There is a subtle but not negligible difference between a lost opera and a forgotten one. The first implies an accidental absence, the caprice of history, the physical dispersal of papers and manuscripts through the folds of centuries. The second implies something more unsettling: that the music still existed, in fragmented form, hidden inside other works, copied by singers who carried it with them as stage luggage, transfused into other men’s pasticcios without anyone yet having the patience — or the competence — to recognise it. Antonio Vivaldi’s La Costanza Trionfante belongs to this second category. It had not been lost in the full sense of the word: it had been scattered. It was waiting for someone to reassemble it.

That someone is Federico Maria Sardelli, and the result of years of philological work is now fixed in this Passacaille recording, released in April 2026 with the ensemble Modo Antiquo and a vocal cast of assured quality. More than a sonic document, the disc is an act of restitution: it restores to music history a title that was, in effect, mute. And the question of silence — three centuries of oblivion, for a work that at its debut in January 1716 at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice had met with such success that it was revived repeatedly under different titles until 1732 — is the first critical knot to unpick.

In January 1716, Vivaldi is thirty-seven years old and already has a solidly established reputation. The Teatro San Moisè — the smallest of the great Venetian theatres, active since 1640, but no less influential for that, frequented by a demanding audience — is the stage on which, in the early years of the eighteenth century, the careers of Gasparini, Albinoni, Ziani and Vivaldi himself intersect. It is here, in the final days of the Carnival of 1715–16, that La Costanza Trionfante is performed.

In the same whirlwind of work in which he composes it, Vivaldi serves as deputy Maestro di Coro at the Ospedale della Pietà, supplies a large quantity of sacred vocal and instrumental music, and brings to completion two grand oratorios: Moyses Deus Pharaonis RV 643 — now lost — and Juditha Triumphans RV 644, which will survive as one of the masterpieces of his catalogue. Three genres, three contexts, three different audiences, tackled simultaneously with a capacity for stylistic adaptation that still astonishes today. To listen to La Costanza in this context means placing it in the period when Vivaldi’s musical language was at once most mature and most open, before the crystallisations that would characterise his later output.

The libretto is by Antonio Marchi, house poet in many Venetian theatres since 1692, and this text would become the vehicle through which Vivaldi’s music would circulate across Europe over nearly twenty years. The plot belongs to the Baroque dramaturgy of Spanish derivation: intricate, traversed by disguises, secret identities, and continual reversals, following a logic that the reformed eighteenth century of Metastasio would later sweep away, but which here is still fully alive.

II. The Detective and the Mosaic

The history of the recovery is as fascinating as the music itself, and Sardelli approaches it with the precision of someone who knows the difference between discovery and reconstruction — and the risks of one as much as the limits of the other. The authority of the undertaking is guaranteed by his own intellectual biography: since 2007, Sardelli has taken on the continuation of the Vivaldi Werkverzeichnis begun by Peter Ryom, the catalogue that for half a century has been the indispensable reference tool for navigating the vast Vivaldian territory. This is no honorary delegation: it is a task that requires exhaustive knowledge of every source, every doubtful attribution, every reuse. It is from this privileged — and solitary — position that he was able to conduct the research on La Costanza.

The starting point was the discovery, in 2001, of a small nucleus of arias at Berkeley Castle in England — the achievement of scholars Faun Tanenbaum Tiedge and Michael Talbot, who identified them within a miscellaneous collection tied to the seasons of the Teatro San Moisè between 1715 and 1717. Seven arias: a meagre sample but musically promising, enough to convince Sardelli that it was worth searching for the rest. From that initial nucleus he worked for years as a musicological detective, following traces scattered across libraries throughout Europe and drawing on a knowledge of Vivaldi’s compositional method that few in the world can claim.

