‘A shameless libertine’ (Casanova)
7th May 2014
Although perhaps largely forgotten now, Giambattista Casti (1724–1803), Salieri’s favoured librettist in Vienna in the 1780s, was notorious in his day, with a reputation for syphilis—Pushkin later wrote of the ‘noseless Casti’ in his lyric ‘K vel’mozhe’ (‘To a Grandee’, 1830)—and ‘for writing witty, salacious satires, as a sort of obscene, Italian Voltaire. Casanova had […]
Read more
