Una nuova fonte librettistica sugli esordi di Anna Lucia De Amicis: ‘Catone in Utica’ (Mazzarino, 1752)

Abstract

The essay examines a libretto of Catone in Utica by Metastasio, performed in 1752 in Mazzarino (Caltanissetta) with music by Egidio Romualdo Duni and «diversi maestri napoletani». The copy, preserved in the Municipal Library of Piazza Armerina (Enna), attests to the enduring operatic activity in the private theatre built in Mazzarino at the end of the seventeenth century by Carlo Maria Carafa, previously documented only by a libretto of Gli equivoci nel sembiante by Alessandro Scarlatti (1688). The new source serves as a valuable document both for reconstructing the itineraries of artists who, in the eighteenth century, spread the language of the Neapolitan school in peripheral or secondary centres, and for identifying the transmission channels that carried texts and musical scores from Naples to Sicily. The libretto also helps to understand the mechanisms and rhetoric of musical patronage on the island, thanks to the list of noble patrons (the family of Ercole Michele Branciforte, Prince of Scordia), who appear in the libretto as sponsors of individual cast members. Furthermore, it provides new information about the tenor Domenico De Amicis and his daughter, Anna Lucia — the renowned soprano whose debut, previously dated to 1754 in Florence as a comic singer, must consequently be moved back by two years.