La Dori

La Dori
Opera by Antonio Cesti
Dori in her slave chains (from the libretto for the 1667 Venice production)
Librettist	Giovanni Filippo Apolloni
Premiere	1657 (1657) Hoftheater, Innsbruck

La Dori, overo Lo schiavo reggio (Doris, or The Royal Slave) is a tragi-comic opera in a prologue and three acts composed by Antonio Cesti to a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni. It was first performed in the court theatre at Innsbruck in 1657. The story is set in Babylon on the shores of the Euphrates and is a convoluted tale of mistaken identities—a female protagonist who disguised as a man eventually regains her lost lover, and a man disguised as a woman who causes another man to fall in love with him. In several respects it resembles the plot of Cesti and Apolloni's earlier opera L'Argia and foreshadows Apostolo Zeno's libretto for Gli inganni felici (1695) and Metastasio's libretto for L'Olimpiade (1733). The first Italian staging of La Dori was in Florence in 1661 for the wedding of Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It subsequently became one of the most popular operas in 17th-century Italy. The opera was revived three times in the 20th century, beginning in 1983.

Following its premiere at the court theatre of Ferdinand Charles, Archduke of Austria in Innsbruck in 1657, La Dori was brought to Italy and performed in Florence in June 1661 as part of the festivities celebrating the wedding of Cosimo III de' Medici, the future Grand Duke of Tuscany, to Marguerite Louise d'Orléans. It was the second opera created by Antonio Cesti and his librettist Giovanni Filippo Apolloni for the Innsbruck court of Ferdinand Charles. Cesti had been appointed the court composer in 1652 and Apolloni the court poet in 1653. Their first operatic collaboration had been L'Argia which was performed in 1655 to celebrate Queen Christina of Sweden's visit to Innsbruck. It proved to very popular and over the next 20 years had multiple productions in Italy. La Dori was to be even more popular. It had at least 30 productions between 1657 and 1689, predominantly in Italy but also in Austria and Germany, and at least 26 separate publications of its libretto.