The
librettist Jacopo Ferretti came from a middle class Roman family. His
father taught him music and literature, and he became fluent in Latin,
Greek, French and English, as well as his native Italian. Jacopo started
to write poetry as a boy. He later became the holder of the Papal tobacco
monopoly but wrote in his spare time: odes for funerals and weddings,
love letters, welcoming speeches, etc. He was the manager of the Rome
opera and wrote over seventy libretti; La
Cenerentola (Cinderella) was his first success and the
best known of all. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera,
"The versatility and spontaneity of his writing mark him out as one of
the very few true poets of the Italian romantic opera".
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Revised May 2009
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