Opera in German
The world's first opera was "Dafne" by Jacopo Peri, which appeared in Florence in 1598. Three decades later Heinrich Schütz set the same libretto in a translation by the poet Martin Opitz, thus creating the first ever German-language opera. The music to Schütz's "Dafne" is now lost and details of the performance are sketchy, but it is known to have been written to celebrate the marriage of Landgrave Georg II of Hessen-Darmstadt to Princess Sophia Eleonora of Saxony in Torgau in 1627. As in Italy, the first patrons of opera in Germany and Austria were royalty and the nobility, and they tended to favour composers and singers from south of the Alps. Antonio Cesti was particularly successful, providing the huge operatic extravaganza "Il pomo d'oro" for the imperial court in Vienna in 1668. Opera in Italian would continue to exercise a considerable sway over German-speaking lands throughout the Baroque and Classical periods. Nevertheless, native forms were developing too. In Nuremberg in 1644, Sigmund Staden produced the "spiritual pastorale", "Seelewig", which foreshadows the "Singspiel", a genre of German-language opera in which arias alternate with spoken dialogue. "Seelewig" was a moral allegory inspired by the example of contemporary school dramas and is the first German opera whose music has survived.
L'amore innocente
Salieri, wrote "L'amore innocent" in Vienna in 1770. It received its first performance during Carnival that same year at the Imperial Burgtheater in Vienna. In 1772, the opera premiered in Dresden. This performance was witnessed by Charles Burney, and included Angiola Calori in the cast. Salieri later reused some of the music from this opera in various unnamed ballet scores, as well as one aria in the late opera "La cifra". Salieri seems to have continued to revise this opera late into his life; performances frequently occurred in German translation as "" under the direction of Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann in 1783 in Bonn and in Mainz, Dresden (this time in German), both in 1783, 1785 in Frankfurt, and Berlin in 1788; a performance as late as 1793 has been reported. The first modern production was in 1997 in Bolzano.