Libretto by Nicolò Beregan, music by Antonio Cesti

Facsimile of the score with a critical edition of the libretto and an introductory essay by Giada Viviani

“Drammaturgia musicale veneta”, 5

Ricordi, Milan, 2012

First performed during the carnival season of 1666 at the Venetian theatre of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Il Tito, by Nicolò Beregan and Antonio Cesti, is an opera often cited in the musicological literature of the last forty years, since the archival material that has come down to us, besides documenting the genesis of the score with unusual precision, sheds light on details of fundamental importance for our understanding of the operation of impresarial opera in Venice during the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite the acknowledgement of the importance of this work, which arose from a collaboration between a widely admired, although not very prolific, librettist and one of the supreme composers of the period, a study of its literary and musical sources is still lacking. It is this lacuna that the new volume in the series “Drammaturgia musicale veneta” aims to fill, joining to a facsimile of the oldest of the manuscript scores of Tito, held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, a scrupulous critical edition of the libretto and a comparative examination of the two other musical sources that have come down to us, so as to present the fullest possible picture of the version performed in Venice in carnival 1666, which none of the extant sources transmits in its totality.