About the work
Tragedia per musica in three acts that Antonio Vivaldi composed in 1735 for the Carnival season at the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona, where he served as artistic director of the Accademia Filarmonica. The libretto by Agostino Piovene had already been set for Francesco Gasparini in 1711; Vivaldi wrote new music only for the sympathetic characters and reused successful arias by other composers, including Johann Adolph Hasse, Geminiano Giacomelli and Riccardo Broschi, for the antagonists.
Plot
The defeated Ottoman sultan Bajazet and his daughter Asteria are taken prisoner by the Tartar ruler Tamerlano, who casts off his betrothed Irene to marry her instead. Asteria only feigns consent in order to poison Tamerlano, while Prince Andronico, secretly devoted to her, wavers between loyalty to Tamerlano and his own love. After Bajazet takes his own life in despair, Tamerlano relents and lets Andronico marry Asteria.
Cultural significance
As a pasticcio, the work illustrates how Venetian impresarios cut costs in economically difficult times by reusing other composers' successful arias without sacrificing dramatic coherence. More recent scholarship also reads the distribution of the music – new composition for the oppressed, borrowed music for the powerful – as a deliberate dramaturgical choice by Vivaldi.