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JOHANN PACHELBELEducation & Influences Born in the city of Nürnberg in 1653, Johann Pachelbel grew up in one of the most culturally active regions of Europe. Pachelbel's father enrolled him in the St. Lorenz high school, but soon recognized his music potential, so he arranged for his son to receive outside musical training from two leading instructors: Heinrich Schwemmer and organist Georg Caspar Wecker. He attended various non-music related courses at Nürnberg's Auditorium Ægidianum. Normally, such courses were reserved for the children of the upper class, but an exception was made in his case, due to his academic abilities. These abilities further served to help Pachelbel gain entrance to the Universität Altdorf, in 1669 at the age of fifteen. In addition to his studies, he served as organist at the Pfarrkirche. Unfortunately, his father was unable to support him financially, so he was forced to withdraw. In the spring of 1670, he enrolled in the Gymnasium Poeticum (the German equivalent of a high school, but is generally for university-bound students) in Regensburg. The school's administration was so impressed by his scholastic achievements that they gave him a scholarship and accepted him above and beyond their normal quota of students. They also made special arrangements for him to study music outside of the gymnasium with Kaspar Prentz . Prentz introduced Pachelbel to Italian music, an experience he would not have experienced inside the Gymnasium. Prentz left Regensburg in 1672, and soon after, in 1673, Pachelbel decided to travel to Vienna. There he was immersed in the works of Catholic composers from Italy and southern Germany. Johann Kaspar Kerll also moved to Vienna in 1673, and though Pachelbel's music reflects various aspects of Kerll's technique , no evidence exists that Pachelbel was ever trained directly by Kerll. The Vienna experience affected his style in a way that would not have been possible in the Protestant region where he grew up and was educated. Styles and techniques he learned here would be carried on and experimented with throughout his career. Composer & Performer Pachelbel began his professional career as an organist in various locations. As was stated above, his first job was as an organist at the Pfarrkirche. When he arrived in Vienna, he quickly found employment at the Stephanskirche (Church of St. Stevens) as a deputy organist. In 1677, he returned to Protestant Germany and settled in Eisenach, Thüringen (Thuringia). Two important events happened while we lived here. Through his appointment as court organist under Daniel Eberlin for Prince Johann Georg of Sachsen-Eisenach, he became known as not only one of the most predominant German organists, but also one of the most accomplished composers. Also in Eisenach, one of the most important events of the Baroque period took place. Here, Pachelbel met the Bach family and soon began to tutor Johann Ambrosius' children, including the young Johann Sebastian. Circa 1678, the Prince of Sachsen-Eisenach died, and Pachelbel began looking for other work. He received no immediate offers, so he asked Daniel Eberlin for a testimonial addressed to any interested parties. Eberlin was happy to oblige and noted in the letter that Pachelbel was "a perfect and rare virtuoso." Later that year, he was invited to nearby Erfurt to be the organist at the Protestant Predigerkirche (Preacher's Church). He remained at this post for 12 years, and during this time was married twice. He lost his first wife and son to the Plague in 1683 and remarried in 1684. Having felt that he had spent enough time in Erfurt, Pachelbel asked to be released from his position there and in August of 1690, traveled to the southern German city of Stuttgart where he assumed the post of court organist for Duchess Magdalena Sibylla of Württemberg. His stay in Stuttgart was cut short by the threat of a French invasion so, in the fall of 1692, he return to the area of Thüringen, and this time found himself in the city of Gotha. He served as the town organist, but due to his growing fame throughout Europe, was asked a month later to serve as an organist in Oxford, England, but rejected the offer. He was asked to return to Stuttgart, but also refused that offer. On April 20th, 1695, his mentor Georg Caspar Wecker died, leaving vacant the organist's post at Sebalduskirche (Church of St. Sebald) in his hometown of Nürnberg. The church authorities were so anxious to appoint him that they decided to forego the customary audition process and helped pay his moving expenses. In the spring of 1695, he officially asked to be released from his position in Gotha, and in July of that year returned home and held the position until his death on March 9th, 1706. Educator
Though he was officially a performer and composer for most of his life, Pachelbel took time out of his busy schedule -- often having to compose a new piece every week -- to tutor musicians on the side. The first and most important example of this occurred in Eisenach around 1677, where he became good friends with the Bach family. In 1680, Johann Ambrosius Bach asked Pachelbel to be the godfather of his daughter, Johanna Juditha. Six years later, he was asked to tutor the eldest son of the Bach family, Johann Christoph (a.k.a. Johann Balthasar). During his visits, he also taught some of J.A. Bach's other children, including a young Johann Sebastian Bach. In the years of 1693 and 1694, the Bach family was devastated by death. First J.A. Bach's twin brother, Johann Christoph Bach died. A short time later, J.A. Bach's wife, Elisabetha died, which devastated J.A. Bach, who in turn, died ten months later. This left the family shattered, and Johann Sebastian was sent to live with a cousin; however, this cousin had financial difficulties and sent Johann Sebastian to live with his brother Johann Christoph in Ohrdruf who trained him using techniques taught to him by Pachelbel. One interesting story comes from his time in Ohrdruf. For some unknown reason, Johann Christoph forbid J.S. from reading a manuscript of Pachelbel's original works. Every night for six months, Bach would sneak down to his brother's study and copy the manuscript by moonlight for his own use. So Pachelbel influenced Johann Sebastian's music both directly and indirectly. For this reason, he is referred to as the "geistige Stammvater Bach" or the intellectual progenitor of Bach. As he moved from various locations, he always took time to tutor students. This is especially evident during his times in Erfurt and his later years in Nürnberg. He also tutored all of his children. His son William Hieronymus filled Pachelbel's position at Sebalduskirche, shortly after his death. His other two sons, Carl Theodor & Johann Michael immigrated to America around 1730. While in America Carl Theodor made a bit of history. Following in his father's footsteps he found employment as an organist at the Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island sometime around 1733. In 1736, he traveled to New York City and at 6:00 PM on January 21, 1736 gave a concert in a local tavern. This event is significant as it was the first concert in the colonies of which records exist. Thus, Pachelbel's influence was not only limited to the European continent, but spread across the ocean to America. Posthumous influenceOne of the last middle Baroque composers, Pachelbel did not have any considerable influence on most of the famous late Baroque composers, such as George Frideric Handel, Domenico Scarlatti or Georg Philipp Telemann. He did influence Johann Sebastian Bach indirectly; the young Johann Sebastian was tutored by his older brother Johann Christoph Bach, who studied with Pachelbel, but although JS Bach's early chorales and chorale variations borrow from Pachelbel's music, the style of northern German composers (Georg Böhm, Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Adam Reincken) played a more important role in the development of Bach's talent.Pachelbel was the last great composer of the Nuremberg tradition and the last important southern German composer. Pachelbel's influence was mostly limited to his pupils, most notably Johann Christoph Bach, Johann Heinrich Buttstett, Andreas Nicolaus Vetter, and two of Pachelbel's sons, Wilhelm Hieronymus and Charles Theodore. The latter became one of the first European composers to take up residence in the American colonies and so Pachelbel influenced, although indirectly and only to a certain degree, the American church music of the era. Composer, musicologist and writer Johann Gottfried Walther is probably the most famous of the composers influenced by Pachelbel – he is, in fact, referred to as the "second Pachelbel" in Mattheson's Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte.[23]
