Withdrawn before its scheduled premiere in the Venetian carnival season of 1668, Eliogabalo resurfaced only in 1999. Yet the composer Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676) was quite the star in his time. A pupil of Monteverdi, he produced upward of three dozen operas, including Ercole Amante (Hercules In Love), which premiered in a purpose-built theater in Paris, at staggering cost. More than a third of Cavalli’s operas are lost; of those that survive, the crown jewel is the gender-bending mythological tragicomedy La Callisto. Eliogabalo takes on racy matter, too. The hero is the deviant Roman emperor Heliogabalus, assassinated while still in his teens. According to his epitaph in Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” The charismatic Ukrainian countertenor Yuriy Mynenko leads the revels in this all-too-rare revival.
—Matthew Gurewitsch