Ezio

Ezio is an eighteenth-century Italian opera in 3 acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. It was the composer's second setting of a libretto by the Italian poet Metastasio that was first performed in Venice in 1728 with music by Nicola Porpora, one of the most popular of the Metastasian librettos in Mysliveček's day. The story is based on incidents from the lives of the 5th-century Roman emperor Valentinian III and his general Aetius. For a performance in the 1770s, it would only be expected that a libretto of such age would be abbreviated and altered to suit contemporary operatic taste. The cuts and changes in the text made for the 1777 performance of Mysliveček's opera are not attributable. All of Mysliveček's operas are of the serious type in Italian language referred to as opera seria that were usually identified with the designation dramma per musica in librettos.