As the Baroque style went out of fashion during the 18th century, the majority of Baroque and pre-Baroque composers were virtually forgotten. Local organists in Nuremberg and Erfurt knew Pachelbel's music and occasionally performed it, but the public and the majority of composers and performers did not pay much attention to Pachelbel and his contemporaries. In the first half of the 19th century, some organ works by Pachelbel were published and several musicologists started considering him an important composer, particularly Philipp Spitta, who was one of the first researchers to trace Pachelbel's role in the development of Baroque keyboard music. Much of Pachelbel's work was published in the early 20th century in the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich series, but it was not until the rise of interest in early Baroque music in the middle of the 20th century and the advent of historically-informed performance practice and associated research that Pachelbel's works began to be studied extensively and again performed more frequently.Works
Pachelbel's most famous work is Kanon/Canon in D Major, and is arguably the most widely used, recorded and recognizable instrumental work of all time. Though his canon is his most popular work, his most highly regarded work is the Hexachordum Apollinis. Others include:
95 magnificat fugues 60 organ chorales 16 toccatas 7 preludes 3 ricercars 6 fantasias 26 non-liturgical fugues 6 ciacconas 17 keyboard suites 8 keyboard variations 3 keyboard arias with variations 3 pieces for chamber orchestra 19 arias 11 motets (9 in German) 11 sacred concertos 25 magnificats & ingressi for Vespers 2 masses
Giovanni Battista PERGOLESI Born: January 4, 1710 - Jesi, ItalyDied: March 16 or 17, 1736 - Pozzuoli, ItalyItalian composer. He probably studied with the maestro di cappella at Iesi, Francesco Santi, and took violin with Francesco Mondini. Sometime after 1720 he was sent to the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo in Naples, where he studied composition with Gaetano Greco, Leonardo Vinci, and Francesco Durante; he also performed as a choirboy and violinist. While still a student, his dramma sacro Li prodigi della divina (1731) was performed at the monastery of S. Agnello Maggiore. His first commissioned opera, Salustia (Naples, 1732), a revision of Zeno's Alessandro Severo, was probably written in haste and enjoyed little success. Pergolesi was appointed maestro di cappella to Prince Ferdinando Colonna Stigliano in 1732, and the same year his commedia musicale Lo firate 'nnamorato was quite successful. After Naples experienced earthquakes in November and December 1732, he composed some works to celebrate the festival of St. Emidius (protector against earthquakes), which apparently included a Mass for double chorus and the Psalms Dixit Dominus, Laudate (not extant), and Confitebor. In 1733 he was commissioned to write an opera for the empress's birthday; the result, Il prigionier superbo, included the intermezzo La serva padrona, which would become one of his most celebrated works. In May 1734 his Mass in F was presented in the Church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Rome, to an audience that included the Duke of Maddaloni; subsequently Pergolesi entered his service as maestro di cappella, returned with the duke to Naples in 1734, and composed an opera on Metastasio's Adriano in Siria in the same year. He was commissioned to set Metastasio's L'Olimpiade for the Teatro Tordinona in Rome, where the work premiered in 1735; it appears to have been a failure, although a few years later it was produced in Venice and Turin. His last success was the commedia musicale Il Flaminio (Naples, 1735); a wedding serenata, Il tempo felice (1735, lost), was completed by Niccolò Sabbatino because of Pergolesi's poor health. In 1736 he moved into a Franciscan monastery in Puzzuoli, where during his final illness he composed the cantata Orfeo, his Stabat Mater, and the Salve Regina. Pergolesi's fame spread rapidly after his death. Four of his cantatas were published posthumously, and traveling troupes of players began to perform his comedies,
especially La serva padrona. In 1752 the tremendous success of this work in Paris, staged there for the second time, initiated the querelle des bouffons. The sacred music enjoyed considerable success as well, the Stabat Mater becoming a particular favorite of the 18th century. The enthusiasm for Pergolesi's works caused a considerable number of misattributions, which still cause confusion; Stravinsky's Pulcinella made use of material ascribed to Pergolesi, but in fact almost none of the works he selected are by the composer.Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was an Italian composer, violinist and organist. He studied music there under a local musician, Francesco Santini, before going to Naples in 1725, where he studied under Gaetano Greco and Francesco Feo among others. He spent most of his brief life working for aristocratic patrons like the principe di Stigliano and the duca di Maddaloni.Giovanni Battista Pergolesi was one of the most important early composers of opera buffa (comic opera). His opera seria Il prigioner superbo contained the two act buffa intermezzo, La Serva Padrona (The Servant Mistress, August 28, 1733), which became a very popular work in its own right. When it was performed in Paris in 1752, it prompted the so-called Querelle des Bouffons ("quarrel of the comedians") between supporters of serious French opera by the likes of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau and supporters of new Italian comic opera. Pergolesi was held up as a model of the Italian style during this quarrel, which divided Paris's musical community for two years. Among his other operatic works are his first opera La conversione e morte di San Guglielmo (1731), Lo frate 'nnammorato (The brother in love, 1732, to a Neapolitan text), L'Olimpiade (January 31, 1735) and Il Flaminio (1735). All his operas were premiered in Naples apart from L'Olimpiade which was first given in Rome.Giovanni Battista Pergolesi also wrote sacred music, including a Mass in F. It is his Stabat Mater (1735), however, for male soprano, male alto and orchestra, which is his best known sacred work. It was commissioned by the Confraternità dei Cavalieri di San Luigi di Palazzo (the monks of the brotherhood of San Luigi di Palazzo) as a replacement for the rather old-fashioned one by Alessandro Scarlatti for identical forces which had been performed each Good Friday in Naples. Whilst classical in scope, the opening section of the setting demonstrates Pergolesi's mastery of the Italian baroque 'durezze e ligature' style, characterized by numerous suspensions over a faster, conjunct bassline. The work remained popular, becoming the most frequently printed work of the 18th century, and being arranged by a number of other composers, including J.S. Bach, who used it as the basis for his psalm Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden, BWV 1083.Giovanni Battista Pergolesi wrote a number of secular instrumental works, including a violin sonata and a violin concerto. A considerable number of instrumental and sacred works once attributed to Pergolesi have since been shown to be falsely attributed. Much of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Pulcinella, which ostensibly reworks pieces by Pergolesi, is actually based on spurious works. The Concerti Armonici are now known to be composed by Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer. Many colorful anecdotes related by his early biographer Florimo, were later revealed as fabrication, though they furnished material for two 19th-century operas broadly based on Pergolesi's career.Pergolesi died at the age of twenty-six in Pozzuoli from tuberculosis.Pergolesis posthumous reputation has been exaggerated beyond all reason. This was due partly to his early death and largely to the success of La Serva Padrona when performed by the Bouffons Italiens at Paris in 1752. Charming as this little piece undoubtedly is, it is inferior both for music and for humor to Pergolesi's three-act comic operas in dialect, which are remembered now only by the air "Ogni pena più spietata" from Lo Fratè Inammorato. As a composer of sacred music Pergolesi is effective, but essentially commonplace and superficial, and the frivolous style of the Stabat Mater was rightly censured by Paisiello and Padre Martini. His best quality is a certain sentimental charm, which is very conspicuous in the cantata L'Orfeo and in the genuinely beautiful duets "Se cerca, se dice" and "Ne' giorni tuoi felici" of the serious opera L'Olimpiade; the latter number was transferred unaltered from his early sacred drama S. Guglielmo, and we can thus see that his natural talent underwent hardly any development during the five years of his musical activity. On the whole, however, Pergolesi is in no way superior to his contemporaries of the same school, and it is purely accidental that a later age should have regarded him as its greatest representative.Adriano in Siria, opera in 3 acts
Opera Opera
