About the work
L'olimpiade is an opera seria by Niccolò Jommelli after the libretto by Pietro Metastasio. It premiered on 11 February 1761 at the Herzogliches Theater in Stuttgart; in 1774 João Cordeiro da Silva produced a revised version at the Palazzo Ajuda in Lisbon. The libretto had first been set by Antonio Caldara in Vienna in 1733 for the birthday of Empress Elisabeth Christine and, with over seventy settings including those by Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Adolph Hasse, is one of Metastasio's most successful texts.
Plot
Against the backdrop of the ancient Olympic Games, the Cretan prince Licida asks his friend Megacle to compete under his name – unaware that the prize on offer, the hand of princess Aristea, is in fact Megacle's own beloved. Megacle wins the contest for his friend, to whom he feels indebted, while Aristea and Argene, Licida's former love now disguised as a shepherdess, are left in the dark about the true circumstances. Only the unravelling of the mistaken identities finally reunites the lovers.
Cultural significance
As a setting of one of Metastasio's most frequently performed librettos, Jommelli's L'olimpiade joins a long line of prominent composers who set the same text. The score was reissued posthumously in 1783 at the Stuttgart Hohe Karlsschule (Académie Caroline), evidence of the work's lasting standing at the Württemberg court; a holograph fragment by Jommelli from the premiere year of 1761 survives at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples.