ABSTRACT
Giacinto Andrea Cicognini's Giasone, with music by Francesco Cavalli, was the most highly acclaimed opera of the seventeenth century. The forty-year span during which it held sway on the Italian stage, the number of surviving scores, the parodies, allusions and paraphrases, all testify to the enduring reputation this music drama enjoyed. Such success, however, was only bound to be met by an equally powerful damnatio. Crescimbeni's claims are partly true, but he was wrong in regarding this as an individual case, because not only Giasone, but most Venetian operas of the time were full of buffi. Giasone is, in many ways, an uneven drama. Not that a certain respect for the pseudo-Aristotelian unities is completely lacking. The unity of time is respected, at least formally. Giasone is, and remains an "untidy" drama, considering how loosely it plays with the ancient myths that form its subject.
