Proserpine (Paisiello)

The seventy-one-year-old musician was reluctant to leave Naples but King Ferdinand IV pressured him to agree in order to help Franco-Neapolitan diplomatic relations.

Reusing Quinault's libretti was a way of asserting the continuity of the national musical tradition and ensuring foreign composers, such as Gluck and Paisiello, were tied into it.

[2] Guillard, following the fashionable model of Metastasian drama, reduced Quinault's libretto from five to three acts,[3] concentrating the action on the main plot, the god Pluto's abduction of Proserpina.

In writing the opera, Paisiello was hampered by his unfamiliarity with the French language and he found it hard to adapt his own style to the conventions of the tragédie lyrique.

[6] Some time between 1806 and 1808, Paisiello asked Giuseppe Sanseverino to translate the libretto into Italian, but this version remained unperformed until 1988 when it was staged at Bagni di Lucca as part of the Marlia International Festival.