Drammi e oratori nella corrispondenza di Francesco de Lemene con il cardinale Pietro Ottoboni

Francesco de Lemene (1634–1704), a man of letters who was born and lived in Lodi, had a high reputation in the Italian courts and academies of his time for his erudition and poetic production. In music historiography, he has long enjoyed fame as the author of texts for music, such as operas, oratorios, cantatas and serenatas. The article, after recalling the relationships between de Lemene and some leading patrons of late seventeenth-century Rome, such as Christina Queen of Sweden and Livio Odescalchi, presents new information from the correspondence between the poet and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in the years 1694-1698. This correspondence focuses on texts for music, and particularly on an oratorio, Giacobbe al fonte that the cardinal commissioned from the poet in 1694. A few years later Ottoboni submitted for the poet’s judgment the libretto of his own oratorio Per la nascita del Redentore, performed in 1698. Nevertheless, de Lemene’s Giacobbe al fonte was never performed in Rome, but only later, in 1700, at the court of Duke Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga in Mantua, where another oratorio by the poet, Santa Cecilia, had been performed in 1698. In the last paragraph, the article also offers some observations on the problems of poetry and the dramaturgical practice of the azioni sacre.