Of the eight arias, four are for contralto, three for soprano, and one for tenor. All have string accompaniment. The most interesting one in this respect is “Lascia almeno che ti consegni”, in which the instruments are played pizzicato to imitate the delicate sound of a kiss. The style is like that of other Vivaldi operas from the same period, such as L’Orlando finto pazzo and L’incoronazione di Dario.

The greatest opera discovery of 2003 was Vivaldi’s Montezuma, written in Venice in 1733. How did this incredible find come about?

The score belongs to the Berln Singakademie collection, and was considered lost since World War II. Actually, the Soviets had secretly transferred it to Kiev, from whence it was recently returned to Berlin. The collection had never been catalogued systematically before its involuntary visit to the Soviet Union, which explains why the treasures it contained were never noticed before.

What does the score look like?

It’s beautiful, and was made by a Venetian copyist. The second act is complete, while certain sections from the first and third acts are unfortunately missing

Montezuma will help to complete our knowledge of Vivaldi’s operas from the early 1730s. What information can it impart about Vivaldi’s mature style, which was already familiar from scores like La fina ninfa (1732) and L’Olimpiade (1734), as well as from the separate arias from Semiramide (1732)?

I haven’t had the opportunity to study the score carefully yet, but my impression is that it resembles La fida ninfa somewhat. The work includes a lovely terzetto that could be favourably compared with other ensemble pieces in Vivaldi operas (which are unfortunately infrequent!).

Are any publishing, performance or recording projects under way?

I don’t know. It will depend on the wishes of the owner; that is, of the Singakademie. A German article on the manuscript by Steffen Voss will be published in the next issue of the annual Studi vivaldiani.

Might this find be a foretaste of future Vivaldi discoveries in Eastern European countries?

Discoveries always seem to come out of the blue, with no warning! Another recent find was the opening theme from a flute concerto, which turned up in a catalogue in Strasburg. Now, if we could just find a concerto, either anonymous or attributed, that began with the same theme, then who knows....!

It would be impossible to avoid mentioning Andromeda liberata in connection with the recent Vivaldi discoveries. The question of the work’s authorship has been the object of lively debate among musicologists. What is your own position on the matter?

It is certain that three composers participated in the work: Vivaldi, Porta and Albinoni. Two of the Andromeda arias are kept in the Venice Conservatory as separately-printed arias, and are “composition manuscripts” by their respective composers, Vivaldi and Porta. The Cassiope arias contain several (extremely idiosyncratic) elements typical of Albinoni, and one of them shares the main theme of an aria by Albinoni, the score of which is now in Pécs, Hungary. I suspect that Porpora and Biffi also participed in the work. My reasons and justifications for this position are part of the introduction I wrote for the facsimile edition of Andromeda liberata, which will be published as part of the Drammaturgia musicale veneta series, probably in 2006.

Apart from “Sovvente il sole”, the aria with obligato violin, which was written by Vivaldi without a doubt, do you feel there is any other aria or part of this Venetian serenata that can be attributed to the Red Priest or to one of his contemporaries ?

I don’t believe that anything but “Sovvente il sole” is by Vivaldi. The work may have been commissioned from him in order to guarantee his participation in the performance of the serenata as a violinist…as far as other composers are concerned, I would assign Andromeda’s arias to Porta, Meliso’s arias, the choruses and the Sinfonia to Porpora (who may have used the tradition of his native city, Naples, in calling the hunting horns trombe), Daliso’s arias to Biffi (with less certainty, however), Cassiope’s arias, Perseo’s other aria and perhaps Andromeda and Perseo’s duet to Albinoni.

Is it possible to imagine that Andromeda was a pasticcio put together by Vivaldi, and that he composed not only the above-mentioned aria but all the recitatives as well?

The recitatives do not contain anything typical of Vivaldi – and foreign to the other composers I’ve cited. The most striking and original facet of Vivaldi’s recitatives – harmonic elision (where a series of three chords is reduced to two by eliminating the second chord) – is missing here. But it seems clear to me that at least two composers participated in composing the recitatives, because two very different ways of indicating the conventional appoggiatura that appears at the end of a vocal phrase are used, and I have trouble imagining that the copyists wrote the two types of appoggiatura in an arbitrary way. The first composer always wrote out the “real sounds”, while the second, equally coherently, wrote the notes that the appoggiatura replaces. I would also like to mention that it is always very difficult to establish the authorship of anonymous Italian recitatives, because this very conventional style did not allow for much difference – at first glance, of course – between two competent composers.

Translated by Marcia Hadjimarkos