So we didn’t know the music, but we knew the libretto and we knew who featured in the piece.” This print was deposited in the National Library in Prague. What remained was the libretto and the names of the singers, printed in the programme for the premiere. The music was always believed to have been lost. “All that I knew was the title of the opera. Knowing that Prague was the only place where Argippo was heard, he says he was always haunted by the possibility that he could come across the lost opera one day. Ondřej Macek founded and conducts a baroque music ensemble and therefore he is used to searching the archives for forgotten 18th century music. That’s basically the whole story of the opera.” A princess has two suitors and the one she denies tries to get rid of his rival by intriguing and plotting. It is a story of love and hate and it is full of intrigues and exchange of identities. “It is a typical baroque opera with a rather complicated plot. Ondřej Macek sums up its rather complicated plot: The only surviving copy of the libretto was deposited in the National Library in Prague. The theatre burned down just a few years after the premiere and Argippo was thought to have disappeared forever. It was first staged by an Italian music company in 1730 in the private theatre of Count Franz Anton Sporck, who commissioned the piece.

Argippo, a musical drama in three acts, is the only opera Antonio Vivaldi composed for Prague.

Vivaldi opera