Aminta's Aria (L'olimpiade)

L'olimpiade reached the stage of the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice on 17 February 1734, in a carnival season Vivaldi ran largely on his own terms. The libretto was Metastasio's, written the previous year for Antonio Caldara and later set by more than fifty composers: a story of friendship tested by love and by an athletic contest at Olympia, in which one man competes under another man's name. Vivaldi kept the verse but rebuilt the pacing around his singers, drawing on arias from earlier scores. The opera disappeared with the rest of his theatre work and returned only in the twentieth century.