Name Alvise Giusti Died 1766, Milan, Italy | Role Librettist Libretti Motezuma | |
Vivaldi Sinfonia from Opera Montezuma, RV723 | Alan Curtis Il Complesso Barocco
Alvise Giusti (1709–1766) was an Italian lawyer, poet, and librettist.
Alvise (or Luigi as his name appears in several manuscripts from the time) Giusti was born in Venice. After studies in Padua, he worked as an official at the Habsburg court in Milan, where he died in 1766.
He is often confused with his uncle, Girolamo Giusti (1703 – ?), who also wrote libretti. Between them, they produced at least four, although it is has been unclear which Giusti wrote which libretto, and sometimes they have wrongly been assumed to be the same person. In the past, the libretto for Vivaldi's 1733 opera Motezuma had been attributed to Girolamo on the basis of a later archivist handwriting the name on a printed copy. However, according to Michael Talbot writing in the The Vivaldi Compendium, "the scholarly consensus is that Alvise is at least the author of the libretto for Vivaldi's Motezuma."