ABSTRACT
PIETRO Metastasio was an upwardly mobile achiever. He seems to have been programmed to strive for success, from the time he was taken up and trained by the demanding humanist achiever Gravina, through the years in the 1720s when he was making his mark as an opera librettist in Naples, Venice and Rome under the aegis of Marianna Bulgarelli Benti (‘La Romanina’), to at least the first half of his long residence in Vienna, which in all lasted from 1730 to his death in 1782. There, having been rewarded for his early theatrical success in Italy with the post of ‘Cesarian poet’ by Emperor Charles VI, he had to look to his laurels—in the Amigoni portrait (illus.1) we can see his quill-holding hand momentarily resting on them—by assiduously contributing to a stream of successful shows, operas 18most importantly, for the Viennese court and courts related to it.
