About the work
Opera seria in three acts by Niccolò Piccinni after Pietro Metastasio's libretto "Zenobia" — Piccinni's first opera seria — premiered on 18 December 1756 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Metastasio had already written the text for the Vienna premiere setting by Giovanni Bononcini (1737), based on an earlier libretto by Apostolo Zeno that follows the conflict between the Armenian royal house and the Parthian kingdom as told by Tacitus in the Annals (Book XII).
Plot
On the Armenian border river Araxes, Princess Zenobia is secretly married to the Iberian prince Radamisto, though she had been promised to the Parthian prince Tiridate. After her father is murdered, the couple flees, but Radamisto stabs the captured Zenobia to keep her from the enemy and throws her into the river; both survive, gravely wounded. Only when it emerges that Tiridate's own father was responsible for the murder does the magnanimous Tiridate renounce Zenobia in favour of her husband Radamisto.
Cultural significance
The libretto was set by around thirty composers and remained one of Metastasio's most popular texts into the nineteenth century; Piccinni's Naples version was revived at the same house in a reworked form in 1768 and again in 1769.