Giovanni Gualberto Bottarelli

Giovanni Gualberto Bottarelli was an Italian librettist.

Life and career The year of Giovanni Gualberto Bottarelli's birth in Siena, Italy is not known. Carl Heinrich Graun, a German composer and Kapellmeister to Frederick the Great, recruited Bottarelli to the Berlin court during his trip to Italy in 1740-1741. In Berlin Botarelli served as the king's librettist; transcribing the king's own ideas and sketches for operas based on French literature into usable Italian-language libretti with Graun providing the music. One of these operas was Rodelinda regina de’ Lombardi (based on Pierre Corneille's Pertharite, roi des Lombards and prior opera libretti by Antonio Salvi and Nicola Francesco) which premiered for the grand opening of a new theatre inside the Sans-Souci Palace on 13 December 1741. A later opera collaboration of this trio, Cesare e Cleopatra (based on Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée), premiered for the grand opening of the Berlin Royal Opera House on 7 December 1742. Casanova also calls Bottarelli a rascal, after meeting him and his family in penury, and reports that Bottarelli had been a monk in his native city, Pisa, and had fled to England with his wife, who had been a nun.

Il ré pastore (The royal shepherd), adapted by Bottarelli, was printed in London in 1765.