Concerti armonici (6), for 4 violins, viola & continuo (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto armonici No. 3, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in A major (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto armonici No. 6, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in B flat major Concerto Concerto
(spurious; by Wassenaer)Concerto armonici No. 5, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in E flat major (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto armonici No. 4, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in F minor (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto armonici No. 1, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in G major (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto armonici No. 2, for 4 violins, viola & continuo in G major (spurious; by Wassenaer)
Concerto Concerto
Concerto for 2 harpsichords, 2 violins, viola & bass in C major Concerto Concerto
Confitebor, for soloists, chorus & orchestra Choral Choral
Dixit Dominus, for soloists, double chorus & orchestra Choral Choral
Domine, ad adjuvandum me (Deus in adjutorium), for soprano, chorus & orchestra
Choral Choral
Concerto for flute & orchestra No.2 in D (very doubtful) Concerto Concerto
Il Flaminio, musical comedy in 3 acts Opera Opera
Il maestro di musica, opera (spurious; based on music by Auletta and 3 pieces by Pergolesi)
Opera Opera
Il prigionier superbo, opera in 3 acts Opera Opera
In coelestibus regnis, antiphon for alto, strings & organ Vocal Music Vocal
Sonata for harpsichord in A major Keyboard Keyboard
Sonata for organ in F major Sonata Keyboard
Sonata (No.4) for keyboard in G major (very doubtful) Sonata Keyboard
L'olimpiade, opera in 3 acts Opera Opera
La contadina astuta, intermezzo in 2 acts Opera Opera
La finice sul rogo (La morte di San Giuseppe), oratorio in 2 acts Oratorio Choral
La serva padrona, intermezzo in 2 acts Opera Opera
Laudate pueri, psalm for soprano, chorus & orchestra Choral Choral
Li prodigi della divina grazia nella conversione di S Gugliemo Duca d'Aquitania, sacred drama in 3 acts
Vocal Music Vocal
Lo frate 'nnamorato, musical comedy in 3 acts Opera Opera
Magnificat in B flat major (spurious; by Durante) Magnificat Choral
Magnificat in C major (edited by Stroh & Red) Choral Choral
Marian Vespers, for soloists, chorus, organ & orchestra (reconstructed by Malcolm Bruno)
Choral Choral
Mass (Kyrie & Gloria), for soloists, chorus & orchestra in F major (4 versions)
Mass Choral
Messa solenne, for soloists, chorus & orchestra (spurious) Mass Choral
Miserere, in C minor (2 settings, both spurious) Choral Choral
Nina, song for voice & piano (spurious; by V.L. Ciampi) Song Vocal
Piccola sinfonia, for 2 violins, viola & bass in E flat major (doubtful) Symphony Chamber
Pro Jesu dum vivo, motet (spurious) Motet Choral
Salustia, opera in 3 acts Opera Opera
Salve regina, for countertenor & strings in F minor (doubtful) Vocal Music Vocal
Sinfonia, for cello & continuo in F major Symphony Chamber
Sonata for violin & continuo No.12 in E major (spurious) Sonata Chamber
Trio for 2 violins & continuo in B flat major (doubtful) Chamber Music Chamber
Trio Sonata No. 4 Chamber Music Chamber
Violin Concerto in B flat major Concerto Concerto
Sonata for violin & continuo in G major Sonata Chamber
Work(s) Miscellaneous (Classical)
Miscellaneous
Apr 24, 1731 Questo è il piano, cantata for alto, strings & continuo Cantata Vocal
1734 Livietta e Tracollo, intermezzo in 2 acts Opera Opera
1735 Venerabilis barba cappucinorum, Scherzo fatto ai Cappucini de Posuoli, for tenor & bass
Vocal Music Vocal
1736-1736 Salve regina, for (mezzo-)soprano, strings & organ in C minor Vocal Music Vocal
1736-1736 Stabat mater, for soprano, alto, strings & organ in F major Vocal Music Vocal
173 Sinfonia in B flat major Orchestral Orchestral
173 Sinfonia in F major Orchestral Orchestral
Sep 28, AFTE Chamber cantatas (4), Op. 2 Cantata Vocal
Sep 28, AFTE Luce degli occhi mei, chamber cantata for soprano, strings & continuo, Op. 2/3
Vocal Music Vocal
ca. 1725-1735 Concerto for flute & orchestra No.1 in G (very doubtful) Concerto Concerto
ca. 1725-1735 Salve regina, for soprano, strings & organ in A minor Vocal Music Vocal
ca. 1725-1735 Tre giorni son che nina, song for voice & piano (spurious; may be by Vocal Music Vocal
V.L. Ciampi)
ca. 1736 Dalsigre, ahi mia Dalsigre ("Lontananza" or "Nigella, ah mia Nigella"), chamber cantata for soprano & continuo, Op. 2/2
Cantata Vocal
ca. 1736 Orfeo ("Nel chiuso centro"), chamber cantata for soprano, strings & continuo, Op. 2/4
Cantata Vocal
ca. 1736 Segreto tormento (Che non ode e chi non vede), chamber cantata for soprano, strings & continuo, Op. 2/1
Cantata Vocal
ca. 1875-1910 Se tu m'ami, for voice & piano (spurious; by A. Parisotti) Song Vocal
Alessandro Scarlatti
Sicilian-born in 1660, Alessandro Scarlatti was trained in Rome. He married in 1678 and later that year was appointed Maestro di Cappella of San Giacomo degli Incurabili. His first large-scale oratorio-operatic works were performed there the following year when he was only 19. His patrons from the outset were of the highest rank, among them the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden who made him her Maestro di Cappella, Cardinal Pamphili, and the musically indefatigable Cardinal Ottoboni and, in Florence, Prince Ferdinando de Medici. In 1684 at the age of 24 Scarlatti moved to Naples, where he was appointed Maestro di Cappella at the vice-regal court of Naples, at the same time as his brother Francesco was made First Violinist. It was alleged that they owed their appointments to the intrigues of one of their sisters with two court officials, who were dismissed. For the next two decades over half the new operas given at Naples were by Scarlatti, producing over 40 works, which were first performed at the Viceregal Palazzo Reale and then at the public theatre of S. Bartolomeo, where Scarlatti was employed as the director along with nine singers, five instrumentalists and a copyist. In contrast to contemporary five-act Venetian operas, which continued to rely upon mythological characters and stage machinery, Scarlatti's shorter three-act 'Drammi per Musica' centered on the characterization of kings and confidants, lovers and servants. Il Pirro e Demetrio (1694) and La caduta de' Decemviri (1697) were particularly successful. From 1695 his operas and 'musical dramas' incorporated three-movement sinfonias which soon became standard for all Italian operas. Indeed, the Italian opera overture, or sinfonia, contained most of the elements of the pre-classical and classical symphonies, and the symphony (or sinfonia), designed for concert performance, may be traced back to the Italian opera overture (or sinfonia) of Alessandro Scarlatti. It was in these overtures and last operas that he also began experimenting with orchestral (instrumental) color in the modern sense. While resident in Naples Scarlatti occasionally returned to Rome to supervise carnival performances of new operas, contributions to pasticci and cantatas at the Palazzo Doria Pamphili and the Villa Medicea (at nearby Pratolino), as well as oratorios at Ss. Crocifisso, the Palazzo Apostolico and the Collegio Clementino. Astonishingly, he also produced at least ten serenatas, nine oratorios and sixty-five cantatas for Naples. By 1700 the War of the Spanish Succession was beginning to undermine the privileged status of the Neapolitan nobility, rendering Scarlatti's position insecure. In 1702 he left with his family for Florence, where he hoped to find employment for himself and his son Domenico with Prince Ferdinando de' Medici. When these hopes failed, he moved back to Rome at the end of 1703, seeking a quieter life, as assistant Maestro di Cappella at S Maria Maggiore (the public theaters had been closed by papal decree since 1700, so operas were performed only occasionally and in private). In this capacity he was required to compose motets and Masses in both strict (Papal) and concertato styles, according to the occasion. To augment his income he renewed his connections with the cardinals and formed new ones with Marquis Ruspoli, concentrating now on oratorios, celebratory serenatas and cantatas. In 1706 he was elected, along with Pasquini and Corelli, to the Accademia dell'Arcadia, where he must have met Handel in 1707. From 1702 until 1708 he sent Prince Ferdinando de' Medici quantities of oratorios and church music and four operas which the prince had performed at Siena, Livorno and Florence. Scarlatti also composed and directed two five-act tragedies for the 1707 Venetian Carnival. Upon his return to Rome he was made Maestro di Cappella at S. Maria Maggiore, but the salary was so meager that he was ultimately forced to return to his posts in Naples in 1709. During the next decade he produced 11 operas employing greater instrumental resources, of which Il Tigrane (1715) was his Neapolitan masterpiece. His 'commedia in musica', Il trionfo dell'onore (1718), was also very successful.
