Page "Christoph Willibald Gluck" Paragraph 9
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The year 1752 brought another major commission to Gluck, when he was asked to set Metastasio's La clemenza di Tito ( the specific libretto was the composer's choice ) for the nameday celebrations of King Charles VII of Naples ( later Charles III of Spain ).
The opera was performed on 4 November at the Teatro di San Carlo, and the world-famous mezzo-soprano castrato Caffarelli ( Gaetano Majorano ) took the role of Sextus.
For Caffarelli Gluck composed the famous, but notoriously difficult, aria " Se mai senti spirarti sul volto ," which provoked admiration and vituperation in equally large measures.
According to one account, the Neapolitan composer Francesco Durante claimed that his fellow composers " should have been proud to have conceived and written aria.
" Durante simultaneously declined to comment whether or not it was within the boundaries of the accepted compositional rules of the time.
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