Metastasio

[ me-tah-stah-zyaw ]

noun

1. Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi, 1698–1782, Italian poet and dramatist.

Metastasio

/ metasˈtaːzjo /

noun

1. MetastasioPietro16981782MItalianWRITING: poetMUSIC: librettist Pietro (ˈpjɛːtro), original name Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi. 1698–1782, Italian poet and librettist; Viennese court poet (from 1730). His works include La clemenza di Tito (1732)

Example Sentences

The young Salieri got to know Pietro Metastasio, the reigning librettist of eighteenth-century Italian opera, and Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose lucid, elegant style set the tone for the Viennese Classical period.

From The New Yorker

The 1734 libretto, by Pietro Metastasio, already felt sclerotic by Mozart’s theatrical standards; he tweaked it to create ensemble numbers amid the sequence of dry recitatives and pomp-and-firework arias that made up a traditional opera seria.

From New York Times

The production, directed by the Hungarian director Balazs Kovalik, drew parallels between Pietro Metastasio’s popular libretto about family intrigue at the ancient Persian court — it was set to music more than 90 times — and the story of Wilhelmine and her family.

From New York Times

The libretto, an oft-used one by Pietro Metastasio, supplies four characters: Costanza and her younger sister, Silvia, deposited on an island 13 years before by a shipwreck; Germano, Costanza’s husband, who, she believes, abandoned her but was actually spirited away by pirates; and Enrico, Germano’s friend.

From New York Times

The anguish of the hurt and battered angels and their horrific treatment is conveyed in a well-paced libretto by Royce Vavrek, who has become a kind of Metastasio of the downtown opera scene, and in music that ranges across a spectrum of sound — from a fine a cappella chorus to the hum of electronica, presented here by Julian Wachner, the music director of the Washington Chorus and the head of music at Trinity Wall Street in New York.

From Washington Post