Carlo Sigismondo Capece

Carlo Sigismondo Capece (Rome, 1652 – Polistena, Calabria, 1728) was one of the most prolific Italian librettists of his era, active chiefly in Rome between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His career is best understood in light of the fact that he combined work as a jurist and ecclesiastical official with writing for the musical stage, a trait common among Roman men of letters of the period.

He studied philosophy and law in Spain and obtained a doctorate in jurisprudence in Rome. Before devoting himself fully to writing, he served as cup-bearer to Cardinal Casanate and worked as a judge for Cardinal Maidalchini and, from around 1689, for the state of Ronciglione. In the 1690s he was governor of Terni and then of Cascia and Assisi. From at least 1703 until Queen Dowager Maria Casimira, wife of John III Sobieski, left Rome in June 1714, he served her as secretary for Italian and Latin correspondence. After her death in 1717 he wrote one further libretto, Telemaco, set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti in 1718.

His dramatic output was extensive: thirteen opera libretti premiered in Rome between 1686 and 1718, to which must be added twenty-eight prose comedies, four of them with sung passages, performed there between 1713 and 1724. He also wrote texts for cantatas, serenatas and oratorios, among them Handel's La Resurrezione (1708).

His first works, L'amor vince fortuna (1686) and Il figlio delle selve (1687), were pastorals composed for his father's household and are comparable to those of other librettists of the late seventeenth century. The second was by far his most performed work, with eighteen productions up to spring 1756. In the seven operas he wrote with Domenico Scarlatti for Maria Casimira he drew on Euripides, Ovid, Ariosto, Corneille and Racine, and in them many features of eighteenth-century opera seria are already evident. His membership of the Arcadia Academy from 1692, under the name Metisto Olbiano, and of other Roman and Calabrian academies may have encouraged him to follow that new convention. A portrait of him appears in G. Gimma's Elogi accademici (Naples, 1703).