Overture to 'Le stravaganze del conte'

Domenico Cimarosa was the most famous and popular Italian opera composer of the second half of the 18th Century. In the course of a brilliantly successful career he composed more than 65 operas as well as a significant body of instrumental music and works for the church. His operas were performed all over Europe, both in Italian and in translation. A number of Cimarosa’s operas continued to enjoy occasional stagings during the 19th Century, and his most famous work, Il matrimonio segreto, is one of only a handful of operas of the period never to have left the repertory. Cimarosa received his first opera commission from the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples for the Carnival season of 1772. With a libretto by the well-established Neapolitan poet Pasquale Mililotti, the resulting commedia per musica, Le stravaganze del conte (The Eccentricities of the Count) opened on 6 January 1772. Cimarosa had just completed his eleven years at the Conservatorio di musica San Loreto in Naples, and quite possibly some of the opera was composed while he was still a student. Since the only extant source for Le stravaganze del conte is the holograph score it can be assumed that the opera was not staged again after its premiere season in Naples in 1772. In spite of the opera’s apparent lack of success, the overture, remarkable for its vitality, melodic invention and assured handling of the orchestra, already displays many characteristics of the composer’s later style.