He maintained his connections in Rome, returning there in 1718 to oversee his opera Telemaco at the Teatro Capranica, in 1719 Marco Attilio Regolo, and finally in 1721 for La Griselda (his last opera). He produced a lavish Messa di S Cecilia for soloists, chorus and strings, performed there in October 1720. Meanwhile Scarlatti ventured into orchestral writing, expanding the Sinfonia concept with his twelve Sinfonie di concerto grosso. The "Six Concertos in seven parts for two Violins and Violoncello Obligate with two Violins more a Tenor and Thorough Bass, Compos'd by Sigr Alexander Scarlatti", as they were first called, were published in London under the above title by Benjamin Cooke in 1740. Of these six Concerti, numbers 1, 2, 4, and 5 were composed so that they could also be performed as string quartets. Scarlatti called them specifically Sonate a quattro, and as such they represent some of the earliest forms of chamber music in this genre. The fact that these Six Concertos were published some fifteen years after the composer's death was quite unusual for that time; it may be suggested that Benjamin Cooke was "cashing in" on the popularity of the Scarlatti name. Thomas Roseingrave had published in London the first edition of Alessandro's son Domenico's Essercizzi per gravicembalo a couple of years before, and Domenico's work was also being popularized in London by Thomas Kelway and Thomas Arne. That Domenico's popularity continued is witnessed by the publication in 1743 by Charles Avison of his twelve Concerto Grosso arrangements of Domenico's harpsichord sonatas. Alessandro's last years were spent in Naples, teaching (Hasse was his pupil from 1722), composing cantatas (which ultimately numbered over 600, mostly for soprano and continuo), a Serenata and a set of Sonatas for Flute and Strings, probably composed for Quantz, who visited him in late 1724 or early 1725. Quantz describes the visit thus: "I heard Scarlatti play on the harpsichord, which he knew how to play in a learned style although he did not possess as much finesse as his son. After this he accompanied me in a solo. I had the good fortune to win his favor, in fact so much so that he composed a few flute solos for me." This comment would almost prove to be an epitaph, for Alessandro Scarlatti died on October 24, 1725.
Scarlatti's music forms an important link between the early Baroque Italian vocal styles of the 17th century, with their centers in Florence, Venice and Rome, and the classical school of the 18th century. Scarlatti's style, however, is more than a transitional element in Western music; like most of his Naples colleagues he shows an almost modern understanding of the psychology of modulation and also frequently makes use of the ever-changing phrase lengths so typical of the Napoli school. His early operas (Gli equivoci nel sembiante 1679; L’honestà negli amori 1680, containing the famous aria "Già il sole dal Gange"; Il Pompeo 1683, containing the well-known airs "O cessate di piagarmi" and "Toglietemi la vita ancor," and others down to about 1685) retain the older cadences in their recitatives, and a considerable variety of neatly constructed forms in their charming little arias, accompanied sometimes by the string quartet, treated with careful elaboration, sometimes with the continuo alone. By 1686 he had definitely established the "Italian overture" form (second edition of Dal male il bene), and had abandoned the ground bass and the binary form air in two stanzas in favour of the ternary form or da capo type of air. His best operas of this period are La Rosaura (1690, printed by the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung), and Pirro e Demetrio (1694), in which occur the arias "Le Violette", and "Ben ti sta, traditor".From about 1697 onwards (La caduta del Decemviri), influenced partly perhaps by the style of Giovanni Bononcini and probably more by the taste of the viceregal court, his opera arias become more conventional and commonplace in rhythm, while his scoring is hasty and crude, yet not without brilliance (L'Eraclea, 1700), the oboes and trumpets being frequently used, and the violins often playing in unison. The operas composed for Ferdinando de' Medici are lost; they might have given a more favourable idea of his style as his correspondence with the prince shows that they were composed with a very sincere sense of inspiration.Mitridate Eupatore, accounted his masterpiece, composed for Venice in 1707, contains music far in advance of anything that Scarlatti had written for Naples, both in technique and in intellectual power. The later Neapolitan operas (L'amor volubile e tiranno 1709; La principessa fedele 1710; Tigrane, 1714, &c.) are showy and effective rather than profoundly emotional; the instrumentation marks a great advance on previous work, since the main duty of accompanying the voice is thrown upon the string quartet, the harpsichord being reserved exclusively for the noisy instrumental ritornelli. In his opera Teodora (1697) he originated the use of the orchestral ritornello.His last group of operas, composed for Rome, exhibit a deeper poetic feeling, a broad and dignified style of melody, a strong dramatic sense, especially in accompanied recitatives, a device which he himself had been
the first to use as early as 1686 (Olimpia vendicata) and a much more modern style of orchestration, the horns appearing for the first time, and being treated with striking effect.Besides the operas, oratorios (Agar et Ismaele esiliati, 1684; Christmas Oratorio, c. 1705; S. Filippo Neri, 1714; and others) and serenatas, which all exhibit a similar style, Scarlatti composed upwards of five hundred chamber-cantatas for solo voice. These represent the most intellectual type of chamber-music of their period, and it is to be regretted that they have remained almost entirely in manuscript, since a careful study of them is indispensable to anyone who wishes to form an adequate idea of Scarlatti's development.His few remaining masses (the story of his having composed two hundred is hardly credible) and church music in general are comparatively unimportant, except the great St Cecilia Mass (1721), which is one of the first attempts at the style which reached its height in the great masses of Johann Sebastian Bach and Beethoven. His instrumental music, though not without interest, is curiously antiquated as compared with his vocal works. Alessandro composed 115 operas as well as oratorios, Masses, cantatas (many solo), madrigals, concerti grossi, harpsichord and chamber cantatas (of which he wrote about 600).. When Handel visited Italy between 1706 and 1710, he met Alessandro and may have studied with him.
Domenico Scarlatti Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples on October 26th, 1685. The high rank of his godparents is proof of the esteem in which his father, Alessandro Scarlatti, was held as maestro di cappella. Domenico's musical gifts developed with an almost prodigious rapidity. At the age of sixteen he became a musician at the chapel royal, and two years later father and son left Naples and settled in Rome, where Domenico became the pupil of the most eminent musicians in Italy. The originality of Bernardo Pasquini"s inventions and his skill in elaborating them, and Francesco Gasparini's solid science and intense vitality united to form the basis on which Domenico developed his own genius. His association with Corelli (Gasparini being a pupil of Corelli) also contributed to the evolution of his adolescent genius and soon Domenico Scarlatti became famous in his country principally as a harpsichordist. He served for five years (1714-19) as maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia in the Vatican. He composed at least one oratorio (1709) and more than a dozen operas for his father's Neapolitan theatre, S Bartolomeo (1703-4), the Roman Palazzo Zuccari (1710-14), and Teatro Capranica (1715, 1718). His patrons in Rome included the exiled Polish queen Maria Casimira (1709-14) and the Portuguese ambassador to the Vatican, the Marquis de Fontes (from 1714), who in 1720 was to succeed in winning Scarlatti for the patriarchal chapel in Lisbon (his serenata, Applause genetliaco, was performed at the Portuguese Embassy in 1714 and his Contesa delle stagioni at the Lisbon royal chapel in 1720). Scarlatti was also a familiar figure at the weekly meetings of the Accademie Poetico-Musicali hosted by the indefatigable music-lover and entertainer Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, at which the finest musicians in Rome met and performed chamber music. There Scarlatti met Handel, who had been born in the same year as Scarlatti. At the time of their meeting, in 1708, they were both twenty-three, and were prevailed upon to compete together at the instigation and under the refereeship of Ottoboni; they were adjudged equal on the harpsichord, but Handel was considered