“La villanella rapita” on the stage of Stepan Apraksin’s theatre
The proposed article tells about the best private theater in Moscow in early of the 19th century, which belonged to General Stepan S. Apraksin. The partially preserved handwritten music archive in the collections of the Russian State Library allows us to describe some versions of popular European operas, specially made by this theater. An interesting example is «La Villanella rapita”, which is listed in the Catalogue of Russian State Library as an opera by P. A. Guglielmi. However, a comparative analysis with different versions of this work and materials from other popular operas of the last quarter of the 18th century shows that this is a pasticcio with music of such famous composers as F. Bianchi, P. A. Giglielmi,W. A. Mozart, D. Cimarosa, G. Paisiello etc.