Omphale

Omphale is a lyric tragedy in five acts and a prologue with a libretto by La Motte that André-Cardinal Destouches had set in 1701 (for La Motte , Destouches , and Omphale, see seventeenth-century volume). This first Omphale was quite successful, and it is difficult to understand why Philibert Cardonne decided to write a second score for La Motte ’s words. Yet he undertook this task, and the resultant composition was produced for the first time at the Royal Academy of Music on 2 May 1769 with…