Libretto by Francesco Saverio Zini

Abstract

The text of the libretto by Francesco Saverio Zini (1770-1803) presented here faithfully follows the reading given beneath the musical notation of the manuscript score of Il poeta di campagna by Pietro Alessandro Guglielmi (1728-1804), as it was set down on the occasion of the work's world premiere at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, in the spring of 1792. The exemplar is preserved in the Archivio Massimo in Rome. In order to achieve the greatest possible fidelity to the text, and in keeping with the work carried out on the musical portion of the manuscript by Salvatore Ivan Emma, the transcription was undertaken by means of a careful, parallel comparison with the libretto printed by the Neapolitan typographer Vincenzo Flauto on the occasion of that same 1792 premiere.  The comparison between these two contemporary sources has thus made it possible to render the stage directions and scenic indications more precisely and completely, to integrate and clarify the punctuation, to emend errors, and to resolve lexical ambiguities. For the libretto, use was made of the exemplar preserved and available in digital format at the Library of Congress in Washington. As a general criterion, it was decided to normalize the text according to modern graphic conventions and usage, while nonetheless respecting the lexical and phonetic peculiarities of the Neapolitan dialect wherever it is employed in the libretto.