Vivaldi's drama per musica Ottone in villa premiered in Vicenza at the Teatro delle Garzerie, in May 1713. It was Vivaldi's very first opera, and set an early libretto of Domenico Lalli, a poet with whom he was to collaborate many times. The text was based on another libretto by Francesco Maria Piccioli, from an opera by Carlo Pallavicino. The story surrounds the Emperor Otho of Rome, and the fictional love intrigues at his court. Mistaken identities, mismatched lovers, and a woman parading en travesti are all part of the twists and turns of the plot.

Even though this is Vivaldi's first opera, some of the standard devices one associates with his operatic writing can already be found here. He uses the augmented second and diminished third as affective melodic intervals. He writes a classic storm aria for Otho in the second act, which features the programmatic kind of writing found in the Four Seasons such as trills, rushing scales and arpeggios, and sighing motives. One of the highlights of the opera is an echo aria for Caio and Tullia. It is composed to a formally free structure in shifting tempi, and depicts various images of the text with programmatic, descriptive instrumental writing. Shadows are illustrated by falling chromatic passages, the shifts of the breezes are felt in the quick paced writing for the violins, and the clear breath of the recorders is the movement of a stream. The most haunting moment of this aria comes at the very end, when the off-stage voice of Tullia echoes some of Caio's final words, filling him with terror and confusion.

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