the winner on the organ. Thenceforward they held each other in that mutual respect which forms the surest basis for a life friendship. Through Ottoboni, Scarlatti also met Thomas Roseingrave who became his enthusiastic champion and, back in London, published the first edition of Scarlatti's Essercizi per gravicembalo (1738-9) from which, in turn, the Newcastle-born English composer Charles Avison drew material from at least 29 Scarlatti sonatas to produce a set of 12 concertos in 1744. Joseph Kelway and Thomas Arne also helped to popularize Scarlatti's music in England. Attracted by the unknown, Scarlatti abandoned the post of maestro di cappella at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Natural curiosity and the fascination of distant countries induced him to undertake a voyage to London, where his opera Narciso met with only a moderate success. From London Scarlatti went to Lisbon (1720-28). As a harpsichordist at the royal court he was entrusted with the musical education of the princesses. The death of his father recalled him to Naples in 1725, but he did not long remain in his native town. His old pupil, the Portuguese princess, who had married Ferdinand VI, invited him to the Spanish court. Scarlatti accepted and in 1733 after a period in Seville (from 1729-33) he went to Madrid, where he lived until his death. With the thorough musical grounding he brought with him from Italy, and his own brilliance on the harpsichord, Scarlatti immersed himself in the folk tunes and dance rhythms of Spain, with their distinctive
Moorish (Arabic) and later gypsy influences. He composed more than 500 harpsichord sonatas, unique in their total originality, and the use of the accacciatura, the 'simultaneous mordent', the 'vamp' (usually at the beginning of the second half of a sonata). The "folk" element is constantly present throughout these works. In addition, Scarlatti also composed at least 17 separate sinfonias and a harpsichord concerto. He exerted a major influence on such Portuguese and Spanish contemporaries as Carlos de Seixas and Antonio Soler. Scarlatti returned to Italy on three occasions. In 1724 in Rome he met Quantz and Farinelli, who himself joined the Spanish court in 1737. In 1725 he returned at the death of his father in Naples - where he met Hasse. And in 1728 he returned to Rome, where he met and married his first wife by whom he had five children (she died in 1739, and by 1742 he was married again, to a Spanish woman, by whom he had four more children). In 1738, sponsored by King John V of Portugal, he passed secret trials to become a Knight of the Order of Santiago, and about 1740 Velasco painted the portrait which heads this page, and for which he wore the full regalia of the Order. He died in Madrid on July 23, 1757. Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti he composed in a variety of musical forms although today he is known almost exclusively for his 555 keyboard sonatas.Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children and a younger brother to Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, also a musician. He most likely first studied under his father, the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti; other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, and Bernardo Pasquini, all of whom may have influenced his musical style.He became a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples in 1701. In 1704, he revised Carlo Francesco Pollarolo's opera Irene for performance at Naples. Soon after, his father sent him to Venice; no record exists of his next four years. In 1709 he went to Rome in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire, where he met Thomas Roseingrave. Scarlatti was already an eminent harpsichordist: there is a story of a trial of skill with George Frideric Handel at the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome where he was judged possibly superior to Handel on that instrument, although inferior on the organ. Later in life, he was known to cross himself in veneration when speaking of Handel's skill.In Rome, Scarlatti composed several operas for Queen Casimira's private theatre. He was Maestro Di Cappella at St. Peter's from 1715 to 1719. In 1719 he travelled to London to direct his opera Narciso at the King's Theatre.According to Vicente Bicchi (Papal Nuncio at the time), Domenico Scarlatti arrived in Lisbon on 29 November 1719. There he taught music to the Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. He left Lisbon on 28 January 1727 for Rome, where he married Maria Caterina Gentili on 6 May 1728. In 1729 he moved to Sevilla, staying for four years and gaining a knowledge of flamenco. In 1733 he went to Madrid as music master to Princess Maria Barbara, who had married into the Spanish royal house. The Princess later became Queen of Spain, and as a result Scarlatti remained in the country for the remaining twenty-five years of his life, and had five children there. After the death of his first wife in 1742, he married a Spaniard, Anastasia Maxarti Ximenes. Among his compositions during his time in Madrid were a number of the 555 keyboard sonatas for which he is best known.Scarlatti befriended the castrato singer Farinelli, a fellow Neapolitan also enjoying royal patronage in Madrid. The musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick acknowledged that Farinelli's correspondence provides "most of the direct information about Scarlatti that has transmitted itself to our day." Domenico Scarlatti died in Madrid, at the age of 71. His residence on Calle Leganitos is designated with a historical plaque, and his descendants still live in Madrid.Only a small fraction of Scarlatti's compositions were published during his lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 30 Essercizi ("Exercises"). These were rapturously received throughout Europe, and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Dr. Charles Burney.The many sonatas which were unpublished during Scarlatti's lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the two and a half centuries since. Scarlatti has, however, attracted notable admirers, including Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Heinrich Schenker, Vladimir Horowitz, Emil Gilels, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Marc-André Hamelin.Frédéric Chopin, as a piano teacher, notably wrote:
"Those of my dear colleagues who teach the piano are unhappy that I make my own pupils work on Scarlatti. But I am surprised that they are so blinkered. His music contains finger-exercises aplenty and more than a touch of the most elevated spirituality. Sometimes he is even a match for Mozart. If I were not afraid of incurring the disapprobation of numerous fools, I would play Scarlatti at my concerts. I maintain that the day will come when Scarlatti's music will often be played at concerts and that audiences will appreciate and enjoy it".[1]
Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and mostly written for the harpsichord or the earliest pianofortes. (There are four for organ, and a few for small instrumental group). Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys.Other distinctive attributes of Scarlatti's style are the following: The influence of Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) folk music. An example is Scarlatti's use of the
Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music. Many of Scarlatti's figurations and dissonances are suggestive of the guitar.
A formal device in which each half of a sonata leads to a pivotal point, which the Scarlatti scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick termed "the crux", and which is sometimes underlined by a pause or fermata. Before the crux, Scarlatti sonatas often contain their main thematic variety, and after the crux the music makes more use of repetitive figurations as it modulates away from the home key (in the first half) or back to the home key (in the second half).
The harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick produced an edition of the sonatas in 1953, and the numbering from this edition is now nearly always used – the Kk. or K. number. Previously, the numbering commonly used was from the 1906 edition compiled by the Neapolitan pianist Alessandro Longo (L. numbers). Kirkpatrick's numbering is chronological, while Longo's ordering is a result of his grouping the sonatas into "suites". In 1967 the Italian musicologist Giorgio Pestelli published a revised catalogue (using P. numbers), which corrected what he considered to be some anachronisms. See [1] for a list converting Longo, Kirkpatrick and Pestelli numbers of Scarlatti's sonatas.Aside from his many sonatas he composed a quantity of operas and cantatas, symphonias, and liturgical pieces. Well known works include the Stabat Mater of 1715 and the beautiful Salve Regina of 1757 that is thought to be his last composition.
