Overture to 'Il mercato di Malmantile'

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’s Oreste, based on a libretto by Luigi Serio, opened on 13 August 1783 at the Royal Theatre of San Carlo in Naples to celebrate the Queen’s name-day, and played for a total of nineteen performances between the opening night and 15 October. There are no furthers productions or performances on record, although eighteenth-century manuscripts of Oreste in Paris and Lisbon suggest the possibility that productions were mounted in those cities. Cimarosa again borrows from himself in the overture: the entire first part (some 178 bars) is an exact repetition of the first part of the overture he had written a year earlier (1782) for his oratorio Giudetta (Judith), a work composed, as he himself wrote, ‘for the virtuous young ladies of the music conservatory in Venice known as l’Ospedaletta’ where he was active as a choral instructor. In spite of the opera’s apparent lack of success, the overture, like all of Cimarosa’s overtures, is remarkable for its vitality, melodic invention and assured handling of the orchestra.