Piero Cavalli was the foremost Italian opera composer of the mid-17th century, and Erismena was first performed in Venice in 1655. The present MS, dating from c.1670 and in its original goatskin binding, contains the text in English translation. It is the earliest surviving score of an opera in English, and the earliest translation of an Italian libretto into English. It was acquired by the Library after a temporary export ban.
Item Provenance
Library of William and Philip Hayes, successive Professors of Music at Oxford, their sale, 1797; Robert Smith, London wine merchant and founder of the Glee Club, his sale, 1813; acquired by James Stevens Cox in the 1960s from a bookshop in the south-west of England; purchased from his son.