Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni

Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni (Genoa, 1692 – Parma, 1768) was an Italian poet and librettist whose work developed at the court of the Farnese and, later, the Bourbons in Parma. Although he came from an aristocratic family and was affiliated with the Somascan Order until 1731, it was his literary reputation that opened the doors of the court, where his work had considerable influence on mid-eighteenth-century musical theatre.

Frugoni arrived in Parma in 1725, under the Farnese. After a brief period in Venice during the War of the Austrian Succession, he was appointed court poet to Duke Philip of Bourbon in 1749. There he was valued by Guillaume du Tillot, the duke's theatre director, who later secured for Frugoni, in succession, the post of secretary for the court's theatrical productions. A large part of his librettos for the court theatre were adaptations of earlier texts by other authors, and he also translated French operas into Italian, among them Francoeur's Zélindor, roi des sylphes and Rameau's Castor et Pollux, together with Rebel.

Du Tillot's interest in merging French and Italian opera matched the ideas of reform set out by Algarotti in his Saggio sopra l'opera in musica (1755). Frugoni wrote Rameau-inspired librettos for Traetta, such as Ippolito ed Aricia (1759) and I tindaridi (1760). Although he kept the traditional structure of the aria-based opera, he introduced mythological subjects that had long been out of fashion in Italy, choruses in the French style, programmatic orchestral music and ballet. It should be noted that Jommelli had presented French-style operas in Stuttgart in 1755, preceding these attempts, although Frugoni's librettos were the first conceived specifically to reform Italian dramaturgy.

Frugoni also composed the festa teatrale Le feste d'Imeneo for the wedding of the future Joseph II of Austria to the Infanta Isabella in 1760, and in 1769 he supplied Gluck with Le feste d'Apollo, which included as its final act his Orfeo (Vienna, 1762). His legacy survives above all in the complete edition of his works, published in fifteen volumes in Lucca between 1779 and 1780.