La Gloria e Imeneo, RV 687 [HL:50600716]

La Gloria e Imeneo, RV 687, belongs to a group of so-called 'French serenatas' by Antonio Vivaldi, namely a series of works composed and performed between the mid-1710s and mid-1720s of the eighteenth century in celebration of important recurrent and non-recurrent events relating to the Kingdom of France and its diplomatic representatives resident in Italy. This serenata was indeed commissioned from Vivaldi by the French ambassador in Venice, Jacques-Vincent Languet, Count of Gergy, on the occasion of the wedding of Louis XV to the Polish princess Maria Leszczyska, and was performed during a festa that took place in the ambassador's garden on the evening of 12 September 1725. This critical edition is based on the autograph score held by Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria of Turin. It also includes an Introduction that describes the genesis and the first performance of the Serenata, the state of the sources and its musical content. The critical edition includes an apparatus that records all the variants between the autograph score and the secondary collate sources, and a diplomatic-interpretative edition of the poetic text, inferred - since no librett has come down to us - by the words underlaid to the notes in the manuscript of the serenata.