(b Bergamo, c1630; d Vienna,1698). Italian librettist, impresario and poet, later active in Austria. His prodigious career as a librettist, attested by an extant output of over 200 works, began in 1650 with Orimonte, set to music by Cavalli, and continued until the year of his death. His activity fell into two distinct periods: the Venetian years, from 1650 to 1669, and the longer Viennese period, from then until his death. His first publication was a translation of Eruditioni per il cortigiano (Venice, 1645) by an anonymous Flemish author. In Venice, where he received legal training during the 1640s, he was a member of the Accademia degli Imperfetti, formed in 1649 and dedicated to the study of jurisprudence, history and the classics (the librettists Giacomo dall’Angelo, Aurelio Aureli and G.F. Busenello also belonged to the group). Minato was also a member of the older Accademia dei Discordanti; poems by him were printed in publications of these institutions (1651 and 1655). The prefaces to his earliest librettos indicate that he considered himself a lawyer by profession and that he initially viewed his writing as an avocation. By the mid-1660s, however, he was fully committed to the theatre as both librettist and impresario, a combination characteristic of the careers of several other Venetian librettists, including Giovanni Faustini and Aureli. By 1665 he was involved in the management of the Teatro S Salvador, an involvement reaffirmed by a three-year contract in 1667. His move to Vienna in 1669 to become court poet provoked a lawsuit for breach of contract by the Vendramin family, owners of the theatre. In the dedication of Il ratto delle sabine (1674) Minato mentioned nine librettos that he had written for Venice, but he actually wrote at least 11. His chief musical collaborator there was Cavalli, though Antonio Sartorio provided the music for his last three Venetian librettos.
Minato’s duties in Vienna included the provision of texts for a wide range of (sacred and secular) theatrical events for weddings, royal visits, royal birthdays and name-days, carnival and the important Lenten celebrations. During his 29-year period at the Viennese court he wrote more than 170 secular librettos (variously labelled dramma per musica, festa teatrale, ‘invenzione’, ‘introduzione ad un balletto’ or ‘serenata’) and approximately 40 sacred texts (labelled ‘rappresentazione sacra’ or ‘oratorio’). He averaged about five texts a year and occasionally – in 1678, for example – produced as many as ten. Most of his Viennese works were collaborations with the court composer Antonio Draghi and the court designer Ludovico Ottavio Burnacini. His election to the exclusive Academy of the Emperor and the posthumous republication in 1700 of two volumes of his sacred texts indicate the high esteem in which he was held. Revived throughout Italy, as well as in France and Germany, his works were set by many composers, among them Leopold I himself (who wrote the music, among other things, for the oratorio Il transito di S Giuseppe, first performed in 1675), Pederzuoli, Sances, Pistocchi, Legrenzi, Giovanni Bononcini, M.A. Ziani, Albinoni, J.A. Hasse and Telemann.
Most of Minato’s texts, like those of such contemporaries as Aureli and Noris – but unlike the pseudo-historical and mythological librettos of Giovanni Faustini, his chief predecessor in Venice – exploit and embroider events of ancient history, with particular emphasis on the military and moral stature of the hero. Although these subjects suggested parallels between the virtues of ancient Rome and those of the Venetian republic, political symbolism became more overt in the Viennese librettos, many of which contain detailed allegorical elucidations identifying the hero with the Emperor Leopold I. In many years until 1685, in deference to the patronage of the dowager Empress, Eleanora Gonzaga, Minato chose as his subject matter for her birthday, the exploits and triumphs of a female heroine, either fictional or historical. Unlike those of his contemporaries, Minato’s multi-act librettos contain an equal number of scenes in each act, 20 in the Venetian texts, usually fewer in those written for Vienna. The growing public demand for arias in Venice after about 1650 is reflected in the increased formal and functional distinction he made between recitative and aria as well as in his manipulation of situations and characters to create plausible opportunities for arias, including the very ingenious introduction of professional singers into his dramatis personae. Although they afforded a means of integrating both arias and scenic display within the drama, his elaborate secondary plots and mixture of comic and serious elements earned him the scorn of late 17th-century opera reformers.
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Archivio Vendramin, 42 F 6/2 (IVcg) [papers concerning Minato’s relationship to the Teatro di S Salvatore]
F. Hadamowsky: ‘Barocktheater am Wiener Kaiserhof, mit einem Spielplan (1625–1740)’, Jb der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 1951–2, 7–117; pubd separately (Vienna, 1955)
R. Schnitzler: The Sacred Dramatic Music of Antonio Draghi (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1971)
H. Powers: ‘Il “Mutio” tramutato, Part 1: Sources and Libretto’, Venezia e il melodramma nel Seicento: Venice 1972, 227–58
N. Hiltl: Die Oper am Hofe Kaiser Leopolds I. mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Tätigheit von Minato und Draghi (diss., U. of Vienna, 1974)
H. Seifert: Neues zu Antonio Draghis weltlichen Werken (Vienna, 1978)
E. Rutschman: ‘Minato and the Venetian Opera Libretto’, CMc, no.27 (1979), 84–91
E. Rutschman: The Minato-Cavalli Operas: the Search for Structure in Libretto and Solo Scene (diss., U. of Washington, 1979)
L’opera italiana a Vienna prima di Metastasio: Venice 1984 [incl. M. Hager: ‘La funzione del linguaggio poetico nelle opere comiche di Amalteo, Draghi e Minato’, 17–30; E. Rutschman: ‘“Orimonte”: Anatomy of a Failure’, 31–41; N. Pirrotta: ‘Note su Minato’, 127–63]
H. Seifert: Die Oper am Wiener Kaiserhof Im 17. Jahrhundert (Tutzing, 1985)
M. Girardi: ‘Da Venezia a Vienna: le “facetie teatrali” di Nicolò Minato’, Il diletto della scena e dell’armonia: teatro e musica nelle Venezie dal ’500 al ’700: Adria 1986–8, 189–221
M. Girardi: ‘Elenco cronologico della produzione teatrale e dei melodrammi di Nicolò Minato rappresentati a Venezia (1650–1730) e a Vienna (1667–1699)’, ibid., 222–66
E. Rosand: Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: the Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991)
G. Gronda and P. Fabbri, eds.: Libretti d'opera italiani (Milan, 1997), 107–207
ELLEN ROSAND/HERBERT SEIFERT