Araja was born at Naples in 1700. His first opera, _Berenice_, was given at the Court of Tuscany in 1730; his second, _Amore per Regnante_, was produced soon afterwards in Rome. This seemed to have attracted the attention of the Russian ambassador to Italy, and in 1735 the composer was invited to St. Petersburg as director of the new Italian opera company. The performances took place in the Winter Palace during the winter, and in the summer in the Theatre of the Summer Garden. It is possible that Araja's first season opened with a performance of one of his own works with Russian text. Trediakovsky's translation of _La Forza dell'Amore e dell'Odio_ is described as "a drama for music performed at the New Theatre, by command of Her Imperial Highness Anna Johannovna, Autocrat of all the Russias. Published in St. Petersburg by the Imperial Academy of Science." It is not impossible that this comparatively unimportant work actually led to Trediakovsky's great literary innovation: the replacing of syllabic verse by tonic accent. It is significant that his book on this subject came out in the same year, and Cheshikin thinks that the study of the Italian opera of the eighteenth century, with its correct versification, may have suggested to him the theories which he sets forth in it. The same opera was given two years later in Italian under the title of _Abizare_. Other operas by Araja given in the Russian language are _Seleucus_ (1744), _Mithriadates_ (1747), _Eudocia Crowned, or Theodosia II._ (1751), and _Dido Forsaken_, the libretto by Metastasio (1758); the last named was given in Moscow the following year, and was apparently the first of Araja's works to be heard in the old capital. The Empress Elizabeth succeeded her cousin Anne in 1741, and Araja continued to be Court Capellmeister. Like Peter the Great, Elizabeth was anxious to popularise the drama in Russia. She showed a taste for Gallic art, and established a company which gave French comedies and tragedies alternately with Araja's opera company. Elizabeth urged her ladies in waiting to attend every performance, and occasionally announced that the upper classes among the merchants might be present on certain nights "provided they were properly dressed."[3]