The forgotten opera that made Madrid the centre of 18th-century European music returns to the stage – with the help of AI

• The Nereydas orchestra and a cast of international singers, under the direction of Ulises Illán, will bring to life an opera that has remained silent for almost three centuries.
• The Spanish version of Didone Abbandonata, commissioned by Farinelli from the composer Galuppi and the poet Metastasio to celebrate the birthday of the music-loving king Ferdinand VI in 1752, transformed the Teatro del Buen Retiro in Madrid into a fashionable European stage.
• This is a scientific initiative from the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU), which recovers musical heritage with the help of the most advanced technology. 
• All this is possible thanks to the support of the European project REPERTORIUM, a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence to protect and bring to life Europe’s forgotten musical masterpieces.

On 11 May 2025, Madrid will once again be the setting for a major musical event with the revival of Didone abbandonata, a fundamental piece of musical heritage that placed Spain at the centre of European music in the 18th century. The Nereydas orchestra, under the direction of Ulises Illán, will bring to life an opera that was presented at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro in Madrid in 1752 under the supervision of the famous castrato Farinelli. This new scientific project from the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU) has made it possible to recover and make available to the public another treasure of Spanish musical heritage.

The concert will be quite an event, with delectable ingredients: the modern-day premiere of a lavish opera that three talents elevated to the category of masterpiece, Metastasio, Galuppi and Farinelli; the innovation in the recovery of the score, with the use of artificial intelligence for the graphological recognition of musical manuscripts; and, together with Nereydas, a first-rate cast specialising in historically informed performance: Natalie Pérez, sopranist Federico Fiorio, Roberta Mameli, Zachary Wilder, Filippo Mineccia and Natalia Labourdette, all under the direction of Ulises Illán.

The revival of this work is possible thanks to REPERTORIUM, an innovative project funded by the European Union that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to protect and bring to life Europe’s forgotten musical masterpieces. The production of the opera has been a unique opportunity to train artificial intelligence models for Optical Music Recognition (OMR) with 18th-century musical manuscripts. The automatic transcription of music thanks to OMR has enormous potential as a support for research and as an accelerator of knowledge and the dissemination of Europe’s musical heritage.

The modern-day premiere of the concert version of Baldassare Galuppi’s opera Didone abbandonata will take place on Sunday 11 May in the Sala Sinfónica of the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, as part of the Universo Barroco series of the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM). This production will then close the Potsdam Early Music Festival in Germany on 28 June 2025.

Baldassare Galuppi and Didone

Baldassare Galuppi was integral to the development of opera seria and served as a bridge between the Baroque aesthetic and the Classical period. Although his name may not appear frequently in the programmes of today’s opera houses, in the 18th century he was revered throughout Europe. His operas were performed continuously for more than 60 years in the continent’s leading theatres, both public and at court, from his country of origin, Italy, to Russia, Germany, England and Spain. 

Galuppi, like many in the society of his time, was fascinated by the story of Dido and Aeneas. He set Pietro Metastasio’s celebrated libretto on this theme to music on three occasions: in 1741 for the Teatro Monza in Modena; in 1752 for the Teatro del Buen Retiro in Madrid; and finally, in 1764 for the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice. Although for a time it was thought that the 1752 version was simply a revision of the first Italian version, this restoration has shown that both the libretto and the music present very notable differences, which make the 1752 score a new version in its own right: a new opera.

A production adapted to the tastes of the Spanish court

The version that will be premiered on 11 May 2025 is an exceptional one: it was commissioned from Galuppi by the Spanish court to celebrate the birthday of King Ferdinand VI on 23 September 1752. The court enjoyed the collaboration of Metastasio himself, who revised for the occasion the libretto of Didone abbandonata he had written in 1724.

Carlo Broschi ‘Farinelli’ (his stage name) coordinated all the details of the production: the gestation process between librettist and composer, as well as the staging by Antonio Jolli and the scenographic design by Francesco Battaglioli. The court spared no expense, and the production featured some of the best singers of the time, such as Teresa Castellini, who years later originated the lead role in Nitteti, an opera by Nicola Conforto also with a libretto that Metastasio wrote specifically for Madrid. In addition, the same cast of Didone would premiere Conforto’s Il Siroe the following year.

Farinelli’s influence extended to revisions and improvements to adapt the opera to the tastes of the court of Madrid. In fact, at Farinelli’s initiative, Metastasio incorporated a licenza or celebratory final scene starring Neptune, with the purpose of attenuating the tragic denouement of the opera, which until that moment concluded with the suicide of Queen Dido. In this way, the protocol of homage to the music-loving monarch was fulfilled.

