About the work
Les Danaïdes is a tragédie lyrique in five acts by Antonio Salieri, set to a libretto by François-Louis Le Bland du Roullet and Louis-Théodore de Tschudi that reworked an unfinished text Ranieri de' Calzabigi had written for Christoph Willibald Gluck. It premiered in April 1784 at the Paris Opéra. Announced as a joint composition by Gluck and his pupil Salieri, Gluck soon publicly clarified that the music was Salieri's alone.
Plot
Danaus, King of Argos, forces his fifty daughters to marry the fifty sons of his hated brother Aegyptus and orders them to kill their husbands on their wedding night. Only Hypermnestre defies him and saves her husband Lyncée, who later storms the city and kills the remaining Danaids.
Cultural significance
The premiere's success brought Salieri further commissions from the Paris Opéra and cemented his reputation as a composer in his own right alongside Gluck. The work is regarded as one of the most consistent French examples of Gluck's operatic reform.