EMPATHETICALLY PATHETIC VIVALDI

ANTONIO VIVALDI — L’OLIMPIADE — 1734 — RENÉ CLEMENCIC CONDUCTOR — 1990

This opera, L’Olimpiade by Vivaldi, is on a libretto by Pietro Metastasio written in 1733 for Antonio Caldara. But then dozens of other composers used the plot and the libretto in many different ways but always with an operatic dimension. Vivaldi was only one of them, and it was used all over Europe, not only in Italy. It is a melodrama from beginning to end using all sorts of plot elements that create the most melodramatic situations in the classic ancient Greek theater.

First of all, but revealed only in the last scene, a father and king decides to expose his son to the sea because he does not want a son, or this son. The man entrusted with this mission to throw the baby into the sea does not expose the boy but gives him to the first person he meets on the beach who accepts to take the boy under his custody. The boy is entrusted to that man with only one distinctive element: a necklace that will reveal his real identity at the end of the opera just before having his head cut off. This is the pattern of Oedipus, but in this case, the son does not kill his father nor marry his mother and have children from her, children who are the son and daughter of their own half-brother since they all have the same mother.