There is much truth in the importance of being in the right place at the right time. For any 18th-century composer who might have imagined immortality as being a household name among a collection of late-20th-century classical CDs, Vienna in the 1780s was neither the right place nor the right time, unless your name happened to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
When Spanish composer Martin y Soler's opera Una Cosa Rara opened in Vienna in 1786, it was more popular than Mozart's Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.
The pretty tunes and straightforward storyline of Soler's comedy captured the public's interest. But time has not treated this opera kindly, and Una Cosa Rara - which premieres in Hong Kong's Academy for Performing Arts next week - has lived up to its name and become a rare thing indeed.
Such was Mozart's genius and so great the magnitude of his operas that many other composers have been lost forever in his shadow. Italian composer Antonio Salieri, who achieved posthumous fame in the film of Mozart's life Amadeus, was yet another casualty.
Mozart referred to Una Cosa Rara in Don Giovanni. This small reference has encouraged musicologists to remove the dust of centuries and Una Cosa Rara is now enjoying a revival.
The libretto of Una Cosa was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a close friend of Casanova. When it opened in Vienna, box-office queues wound round the corner. The librettist Da Ponte was inspired by a Spanish story he had read about a virtuous girl, a subject he found so fascinating - one suspects because it represented an unknown quantity for him and his friend Casanova - that he finished the libretto in a single month.
Una Cosa (subtitled Bellezza ed Onesta - 'Beauty and Honesty') tells the simple story of a peasant girl, Lilla, in love with a village boy, Lubino. Her brother, Tita, wants her to marry Lisargo, a magistrate. The local prince and his chamberlain are also in hot pursuit. She spurns their advances and remains faithful to Lubino.