The key to the recovery was the practice of recycling. Vivaldi reused his best arias, transplanting them from one opera to another with minimal adjustments of key or text. What at first glance appears to be dispersal reveals itself, in hindsight, as a form of involuntary preservation: traces of La Costanza resurface in German pasticcios, in later works by Vivaldi himself, in copies of unknown hand held in Berlin, Copenhagen, and Berkeley itself. Each trace required identification, comparison, and restoration — often working on poorly transcribed materials, with gaps to be filled by analogy. The celebrated Ti sento, sì ti sento — one of the finest numbers in the entire collection — was not even written for this opera: it came from an earlier work, from which Vivaldi drew it to graft it here, and then elsewhere again. An aria that has crossed multiple dramatic contexts and three centuries of silence without ever losing its own voice.

Two arias — Lucioletta vezzosetta and È ver la navicella — present a special case: transmitted by a Berlin manuscript with uncertain scenic attribution, they most probably belong to a second version of the 1716 libretto, now lost, added to refresh the production during the same season. The text of È ver la navicella had already circulated in a drama by Fortunato Chelleri staged at the Teatro Sant’Angelo in 1715 — a theatre of which Vivaldi was impresario — which suggests an internal circulation of materials that we might today call something close to editorial management of one’s own catalogue.

The result is a corpus of eighteen pieces — seventeen arias and a duet — that restores to the listener a good half of the original opera, which comprised thirty-five numbers. It is important to underline what this recovery is not. Sardelli has explicitly declared his opposition to the practice of filling lacunae with modern inventions, and has deliberately renounced fabricating the missing parts. The recitatives are absent; with them, the connective tissue that links the arias, the scene changes, the dramatic coups de théâtre. The instrumental forces are reduced to strings and basso continuo alone, because the sources document no wind instruments and to insert them would have been arbitrary. The only liberty taken is the opening of the disc with the Sinfonia RV 112 — one of the many Vivaldian operatic sinfonias without documented destination — which introduces with its three movements a sonic world subsequently developed in every direction by the arias.

In the landscape of Baroque rediscoveries, where the anxiety to restore presumed integrities often produces arbitrary operations, the subtractive path chosen by Sardelli represents an intellectual position before a philological one. He preferred to show what exists rather than pretend what is missing, and in doing so demonstrated that what exists is enough.

III. The Sound of Modo Antiquo

Founded by Sardelli in 1984, Modo Antiquo has over time built a sonic identity that is both aesthetic and philosophical: lean strings, clean articulation, transparency of line as an inviolable principle. This is not a sound that ‘warms’ the Baroque to make it more welcoming to modern ears: it is a sound that respects the Baroque in its geometry, that does not round off the asperities or soften the contrasts, that does not seek softness where the score prescribes hardness. Forty years of work in the Baroque repertoire, with Vivaldi as its central axis, have produced an ensemble that knows this music from the inside, that has no need to interpolate or explain it: it simply plays it, with that naturalness which is the paradoxical result of very long application.

The reduction of the forces to those alone documented by the sources — seven violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass, harpsichord — is not a limitation but a choice that accentuates this character. The sound is necessarily more transparent, more chamber-like, more exposed in its components: every instrumental voice is audible, every figure in the basso continuo carries its own specific weight, every ornament in the strings emerges with full clarity. The recording, made at the Oratorio di San Francesco in Florence in July 2025 under the technical care of Federico Pelle, renders this sound with exemplary sobriety: Passacaille never indulges in effect, and the microphone placement allows the acoustic of the room to breathe without emphasising it.

What strikes in the listening, however, is something that goes beyond clarity: it is substance. A full, mature Vivaldi who has no need to astonish through effect because he already has everything under control. The sonic cleanliness does not produce a thinned-out sound here: it produces, on the contrary, a clarity that leaves space for the weight of every single note. This is not a paradox: it is the consequence of a performance in which transparency serves density rather than replacing it. There is, in every number, an internal breathing that restores to Vivaldi’s writing that nervous mobility which is its own — the capacity to pass in a few bars from intensity to lightness, from harmonic tension to melodic release, without anything seeming forced or calculated.

