bavarikon4UIl Pomo d’Oro
The premiere of Francesco Sbarra's (1611–1668) festive opera Il Pomo d'Oro counts among the high points among the Baroque operas that were performed at the Viennese imperial court over the course of several days. With the exception of two scenes which Emperor Leopold I (1640–1705, emperor from 1658) had set to music himself, Antonio Cesti (1623–1669) composed the music.
Not only the exceptional scale of five acts in the course of which distributed over two days 22 different locations were displayed by means of a change of scenery, turns it into one of the most magnificent Baroque operas. The lavish costumes and the spectacular stage decoration by Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini (1636–1707) in which were used the flying and stage machineries he had designed, astonished the contemporaneous audience by its magnificence and effects.
In 1666, this "festa teatrale" (theatrical feast) had originally been commissioned and created for Leopold I and his bride, the Spanish Infanta Margarita Teresa (1651–1673), as a wedding opera. The magnificent stage production, however, only took place on the seventeenth birthday of the empress on the 12 (Prologue, first & second acts) and 14 July (third & fourth acts) 1668 in the Opera House that Burnacini had completed on the Cortina in Vienna.
In the libretto, based on the mythological story of the judgement of Paris, the three goddesses Juno, Athena and Venus cease to compete and renounce the golden apple in favour of the empress. Thereby, they pay homage to the virtues united in Margarita Teresa such as wisdom, fortitude and beauty. The representational function of homage rendered by this opera to the ruling house of Habsburg reached all of Europe and can be traced by its dissemination, since next to four different versions of the libretto in Italian another one was printed in Spanish and one in German. Therein were included 23 images of the stage production as copperplate prints.
>> Il Pomo d'Oro (The Golden Apple) is part of the stock of "designs of stage decoration and scenery" of the Deutsches Theatermuseum (German Theatre Museum).