About the work
Montezuma is an opera seria by Carl Heinrich Graun, set to a text that King Frederick II of Prussia wrote himself in French prose and that Giovanni Pietro Tagliazucchi turned into Italian verse. It premiered on 6 January 1755 at the Royal Court Opera in Berlin.
Plot
Hernán Cortés and his Spanish conquerors lure the Aztec ruler Montezuma into a trap under the guise of negotiation and take him prisoner. Neither his people's resistance nor his fiancée's attempts to free him can avert his fate, and the opera ends with his death.
Cultural significance
The authorship is unusual: a reigning monarch wrote the libretto himself for his own court stage, which historians have read as a reflection of Frederick's own political concerns. After the king's death the opera fell largely into oblivion and was rediscovered only in 1982 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, followed by performances marking Frederick's 300th birthday in 2012.