Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632–1692), who was born in Bologna and spent the last two decades of his life in Modena, wrote nine cantatas for meetings of the Accademia dei Dissonanti, an intellectual talking-shop centred on Duke Francesco II’s Modenese court. Many of these works are described as ‘accademia’, suggesting a distinct subgenre of cantata at this time. Six of them survive in a single source, held in Modena’s Estense Library, which is a fair copy score from which, presumably, parts were ...