Article: The castrato's tale: Artaxerxes and the feminization of virtuosity.(Thomas Arne adaptation)(Critical essay)

Metastasio's Artaserse, "the most famous Italian opera" of the 18th century, is now unknown, even in this age of baroque revival (de Brosses, 2:314). It has been ignored almost entirely by literary and theater historians. And yet from the London debut in 1734, with Farinelli as star, to its permanent retirement from the repertoire a century later, Artaserse was a widely known theatrical text in Georgian Britain. The opera, in both Italian and English versions, was staged over 260 times between 1730 and 1800, to at least nine different scores, and as many variants of the text (Salwey 284). Frances Burney's Cecilia attends an Italian production of the opera at the King's ...

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