About the work
L'Olimpiade is a three-act opera seria by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, set to Pietro Metastasio's libretto of the same name. It was commissioned by the financially struggling Teatro Tordinona in Rome, which had ordered two economical new operas for the 1735 carnival season, and premiered there in January 1735.
Plot
The story is set in ancient Greece during the Olympic Games. Megacle competes under the name of his friend Licida to win the games for Aristea, daughter of King Clistene and Licida's beloved, even though Megacle himself was once betrothed to Aristea. Only the revelation that Licida is in fact Clistene's long-lost son resolves the entanglements between the couples.
Cultural significance
Despite a premiere marred by disruptions, L'Olimpiade became, alongside La serva padrona and the Stabat Mater, one of the works that established Pergolesi's European fame, and it ranks among the finest of more than fifty settings of Metastasio's text. In his Dictionnaire de musique (1768), Jean-Jacques Rousseau held up the first-act duet "Ne' giorni tuoi felici" as the model for the duet form.