About the work
L'Arminio is a three-act opera seria by Baldassare Galuppi on an older libretto by Antonio Salvi. It premiered on 4 November 1747 at the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice.
Plot
The Germanic prince Arminio resists Rome and is betrayed and captured by his own father-in-law Segeste, who sides with the Romans. The Roman general Varo, secretly in love with Arminio's wife Tusnelda, is ordered to execute him but is moved by her to show mercy instead. Only when Segeste's son Sigismondo, for love of Arminio's sister Ramise, helps the prisoner escape does the tide of war turn: Varo falls in battle, and Arminio forgives his repentant father-in-law.
Cultural significance
Salvi's libretto about the Cheruscan prince who defeated the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest, first set by Alessandro Scarlatti in Florence as early as 1703, stayed in circulation for decades: ten years before Galuppi's version, George Frideric Handel had set the same text in London in 1737.