Benedetto MarcelloBorn: August 1, 1686 - Venice, ItalyDied: July 24, 1739 - Brescia, ItalyItalian composer and writer, especially remembered for two works: the satirical pamphlet Il teatro alla moda (1720); and Estro poeticoarmonico (1724–26), a setting for voices and instruments of the first 50 psalms in an Italian paraphrase by G. Giustiniani.Benedetto Marcello was an Italian composer, writer, advocate, magistrate, and teacher. He was a member of a noble family and his compositions are frequently referred to as Patrizio Veneto. Although he was a music student of Antonio Lotti and Francesco Gasparini, his father wanted Benedetto to devote himself to law.Indeed, Benedetto Marcello combined a life in law and public service with one in music. Marcello served the Venetian Republic as a magistrate from about 1708 until 1728, when he was exiled to the resort city of Pula, now in Croatia. In 1711 he was appointed member of the Council of Forty (in Venice's central government), and in 1730 he went to Pola as Provveditore (district governor. In 1738 Marcello was appointed to his final position as chief financial officer of the city of Brescia, but died after less than a year in this job on or around his 53rd birthday.Benedetto Marcello was what 18th century chroniclers called a "dilettante"; not a dabbler as in the current vernacular, but an aristocrat who also pursued musical composition as a sideline (one of his appellations was 'Princeps musicae'). Marcello was a younger contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi in Venice and his instrumental music enjoys a Vivaldian flavor.As a composer, Benedetto Marcello was best known in his lifetime and is now still best remembered for his massively influential eight-volume publication Estro poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724-1726), popularly known as the "Psalmi." It is a collection of the first 50 Psalms (as paraphrased in Italian by his friend G. Giustiniani.) musical settings for for voices, figured bass (a continuo notation), and occasional soloist instruments. Marcello's Psalms were heard during the 18th century at concerts in Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig
and London. In Rome, Cardinal Ottoboni decreed that every one of his accademie was to begin with a composition from the Estro poetico-armonico. Innumerable reprintings, as well as translations even into Russian, appeared in Europe during the 19th century. They were much admired by Charles Avison, who with John Garth brought out an edition with English words (London, 1757). Marcello's sacred vocal music was revered by most of his contemporaries as representing the supreme example of contrapuntal technique, and he was in use in teaching through the end of the 19th century. Now, unfortunately, this monumental work is practically unknown except to specialists.Scarcely less popular was his treatise, Il teatro alla moda (1720), a satire that skewered the opera world of his time. Marcello wrote nearly 400 cantatas, some so well known that they exist in up to 25 contemporary manuscript copies, in addition to oratorios, operas, and nearly 100 small chamber works for singers. His surviving instrumental catalog is less generous, mostly consisting of keyboard sonatas, but also containing a few sinfonias and concertos. All of Marcello's instrumental music was composed by 1710 or thereabouts; the set of 12 concerti published as Marcello's "Op. 1" in 1708 is lacking its first violin part.The library of the Brussels Conservatoire possesses some interesting volumes of chamber-cantatas composed by Marcello for his mistress. Although Benedetto Marcello wrote an opera called La Fede riconosciuta and produced it in Vicenza in 1702, he had little sympathy with this form of composition, as evidenced in his writings. He vented his opinions on the state of musical drama at the time in the satirical pamphlet Il teatro alla moda, published anonymously in Venice in 1720. This little work, which was frequently reprinted, is not only extremely amusing, but is most valuable as a contribution to the history of opera.Before the early years of the 20th century, any list of significant Western composers from past eras would have included the name of Benedetto Marcello. Through his advocacy of a return to the proportional values and simplicity of ancient Greco-Roman civilization, Marcello helped set the stage for the Classical era in Western music, soon to unseat the aesthetic norms of the Baroque in which Marcello lived and worked. Nonetheless, controversy and confusion surrounding his works and history have considerably dimmed Marcello's star. Many of the instrumental works once believed by Marcello are actually by others. Composer Alessandro Marcello (1669-1747) was Benedetto's older brother, and some of Alessandro's music has been misattributed to Benedetto. Various instrumental pieces attributed to Marcello are merely instrumental arrangements of his Psalmi, in some cases made decades after his death. Benedetto Marcello's music is "characterized by imagination and a fine technique and includes both counterpoint and progressive, galant features" (Grove, 1994). On the other hand, "Today his music is generally found dry and quirkish." (Oxford Composer Companion J.S. Bach, 1999). The composer Joachim Raff wrote an opera entitled Benedetto Marcello, based loosely on the life of Marcello.Born in Venice, Benedetto Marcello was a member of a noble family and his compositions are frequently referred to as Patrizio Veneto. Although he was a music student of Antonio Lotti and Francesco Gasparini, his father wanted Benedetto to devote himself to law. Benedetto managed to combine a life in law and public service with one in music. In 1711 he was appointed member of the Council of Forty (in Venice's central government), and in 1730 he went to Pola as Provveditore (district governor). Due to his health having been "impaired by the climate" of Istria, Marcello retired after eight years to Brescia in the capacity of Camerlengo where he died of tuberculosis in 1739.Benedetto Marcello was the brother of Alessandro Marcello, also a notable composer. On 20 May 1728 Benedetto Marcello married his singing student Rosanna Scalfi in a secret ceremony. However, as a nobleman his marriage to a commoner was unlawful and after Marcello's death the marriage was declared null by the state. Rosanna was unable to inherit his estate, and filed suit in 1742 against Benedetto's brother Alessandro Marcello, seeking financial support.[1]
Marcello composed a diversity of music including considerable church music, oratorios, hundreds of solo cantatas, duets, sonatas, concertos and sinfonias. Marcello was a younger contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi in Venice and his instrumental music enjoys a Vivaldian flavor.As a composer, Marcello was best known in his lifetime and is now still best remembered for his Estro poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724–1727), a musical setting for voices, figured bass (a continuo notation), and occasional soloist instruments of the first fifty Psalms, as paraphrased in Italian by his friend G. Giustiniani. They were much admired by Charles Avison, who with John Garth brought out an edition with English words (London, 1757).The library of the Brussels Conservatoire possesses some interesting volumes of chamber-cantatas composed by Marcello for his mistress. Although Benedetto Marcello wrote an opera called La Fede
riconosciuta and produced it in Vicenza in 1702, he had little sympathy with this form of composition, as evidenced in his writings (see below).Benedetto Marcello's music is "characterized by imagination and a fine technique and includes both counterpoint and progressive, galant features" (Grove, 1994).With the poet Antonio Conti he wrote a series of experimental long cantatas - a duet, Il Timoteo, then five monologues, Cantone, Lucrezia, Andromaca, Arianna abandonnata, and finally Cassandra.Marcello composed a diversity of music including considerable church music, oratorios, hundreds of solo cantatas, duets, sonatas, concertos and sinfonias. Marcello was a younger contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi in Venice and his instrumental music enjoys a Vivaldian flavor.As a composer, Marcello was best known in his lifetime and is now still best remembered for his Estro poetico-armonico (Venice, 1724-1727), a musical setting for voices, figured bass (a continuo notation), and occasional soloist instruments of the first fifty Psalms, as paraphrased in Italian by his friend G. Giustiniani. They were much admired by Charles Avison, who with John Garth brought out an edition with English words (London, 1757).The library of the Brussels Conservatoire possesses some interesting volumes of chamber-cantatas composed by Marcello for his mistress. Although Benedetto Marcello wrote an opera called La Fede riconosciuta and produced it in Vicenza in 1702, he had little sympathy with this form of composition, as evidenced in his writings The celebrated Concerto in D Minor for oboe and strings, long attributed to Benedetto, is now known to have been composed by his brother Alessandro (c. 1684–1750).
Alessandro MarcelloBorn: August 24, 1669 - Venice, ItalyDied: June 19, 1747 - Padua, ItalyAlessandro Marcello was an Italian nobleman and dilettante who excelled in various areas, including poetry, philosophy, mathematics and, perhaps most notably, music. Much of what is known about Alessandro Marcello comes not from his few compositions, but from his professional career and social activities as a member of Venice's nobility. Both he and his younger and more famous brother Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739) studied law and were members of the city-state's high council. Alessandro was educated at the Collegio di S. Antonio.After studies, Alessandro Marcello joined the Venetian Arcadian society, the Accademia degli Animosi in 1698, and served the city as a diplomat in the Levant and the Peloponnese in 1700 and 1701. After returning to Venice, he took on a series of judiciary positions while dabbling in a number of creative endeavors. He was responsible for paintings found in the family palaces and parish church and, after joining the literary society, the Accademia della Crusca, published eight books of couplets, Ozii giovanili, in 1719. That same year, he was named head of the Accademia degli Animosi, and as such, he did much to expand its collection of musical instruments, many of which are now in Rome's National Museum of Musical Instruments. A slightly older contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi, Marcello held concerts at his hometown of Venice. Being a nobleman, he played and wrote music for pleasure alone.Alessandro Marcello's compositional output is small, consisting of not much more than a dozen each of chamber cantatas, violin sonatas, and concertos, as well as several arias and canzonets. Most of his works were published under the pseudonym "Eterio Stinfalico," his name as a member of the celebrated Arcadian Academy (Pontificia Accademia degli Arcadi). He composed and published several sets of concertos, including six concertos under the title of La Cetra (The Lyre). Although his works are infrequently performed today, Marcello is regarded as a very competent composer. His La Cetra concertos are "unusual for their wind solo parts, concision and use of counterpoint within a broadly Vivaldian style," according to Grove, "placing them as a last outpost of the classic Venetian Baroque concerto." His cantatas dealt primarily with pastoral subjects and contained topical references, and, befitting his station in society, were clearly intended for Venice's and Rome's best singers, including Farinelli, Checchino, Laura and Virginia Predieri, and Benedetto's student, Faustina Bordoni. His instrumental works reflect a knowledge and understanding of the differences in French, Italian, and German music of the time, including choices of instruments for both the solo and continuo parts and use of ornamentation. Of all of his works, what is best known is the Adagio from the Oboe Concerto, which has become a staple of wedding music collections.Alessandro Marcello's small but distinguished musical output includes a concerto in D minor for oboe, strings and basso continuo, published about 1717 at Amsterdam in a concerto anthology and transcribed by J.S. Bach as concerto for solo harpsichord in D minor (as BWV 974), presumably from an earlier
manuscript. Using the pseudonym "Eterio Stinfalico" is one of the reasons why it was not known until the mid-20th century thar this fine, typically Venetian concerto was composed by Alessandro Marcello. In the past it has sometimes been attributed to Antonio Vivaldi as well as to Benedetto Marcello, but there is no reason to doubt Alessandro's authorship.Alessandro Marcello (24 August 1669[1] – 19 June 1747) was an Italian nobleman, poet, philosopher, mathematician and musician.Marcello held concerts at his hometown of Venice. He composed and published several sets of concertos, including six concertos under the title of La Cetra (The Lyre), as well as cantatas, arias, canzonets, and violin sonatas. Marcello, being a slightly older contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi, often composed under the pseudonym Eterio Stinfalico, his name as a member of the celebrated Arcadian Academy (Pontificia Accademia degli Arcadi). He died in Padua in 1747.Alessandro's brother was Benedetto Marcello, also a composer, who illegally married his singing student Rosanna Scalfi in 1728. After his death she was unable to inherit his estate, and in 1742 she filed suit against Alessandro Marcello, seeking financial support.[2]
Although his works are infrequently performed today, Marcello is regarded as a very competent composer. His La Cetra concertos are "unusual for their wind solo parts, concision and use of counterpoint within a broadly Vivaldian style," according to Grove, "placing them as a last outpost of the classic Venetian Baroque concerto."A concerto Marcello wrote in D minor for oboe, strings and basso continuo is perhaps his best-known work. Its worth was affirmed by Johann Sebastian Bach who transcribed it for harpsichord (BWV 974). A number of editions have been published of the famous Oboe Concerto in D minor. The edition in C minor is credited to Benedetto Marcello.
