ABSTRACT
Up until 1749, however, there had been only two Italian drammi per musica that featured Telemachus, the first produced in 1689, ten years before the publication of Fenelon’s novel, and the second in 1718, nearly two decades afterward. This chapter argues that the problem was principally with Capeci’s libretto and possibly even with the genre of dramma per musica itself; that the adaptation of Fenelon’s story to fit the conventions of opera altered the elements that interested Alessandro Scarlatti’s and Capeci’s contemporaries about the novel so radically that the librettist failed to capture his audience’s imagination. It reviews the French and Italian reception of Fenelon’s Telemaque in the two decades following its first publication, and then examine Capeci and Scarlatti’s opera in that context. The first Italian translations were printed in Leiden in 1702 and 1704 with the title Gl’avvenimenti di Telemaco, figliuolo d’Ulisse, followed by a Venetian translation in 1705 that was reprinted in 1708.