The overall impression one carries away from the listening is that of a music that has remained intact beneath the layers of time — like a gilded stucco that the centuries had dulled and that a patient hand has cleaned, restoring its original splendour. And it is an impression with a precise aesthetic correlative: this Vivaldi is joyful. Not with the superficial lightness that certain Baroque performances mistake for style, but with the full and knowing joy of a composer in the full command of his faculties, who knows exactly where he is going and goes there with a sure step.

IV. The Voices

The cast is dominated by Cecilia Molinari, to whom fall eight numbers across the roles of Eumena, Farnace, and Tigrane. This is a choice that reflects Vivaldian practice: assigning the male protagonist’s role en travesti to a mezzo-soprano voice was established convention in early eighteenth-century Venetian opera, and Molinari is today one of the most complete Italian interpreters of this repertoire. Her trajectory is remarkable: a graduate in medicine, holder of a diploma in flute from the Conservatorio Bonporti in Trento and subsequently in singing from the Conservatorio Pollini in Padua, she was trained by Alberto Zedda at the Accademia Rossiniana in Pesaro in 2015 — an encounter that directed an already promising career towards bel canto and the Baroque. In a few years she has built an international presence spanning Rossini, Mozart, and Handel with the same stylistic ease, making her debuts at the Wiener Staatsoper, the Opéra national de Paris, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. But it is in the en travesti repertoire — Ariodante, Sesto, Orfeo — that her voice finds its most natural home: that zone in which the softness of the timbre takes on an expressive ambiguity that no other register can produce.

Her voice — endowed with velvety softness in the middle register, solid projection in the upper range, and an agility that never has the flavour of mechanism — is particularly suited to Vivaldi’s writing, which demands technical precision without sacrificing communication of the text. And it is precisely this equilibrium that Molinari commands with rare awareness: in every aria one senses a reading that precedes the emission, a grasp of the character that translates into precise and non-negotiable interpretive choices.

«Ti sento, sì ti sento» — Eumena’s aria that closes the first act, and which carries with it the memory of at least three different dramatic contexts in Vivaldi’s history — is perhaps the most representative example of her approach: a refined interpretation in which the care for expressive detail never weighs upon the fluidity of the phrasing. The text speaks of hope beating in the breast like a flash of lightning — and Molinari finds exactly that quality of intermittent light, that tension between present pain and future promise, without ever yielding to the easy allure of the beautiful note as an end in itself.

In «Parto con questa speme», the register lowers and the discourse becomes more intimate: the pain that trembles in the breast is calmed by the embrace, the text tells us, and Molinari constructs this trajectory with a progression that is at once vocal and actorly. The accompaniment of Modo Antiquo here achieves exemplary discretion: the strings accompany without ever overwhelming, leaving the voice all the space it needs to build the phrase without competition.

Among the Tigrane arias, «Un’Aura lusinghiera» from the third act is perhaps the lyrically most accomplished moment in the entire collection entrusted to Molinari: an aria of hope in which Vivaldi abandons every virtuosic effect to unfold the melody in a broad, expansive phrasing. Here Molinari’s voice rediscovers that softness of the middle register which is her most personal signature, and deploys it with a generosity that has nothing self-satisfied about it.

Valeria La Grotta (Doriclea, Getilde) bears the most visible dramatic weight of the opera: the principal character traverses the widest emotional arc of the entire work, from the opening threat of «Hai sete di sangue», a cry of defiance at her persecutor, to the triumphant tenderness of «Amoroso, caro sposo» in the third act, passing through the consoled unease of «È ver la navicella» and the near-playful vivacity of «Lucioletta vezzosetta». It is a role that demands not only technique but a continuous capacity for expressive modulation, and La Grotta possesses it in full measure.

