Musicology Commons^™

Sarti’S Fra I Due Litiganti And Opera In Vienna, John Platoff

Faculty Scholarship

Giuseppe Sarti's opera Fra i due litiganti, premiered in Milan in 1782, was the first great success of the reconstituted Italian opera company in Vienna in 1783. The opera sustained its enormous Viennese popularity for years, while also being performed in over one hundred other European cities by 1800. Mozart's quotation of the work in Don Giovanni testifies to its continuing appeal. But the version of the opera that was so successful in many parts of Europe differed substantially from the Milanese original. The surviving manuscript scores and printed librettos reveal that a standardized Viennese version of Fra i …