By David Ng [LA Times, 22 March 2009]

Call it a musical homecoming more than 275 years in the making.

Antonio Vivaldi’s “Motezuma,” first performed in 1733 in Venice, was long considered a lost opera, its score having vanished, like so many other works of that era, into the void of history. But in 2002, a German musicologist discovered an incomplete copy in Berlin, and since then various reconstructed versions of “Motezuma” have been performed across Europe.