«Lucioletta vezzosetta» is the number in which the soprano reveals her most complete nature: she ascends with that lightness that cannot be taught, and the coloratura unfolds with an evidence that has nothing ostentatious about it. This is a voice that does not conquer the upper register — it inhabits it. The text likens the character to a firefly wandering through horrors in search of peace: and La Grotta finds exactly that quality of mobile and discreet light, that weightless grace which is the only possible vocal translation of so ethereal an image.

«Amoroso, caro sposo» closes the circle of the character with a full-voiced, nobly composed singing: La Grotta does not force the grandeur of the moment, she allows it to emerge from the voice itself, from the naturalness with which the phrase unfolds without holding anything back. It is the kind of closing that a healthy opera deserves — not a firework display, but a resolution. And in the difference between these two extremes — the volatile grace of Lucioletta and the noble fullness of Amoroso — one measures the quality of a performer who knows how to inhabit a character from within.

Valentino Buzza brings to the tenor the sole aria of Olderico, «Non sempre folgora»: a piece of resolute and noble character, delivered with precision and clean timbre, with that command of Baroque agility writing that is rare among contemporary tenors. He does not seek effect — he serves the note, and serves it well, with a stylistic restraint that keeps the dramatic profile firm even in the most exposed passages.

Biagio Pizzuti (Artabano) holds the bass register with «In trono assiso» in a voice noble and solid: he takes the note with rigour and sustains it, without yielding or indulgence. It is the right solemnity for a king — neither emphatic nor cold — and in an opera where the lower voices tend to be marginalised by Vivaldi’s writing, his presence is a necessary and well-calibrated counterweight.

V. Vivaldi the Opera Composer and the Question of the Fragment

There is a well-established critical tendency to treat Vivaldi the opera composer as a kind of poor relation to Vivaldi the instrumentalist: a composer who transfers to the theatre the same formulas he used in his concertos, with mechanical and predictable results. It is a received idea that withstands attentive listening badly, and which this disc contributes to dismantling with sonic arguments more convincing than any theoretical discussion. The arias of La Costanza are not formulas: they are characters. «Hai sete di sangue» differs from «Qual dispersa Tortorella» as much as Doriclea differs from Eumena, and the difference is not only one of tessitura or key, but of language, gesture, breath. Vivaldi knows how to build characters through music; he knows that an aria of fury and an aria of lament cannot use the same ornaments, the same rhythms, the same relationships between voice and orchestra.

This is most clearly visible in the arias of more intimate character — those in which the writing becomes almost suspended, such as «Parto con questa speme» or «Lascia almen che ti consegni» — where the melody unfolds over an accompaniment reduced to the essentials, and the word takes precedence over ornament. This is a Vivaldi who knows how to be silent, who knows how to create space around the voice, who knows that silence is as much a part of the music as sound. This is not the Vivaldi of the Seasons, that tireless virtuoso who never stops: it is a theatrical composer who has learned that theatre is also made through subtraction.

There is also a critical temptation to resist when speaking of a partially recovered opera: that of treating the fragment as a defect, as something awaiting completion. It is a misleading temptation. The fragment has its own aesthetic dignity — Schlegel knew this, the Romantics knew it, and so does anyone who has listened to isolated arias from a Baroque opera that has survived by indirect routes. The Costanza Trionfante we hear on this disc is not a truncated opera: it is an opera that exists in the form in which history has handed it down.

The eighteen numbers speak a complete language, each within its own da capo architecture, each with its own affective identity. The absence of the recitatives does not diminish the listening: it orients it differently, bringing it closer to the form of the aria recital than to the complete opera, and in this format the Vivaldi of 1716 emerges with a clarity that a full staged performance might in part have obscured. As happens before a mutilated fresco — and it is not by chance that the painting chosen for the cover, Jacques-Louis David’s Psyche Abandoned (c. 1795), depicts a figure suspended in abandonment, not in ruin — it is the listener who fills the gaps, guided, however, by a sonic substance that here appears anything but residual.