Farinelli fiercely defended Galuppi’s work during his stay at the Spanish court; in fact, Galuppi’s music was already being performed in Spanish theatres before 1752. Two years earlier, he had written, together with Giovanni Battista Mele, a version of Demofoonte, also with a libretto by Metastasio. The Spanish Didone was revived at least seven times in the following three years, always in the same theatre and with several performances on each occasion, achieving great success.

A story of female empowerment

Nicknamed ‘Il Buranello’ after his birthplace on the island of Burano (Venice), Galuppi managed to capture characters with great depth and nuance in his music, without renouncing his unmistakable melodic clarity. In the case of Didone, in its 1752 version, he portrays the vulnerability of the protagonist in a timeless and deeply moving way. Through his music, one perceives the duality between the queen and the lover, between the powerful woman and the wounded lover. For example, the fierceness of the aria ‘Son regina e sono amante’, in which the protagonist asserts herself in the first act as an independent and empowered monarch, contrasts with ‘Ah, non lasciarmi, no’ in the middle of the opera, where we see a self-absorbed and pleading woman.

Dido’s story – of love, betrayal and resilience – is universal, and her feminine power is still relevant today. The opera tells the story of Queen Dido (the protagonist of the opera), founder of Carthage, who falls in love with Aeneas, the surviving hero of the Trojan conquest (the protagonist of the Aeneid). However, Aeneas responds to the call of the gods to found a new city (Rome) and abandons Dido, who spends much of the opera torn between her feelings and the duty to rule. 

Manuscripts and technology, artificial and human intelligence

The original manuscript of the version of Didone that has been used as the main source for this historical recovery is currently kept in the Library of the Ajuda Palace in Lisbon, Portugal. Although the cover does not specify its origin, we know that it is the version composed for the Spanish court because it coincides with Metastasio’s libretto published for the 1752 performances in Madrid, and because it differs from the music preserved for the other two versions by Galuppi. In addition, it has been possible to compare it with another partial source preserved in the Library of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Artificial intelligence experiments to attribute authorship have confirmed the hand of Galuppi.

A top-level scientific and artistic team has been brought together for the edition of the score to be performed at the Auditorio Nacional. The arias from the opera that were digitised and analysed as part of a corpus of 3,000 18th-century opera arias by the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales within the framework of the DIDONE project have been used. The DIDONE, The Sources of Absolute Music: Tracing Emotions in Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera has been funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council and its results are available at arias.didone.eu. The editorial team of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales has completed the score by copying and editing the recitatives and purely instrumental pieces of the opera.

The score has been revised and corrected by the editors Ana Llorens and Álvaro Torrente, who have sought to guarantee fidelity to the manuscript sources of the work. The editorial team of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales (ICCMU) has prepared the materials for performance in concert by the Nereydas orchestra, which will use iPads to read the music for each instrument. The ICCMU will provide the orchestra with the tablets thanks to the DEeP Music project: Digitisation of the musical heritage ecosystem, financed with European funds through the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

Within the framework of the European programme Repertorium, a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in the recovery of musical manuscripts 

Fundamental to the recovery of the work has been the REPERTORIUM project: Researching and Encouraging the Promulgation of European Repertory through Technologies Operating on Records Interrelated Utilising Machines, funded by the European Union’s Horizon programme. Thanks to this project, the publication of this opera has been a unique opportunity to train artificial intelligence models for Optical Music Recognition (OMR) with 18th-century musical manuscripts. The automatic transcription of music thanks to OMR has enormous potential as a support for research and as an accelerator of knowledge and the dissemination of Europe’s musical heritage. This development has been carried out in collaboration with the team of Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza and David Rizo from the University of Alicante, world specialists in OMR.

Using an innovative combination of artificial intelligence algorithms, machine learning and musicological knowledge, REPERTORIUM digitises ancient and fragile manuscripts; decodes and transcribes the complex musical notation of the 18th century; and restores lost works for contemporary performance.

To date, REPERTORIUM has digitised and processed more than 10,000 pages of historical manuscripts and its AI platform continues to evolve, learning from human corrections to improve accuracy. The success of Didone abbandonata lays the foundation for other modern premieres of long-forgotten works.

Practical information 

Date: Sunday 11 May 2025 / 18:00

Venue: Auditorio Nacional de Música (Sala Sinfónica), Madrid (SPAIN)

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