"Mezzanità de' caratteri e dello stile"? : die tragicommedia per musica nördlich und südlich der Alpen

At the beginning of the 18th century, a few librettists in Venice tried to avoid the new trend of transferring comical opera-scenes into intermezzi by creating tragicommedie. The two principal characters were Pietro Pariati and Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti. In their argomenti the two poets dissociated themselves from each other and conceptualized quite different views on how a tragicomic libretto had to look like. Pariati exported his view north of the Alps: He was appointed poeta cesareo in Vienna where he resumed to produce six tragicomic libretti for the imperial court during carnival which were all set to music by the compositore di camera Francesco Bartolomeo Conti. The most successful work of Pariati and Conti, Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena, was in turn exported to Northern Germany: in 1720 to Brunswick and two years later to Hamburg, where Johann Mattheson arranged Conti's score.