Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (The Horatii and the Curiatii) is an opera in three acts (azione tragica) composed by Domenico Cimarosa to a libretto by Antonio Simeone Sografi, based on Pierre Corneille's tragedy Horace.

[7] Gli Orazi e i Curiazi was very dear to Napoleon, especially in the Parisian performances of the singer Giuseppina Grassini who was for some time a lover of the Emperor, and of the castrato Girolamo Crescentini — both of whom had been the original creators of the major roles of Horatia and Curiatius in 1796.

Gli Orazi e i Curiazi is generally regarded as the best of the eleven opere serie produced by Cimarosa, even though the composer himself considered 1797's Artemisia, regina di Caria "the most passable" of his works.

In Oriazi e Curiazi, an archetype of the classicist and 'republican' drama between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, we must see a kind of elegant evolutive operation in ultra-conservatism ... As to musical habit, the republican melodrama by Cimarosa and others was adorned with some more embellishment and accepted clangs of trumpets and some marches in order to remain, substantially, the one it had always been at the time of court theatres: a source of lyric effusions and not of epic [bursts].

"[11] The musicologist Francesco Florimo, Bellini’s friend, chanced to observe: "sometimes Cimarosa gives himself up to a more lyric than tragic affection, at other times to vocalisms and graces which can only be borne in the comic genre".

The only possible exception is Oratius’s Se alla patria ognor donai, which constitutes instead "an example of heroic aria for a tenor of buskined melodrama", which was to remain in full vogue till Rossini beginnings, "central range, periodical ascending intervals to give vigour and fit to the melody, short melismas or descending scales to strengthen its aulic expression, and intensification of the melismas when the Allegro A voi tutti il vivo lampo begins.

"[10] Celletti also says that Cimarosa got to give the best of his inspiration in the grand scene of the subterranean temple in act two: "An orchestral introduction, solemn and mysterious, is followed by other orchestral moments of a descriptive character that show how brilliantly certain operists of ours could catch the element either mysterious or fearful or horrid without imitating nature slavishly…; but in the meantime the beautiful recitatives of Curiatius and of Horatia and Curiatius’Andantino Ei stesso intrepido intersect, to come to the great resumption of the other solo voices and of the chorus (Regni silenzio muto, profondo).

In order to avoid further major damage the two kings, Tullus Hostilius and Mettius Fufetius, reach an agreement to settle contention between the two towns through a limited encounter to the death between six champions, three from the Horatii and three from the Curiatii.

Horatia, rebelling against her fate, calls down curses from the gods upon her native town which has driven her husband to a bloody death and is in her turn slain by her furious ruthless brother and flung headlong down the staircase.