About the work
L'inimico delle donne is a three-act dramma giocoso by Baldassare Galuppi on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati, the pair's first collaboration. It premiered in autumn 1771 at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice.
Plot
Two shipwrecked Italians, the man-hating Agnesina and her scheming uncle Geminiano, end up at the court of the fictitious kingdom of Kibinchinka. Its ruler Zon-Zon is a notorious misogynist, yet an old law of his land forces him to choose a bride within the month. After much comic confusion between these two sworn enemies of love, the encounter of Agnesina and Zon-Zon ends, against all expectation, in a match.
Cultural significance
The opera stayed in the repertoire for about a decade and was restaged in cities including Turin, Reggio Emilia, Lisbon, Parma, Vienna and Dresden – an unusually wide international echo for one of Galuppi's comic works.