Giuseppe TorelliBorn: April 22, 1658 - Verona, ItalyDied: February 8, 1709 - Bologna, ItalyGiuseppe Torelli was an Italian violist and violinist, pedagogue and composer, who ranks with Arcangelo Corelli among the developers of the Baroque concerto and concerto grosso. Not much is known about his early years, and it is not known with whom he studied violin though it has been speculated that he was a pupil of Leonardo Brugnoli or Bartolomeo Laurenti, and it has also been suggested that Giuliano Massaroti was one of Torelli's earliest teachers, owing to his close proximity in Verona. Torelli departed Verona in 1681 and shortly afterward may have taken the post as maestro di cappella at the Imola Cathedral in the Bologna province. An accomplished string player, he also began studying composition with Giacomo Antonio Perti around this time.
On June 27, 1684, at the age of 26, Giuseppe Torelli became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica as suonatore di violino. He was active in the orchestra of the huge Basilica di San Petronio in Bologna from 1686 to 1695 as a violist. His first published works were the ten Sonate a 3, for violin and basso continuo, and 12 Concerto da camera for two violins and basso continuo. Both appeared in 1686, and were probably written shortly after his arrival in Bologna. In 1687, Torelli published his third collection of works, this one a set of 12 Sinfonie, for two to four instruments. His next (1688) was the 12 Concertino per camera, for violin and cello. Around 1690 Torelli began writing his first trumpet works, the Suonata con stromenti e tromba. The composer's growing interest in the trumpet, unusual for a string player, likely owed something to the virtuoso trumpeter Giovanni Pellegrino Brandi, who occasionally performed with the San Petronio orchestra, of which Torelli was a member.In 1692 Giuseppe Torelli published another collection of works, the Sinfonie a 3 e concerti a 4. Four years later he departed Bologna, eventually reaching Ansbach, Germany, where he engaged in some joint musical ventures with his friend, Pistocchi, the famous castrato and composer. There are accounts that during this time, Torelli toured Germany with Pistocchi. Torelli was appointed maestro di concerto in Ansbach, probably in 1697. It appears that during his tenure there, he wrote very little music, apparently finding the duties demanding. The composer was known to suffer from hypochondria in his later years, and the condition may well have been worsening for him while away from home.By 1698 Giuseppe Torelli was maestro di concerto at the court of Georg Friedrich II, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, where his Concerti musicali a quattro, Op. 6 were published. He conducted there the
orchestra for Le pazzie d'amore e dell'interesse, an idea drammatica composed by the maestro di cappella, the castrato Francesco Antonio Pistocchi, before leaving for Vienna in December 1699. He returned to Bologna sometime before February (1701), when he is listed as a violinist in the newly re-formed cappella musicale at San Petronio, directed by his former composition teacher Perti. Torelli and Pistocchi seem to have appeared in a number of concerts together in the early 1700's, most likely earning substantial fees. Relatively little is known about Torelli in his final years, except that he composed little music. His only significant effort was the 12 Concerti grossi con una pastorale, Op. 8, which features one of his more popular pieces, the so-called Christmas Eve Concerto (No. 6). Giuseppe Torelli died in Bologna in 1709, where his manuscripts are conserved in the San Petronio archives. Giuseppe's brother, Felice Torelli, was a Bolognese painter of modest reputation, who went on to be a founding member of the Accademia Clementina. The most notable amongst Giuseppe's many pupils was Francesco Manfredini.Giuseppe Torelli's music served as an essential link in the evolution of the concerto grosso and and the solo concerto, for strings and continuo forms. He was also the most prolific Italian composer for the trumpet, with some three dozen pieces, variously entitled sonata, sinfonia, or concerto, for one, two, or four trumpets. His works were published in eight collections of concertos, sinfonias, and sonatas, all appearing chronologically. Thus, one can trace his progress from the rather conventional style of the early chamber-oriented concertos and sonatas to the more expansive and stronger efforts of the middle sets. The last two of his collections, 12 Concerti musicali and 12 Concerti grossi con una pastorale are the flowering of his efforts in the these genres. The Concerti musicali are more deftly written than his previous efforts, with ritornellos taking a more prominent role, while the Concerti grossi show his full grasp of structure and a crucial balancing of the roles of the soloist and the orchestral players. Apart from the published collections many other works (sinfonias, concertos, sonatas, etc.) remain in manuscript.Giuseppe Torelli was the probable author of a violin concerto in D minor which J.S. Bach transcribed for harpsichord (BWV 979, in B minor) at Weimar in about 1714. Torelli's name appears on a manuscript of the original version discovered in 1958 in the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, by the Belgian musicologist Albert vander Linden.In 1967 the Swedish scholar Peter Ryom came across a manuscript of the same work, bearing the name of Antonio Vivaldi, in the collection of Christian Wenster of Lund. On stylistic grounds the attribution to Torelli seems to be the correct one, and this is supported by the concerto's fourmovement structure: [Adagio]; Allegro-AdagioAllegro-Adagio; Andante-Adagio; and Allegro.Selected Works10 Sonate a 3, with Basso Continuo, Op. 1. (1686)12 Concertino per camera for Violin and Cello, Op. 4. (1688)12 Concerti musicali a quattro, Op. 6. (1698)12 Concerti grossi con una pastorale per il Santissimo Natale, Op. 8. (1709)More than 30 concertos for 1 to 4 trumpets, including a Sinfonia à 4, composed after 1702 and unpublished during his lifetime, which is a concerto for four trumpets, with an orchestra requiring a minimum of four oboes, two bassoons, trombone, timpani, four violins, two violas, four cellos, two double basses, and continuo.Giuseppe Torelli (April 22, 1658 – February 8, 1709) was an Italian violist, violinist, teacher, and composer.Torelli is most remembered for his contributions to the development of the instrumental concerto (Newman 1972, p. 142), especially concerti grossi and the solo concerto, for strings and continuo, as well as being the most prolific Baroque composer for trumpets (Tarr 1974).Torelli was born in Verona. It is not known with whom he studied violin though it has been speculated that he was a pupil of Leonardo Brugnoli or Bartolomeo Laurenti, but it is certain that he studied composition with Giacomo Antonio Perti (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). On June 27, 1684, at the age of 26, he became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica as suonatore di violino (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). By 1698 he was maestro di concerto at the court of Georg Friedrich II, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, where he conducted the orchestra for Le pazzie d'amore e dell'interesse, an idea drammatica composed by the maestro di cappella, the castrato Francesco Antonio Pistocchi, before leaving for Vienna in December 1699 (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001). He returned to Bologna sometime before February (1701), when he is listed as a violinist in the newly re-formed cappella musicale at San Petronio, directed by his former composition teacher Perti (Schnoebelen and Vanscheeuwijk 2001).
