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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.
Gluck later reworked this aria for his Iphigénie en Tauride.
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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