ABSTRACT
The first commission obtained by Francesco Cavalli from a city other than Venice was an opera with magnificent "apparenze" for the governor of Milan in 1653. Cavalli chose Orione, an old but especially amusing libretto by Francesco Melosio, perhaps wanting to replicate the success of that comic masterpiece Giasone, which had been performed to great acclaim in Milan a few years earlier. The Orione score represents another watershed as well; namely, it is the first surviving musical source of a Milanese opera production. And a year earlier, at the 2002 Cavalli conference in Crema, in a paper focused on Cavalli opera productions in seventeenth-century Milan, Roberta Carpani mentioned an Orione libretto with manuscript staging annotations. It makes sense, then, that some ten years later, when Cavalli received the request from Milan for a grand opera, he would have thought immediately of Orione: an opera too expensive for the commercial Venetian stages, but perfect for a regal celebration.
