A superstar returns

The simplicity of the process is all but suspicious. On an autumn day of 2006, Ondřej Macek, a musician from Český Krumlov, set out for Prague's National Library. He asked for the contemporary booklet on Vivaldi's opera Agrippo. He did not expect to find more: The text was the only surviving part of the famous composer's work premiered in Prague centuries ago. The musicologist Macek travelled to Prague to look for the lost score. First of all, he found the names of musicians who played the opera in 1730 in the booklet, and then he looked in other resources to see where they went after their contracts in Prague had expired. He found out they had moved to Regensburg in Bavaria, and he made an appointment with the local archive containing scores. Two weeks later, he had the Agrippo arias. His discovery caused a big uproar among experts, and it has even earned a place in some European dailies. Vivaldi is one of the most popular personalities in his field, and as such he is the subject of research by hundreds of experts worldwide. „With these well-known and well-researched composers, each new discovery is a big success,“ says Marek Štryncl from the Baroque music group Musica Florea. „I was simply lucky and the search was quite easy. Actually, anyone could have done that,“ says Ondřej Macek.

Being first

But the score is not the end.…