La Betulia liberata (The Liberation of Bethulia) is a libretto by Pietro Metastasio which was originally commissioned by Emperor Charles VI and set to music by Georg Reutter the Younger in 1734.
It was subsequently set by as many as 30 composers, including Niccolò Jommelli (1743), Ignaz Holzbauer (1752), Florian Leopold Gassmann (1772),[1] Joseph Schuster (1787), and most famously Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1771).
It was commissioned in March 1771 by Giuseppe Ximenes, Prince of Aragon, while Mozart and his father Leopold were on the way home to Salzburg from their first journey to Italy.
Not performed in Mozart's lifetime, La Betulia liberata is shaped stylistically to works by Leonardo Leo and Johann Adolph Hasse.
[2][3] As a student of Antonio Salieri, Franz Schubert set "Te solo adoro", Anchior's aria from the second part, as a composition exercise for four voices in November 1812.