According to the rules of opera seria, after much plotting and many reversals of fate, the work grinds to the prescribed lieto fine (‘happy ending’), with Teuzzone restored to the throne, and, like a good enlightened monarch should, pardoning most of the conspirators. Zidiana, hoping to retain her position of power, has designs on marrying Teuzzone herself, but his actual betrothed, a Tatar princess named Zelinda, works under an assumed identity to thwart Zidiana’s plans and save Teuzzone. At the death of the emperor Troncone, his consort, Zidiana, and two ministers, Cino and Sivenio, conspire to falsify his will, placing Zidiana on the throne instead of the legitimate heir, Teuzzone.

In an authoritative booklet essay, scholar Frédéric Delaméa labels the latest opera in the Vivaldi Edition, Teuzzone, as “Vivaldi’s Turandot.” The similarity with Puccini’s opera is mostly limited to the fact that librettist Apostolo Zeno locates the action in China.

In some cases, the cover model’s appearance is not entirely unrelated to the opera in question. (The cover art, featuring attractive models in unusual costumes, only adds to the appeal.) For over a decade, Naïve has been enlisting Europe’s best historically informed performance ensembles to record the operas as they are sorted and catalogued by scholars - occasionally for the first time, almost always in the best possible performances available.

This has been true especially of the box sets devoted to the Venetian composer’s operas, a body of music that has finally laid to rest the misunderstanding that Vivaldi was only - or even primarily - a composer of instrumental concertos. Most of the releases in Naïve’s Vivaldi Edition, the fruit of a quixotic project to record all of Antonio Vivaldi’s music found in the manuscript collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, are worthy additions to any library. This article was originally published by The Classical Review (February 10, 2012).

Vivaldi edition operas