Ezio (Mysliveček) (1775)

Ezio is an eighteenth-century Italian opera in 3 acts by the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček. It was the composer's first setting of a libretto by the Italian poet Metastasio that was first performed with music by Pietro Auletta in 1728, 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 1775 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.

The opera was first performed at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 30 May 1775 in honor of the nameday of Ferdinand, the king of Naples. It was the last of a series of four operas composed by Mysliveček for the Teatro San Carlo between 1773 and 1775, the last two commissions made possible by the failure of Johann Christian Bach to make good on a commitment to the management of the theater. Ezio (and all three of the other operas from this series) were very well received by the Neapolitan musical public. The cast was distinguished, as would be expected at the San Carlo; it included the castrato Gaspare Pacchierotti. Mysliveček's Ezio of 1775 was first revived in modern times in Prague in 1937.

The musicologist Daniel E. Freeman has demonstrated that Mozart used Mysliveček's scene and aria, "Misera, dove son?/Ah, non so io che parlo," as a partial model for his own setting of the same texts, K. 369.

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