Some time in the spring or early summer of 1789, probably fairly soon after his meeting with Mozart in Prague, Guardasoni relocated to Warsaw. For him personally, this was no leap in the dark, as he had been employed there as a singer during the mid-1770s. The ITS report describes the company as being in Warsaw ‘in tutto l’anno 1789, e Carnivale 1790’. The departure of the company left Leipzig without its regular summer season of Italian opera. The Dresden Electoral troupe, by now under the control of Franz Seconda, made some effort to fill the vacuum with performances of Una cosa rara in Prague on 4 and 5 September and in Leipzig on 24 and 27 September and 15 October. In the winter, Joseph Seconda’s Singspiel company returned and for the next four years provided a regular season featuring Italian opera in German translation.

The Italiänische Opera-Virtuosen arrived in Warsaw at the height of the Polish Enlightenment during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last King and Grand Duke of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Full details of the repertoire performed during the company’s first Warsaw season are to be found in the ITS, as given in Table 26. The repertoire was largely unchanged and was still dominated by the Viennese works of Paisiello, Martín y Soler, Salieri and Mozart, with a single Dresden piece by Schuster. A new work by the mysterious ‘Sig. Maestro Guardasino di Littuania’ suggests that the impresario had turned his hand to composition and perhaps had seen fit to depict himself humorously in an opera. The most significant event of the season, from the perspective of Warsaw, was undoubtedly the performance of Salieri’s Axur, as the success of this work had an impact on the future provision of opera in the city.