Abstract
Some unique Viennese librettos in the Carvalhaes Collection (Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome) may come from the workshop of Lorenzo Da Ponte. They include librettos for several operas by Antonio Salieri and a libretto for Giuseppe Sarti's Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode containing replacement aria texts in what appears to be Da Ponte's hand. These librettos form part of a larger collection from Vienna and Dresden that probably belonged to the tenor Vincenzo Calvesi or someone in his circle, since Calvesi participated in most of the productions for which these librettos were printed. The Calvesi collection in turn forms part of a collection of consisting mostly of Roman librettos from the early nineteenth century, which can, for analogous reasons, be associated with the Roman costume makers Federico Marchesi and his wife Margherita Marchesi.
This essay was published in Music Observed: Studies in Memory of William C. Holmes, ed. Colleen Reardon and Susan Parisi (Warren, Michigan, 2004), 429–45, and is available on Academia.edu