I libretti italiani a Vienna tra Sei e Settecento

During the Baroque era, the Habsburg emperors encouraged an extraordinary production of Italian libretti, in terms of quantity and quality. For this reason, Vienna was, for almost two centuries, a leading centre of dramatic vocal music based on Italian texts: drammi per musica and feste teatrali, but also cantatas, oratori, serenate, rappresentazioni sacre and smaller genres like prologhi, introduzioni a balletti and so on. Librettists from all over Italy worked in Vienna, adapting their own styles to the local poetic and dramatic taste, with particular attention to the function their works had in the Viennese cultural and political context. The present miscellany focusing on Italian libretto studies in the Baroque era at the Habsburg Court contains the papers presented at the international conference held at the Institute of Romance Philology of the University of Vienna from June 21st to 23d, 2019 and aims at stimulating and renewing the debate on a topic of the highest interest for the cultural studies of Early Modern Times. The 29 papers presented in this miscellany (in Italian, German, and English), written by many of the best-known scholars in the field, focus on the features of several testi per musica both secular and sacred and illustrate the vast presence of Italian texts in Viennas musical world of the time, first exclusively at the Habsburg court, and later in public theatres, pointing out their role and importance in the Italo- Austrian history of music.