the festivities. Amid feasting, dances and the knight's delusions, a comic tangle unfolds around love, social pretension and the gap between Don Quixote's chivalric ideals and the earthy reality of country life.
Cultural significance
The combination of sung opera buffa with a substantial, independent ballet within a single work remained an isolated experiment: on the Viennese stage, opera and ballet stayed separate genres for a long time afterward. Salieri later reused the overture as the prelude to his 1795 opera 'Il mondo alla rovescia'.