Few legends have had the impact of the extraordinarily handsome Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. In the arts,...

Few legends have had the impact of the extraordinarily handsome Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. In the arts, the legend of Narcissus made its mark from ancient Greece onward. In music, interest in the legend dates back to the baroque. The opera by Domenico Scarlatti Amor d’un’ombra e gelosia d’un’aura was composed in Rome on a libretto by Carlo Sigismondo Capece and was revised in 1720 by Domenico Scarlatti himself- but with a libretto by Paulo Antonio Rolli- for a London performance of Narciso at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket. The Roman score is lost, leading to an exercise in what might be termed “experimental philology”: the London score was the source for all the parts containing traces of the original Roman libretto- and so (presumably) of the music of the Roman performance. For this release, the artists have changed the original title to Eco e Narciso, turning it into almost a “minidrama for two voices.”