He died in Bologna in 1709, where his manuscripts are conserved in the San Petronio archives. Giuseppe's brother, Felice Torelli, was a Bolognese painter of modest reputation, who went on to be a founding member of the Accademia Clementina. The most notable amongst Giuseppe's many pupils was Francesco Manfredini. 10 Sonate a 3, with Basso Continuo, op. 1 (1686). 12 Concerto da camera, for 2 violins and basso continuo, op. 2 (1686). 12 Sinfonie, for 2–4 instruments, op. 3 (1687). 12 Concertino per camera for Violin and Cello, op. 4 (1688). 12 Sinfonie a 3 e concerti a 4, op. 5 (1692). 12 Concerti musicali a quattro, op. 6 (1698). 12 Concerti grossi con una pastorale per il Santissimo Natale, op. 8 (1709). More than 30 concertos for 1 to 4 trumpets, including a Sinfonia à 4, composed after 1702 (Tarr
1974) and unpublished during his lifetime, which is a concerto for four trumpets, with an orchestra requiring a minimum of four oboes, two bassoons, trombone, timpani, four violins, two violas, four cellos, two double basses, and continuo.
Pietro Antonio LocatelliBorn: September 3, 1695 - Bergamo, ItalyDied: March 30, 1764 - Amsterdam, HollandPietro Antonio Locatelli was an Italian composer and violinist. Pietro Antonio Locatelli was born in 1695 in the Italian city of Bergamo. He was still a young boy when his astonishing talent for playing the violin revealed itself. Joining the Bergamo Cathedral instrumental ensemble as a boy, he left it in 1711 at the age of sixteen to go to Rome. For a violinist on the threshold of his career, Rome was the place to be as it was there that Arcangelo Corelli lived. Although Locatelli did not actually study with Corelli, he certainly absorbed a good deal of his influence.Until early in 1723 Pietro Locatelli remained in Rome, although little is known about the ensuing period of his life because we do not know where he was. In 1725 his name appears in Mantua, where Count Philipp von Hesse-Darmstadt appointed him virtuoso da camera (Mantua was ruled by the House of Habsburg). However, there are no indications that Locatelli actually was in Mantua; he could simply have been passing through, his short stay remaining undocumented. After 1725 his name turns up successively in Venice, Munich and Berlin. In 1728 he was in Frankfurt and Kassel. Wherever he travelled he gave concerts and received rapturous acclaim for his virtuosic playing.Pietro Locatelli was unable to settle anywhere, however, and did not wish to spend the rest of his life as a court musician. In 1729 he therefore moved to Amsterdam, a city lacking a court but which did offer ample opportunities for him to publish his compositions. Amsterdam was known throughout Europe for this aspect of its musical scene and many Italian composers, including Vivaldi, published their music there even though they themselves never visited the city. Having had every composition since his Opus 1 (composed in 1721) published by Roger en Le Cène in Amsterdam, Locatelli lived and worked there as an 'Italian music master' from 1729 until his death in 1764.Amsterdam offered Pietro Locatelli many advantages: he was able to work there as a free musician, unfettered to a church or court. He could compose whatever and whenever he wanted. For an 18th-century composer this was highly exceptional. He participated little in the city's music scene. He had no pupils and never played in public. On Wednesday evenings he did, however, give concerts in private houses, which were highly fashionable among the city's beau monde. Being a master at the violin, Locatelli preferred not to have any professional musicians attend, a suspected reason for which is that he was afraid of their imitating him. For a musician who in terms of virtuosity left his contemporaries far in his wake - see L'Arte del Violino concertos Op. 3 - such fear is remarkable. Thus the claim is occasionally made that Locatelli himself was not a virtuoso at all, rather he was merely afraid of making mistakes. In his time it was said that he had never played a wrong note - except once, when his little finger slipped and got stuck in the bridge of his instrument.The States of Holland and West Friesland granted Pietero Locatelli permission to print his own music and to sell it from home. In addition to selling his compositions he also sold books he had acquired from all over Europe. They were about all sorts of subjects, in no way restricted to music alone but embracing theatre, literature and visual art. As a composer and merchant he was therefore able to support himself. Given his
wealth when he died in 1764 (an enormous library was discovered in his house) and the extent to which his music circulated throughout Europe, he must have possessed a genuine Dutch commercial streak.WorksPietro Locatelli's works are mainly for the violin, an instrument on which he was a virtuoso. His most significant publication is probably the Arte del violino, opus 3, a collection of twelve concertos for the instrument which incorporate twenty four technically demanding capriccios (or caprices) - these could function as extended cadenzas, but are now usually extracted and played in isolation from the concertos. He also wrote violin sonatas, a cello sonata, trio sonatas, concerti grossi and a set of flute sonatas (his Op. 2). His early works show the influence of Arcangelo Corelli, while later pieces are closer to Antonio Vivaldi in style.Pietro Locatelli may be best known to the modern public for a piece that does not actually exist. Master and Commander, the first novel in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, begins with the famous line: 'The music-room in the governor's house at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.' In fact, Locatelli is not known to have written any quartets.L'Arte del Violino, printed in Amsterdam in 1733, was one of the most influential musical publications of the early 18th century. It is a collection of twelve concertos for solo violin, strings and basso continuo, with a 'capriccio' for unaccompanied violin inserted into the first and last movements of each concerto as a sort of cadenza.Vocal and instrumental pieces by a great variety composers must have been included in the weekly series of "ordinary" concerts by the Collegium Musicum, but it is impossible to reconstruct, even in the broadest outlines, any of the more than five hundred two-hour programs for which J.S. Bach was responsible. Pertinent performing materials from the 1730's are extremely sparse; among the traceable compositions are four orchestral overtures by Johann Bernhard Bach; the Cantata Armida Abbandonata (HWV 105) by Georg Frideric Handel; the Concerto Grosso in F minor, Op. 1, No. 8, by Pietro Locatelli; three Italian cantatas (Dal primo foco in cui penai, Sopra un colle fiorito, and Ecco l'infausto lido) by Nicola Porpora; and the cantata Se amor con un contento by Alessandro Scarlatti. (Glöckner 1990, pp 89f.) Additionally, "Mr. Bach de Leipzig" is found among the subscribers to Georg Philipp Telemann's Nouveaux Quatuors (flute quartets), published in Paris in 1738, which suggests that he wanted the pieces for the Collegium series. Although these few works and composers cannot be considered representative at all, they confirm that the repertoire was both instrumental and vocal, that Italian solo cantatas played a role, and that the newest kind of music (such as the N. Porpora cantatas and the G.P. Telemann quartets) was introduced.Christoph Wolff: Johann Sebastian Bach The Learned Musician (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), p. 333List of published worksOp. 1 (1721) - 12 concerti grossi (in F, C minor, B flat, E minor, D, C minor, F, F minor, D, C, C minor, G minor)Op. 2 (1732) - 12 flute sonatas (in G, D, B flat, G, D, G minor, A, F, E, G, D, G)Op. 3 (1733) - L' arte del violino 12 violin concertos (in D, C minor, F, E, C, G minor, B flat, E minor, G, F minor, A, D Il laberinto armonico)Op. 4 (1735) - 6 Introduttione teatrale (in D, F, B flat, G, D, C) and 6 concerti grossi (in D, F, G, E, C minor, F)Op. 5 (1736) - 6 trio sonatas (in G, E minor, E, C, D minor, G Bizarria)Op. 6 (1737) - 12 violin sonatas (in F minor, F, E, A, G minor, D, C minor, C, B minor, A minor, E flat, D minor)Op. 7 (1741) - 6 concerti a quatro (in D, B flat, G, F, G minor, E flat)Op. 8 (1744) - 10 trio sonatas (in F, D, G minor, C, G, E flat, A, D, F minor, A)
Arcangelo CorelliBorn: February 17, 1653 - Fusignano, near Bolgna, Romagna (in the current-day province of Ravenna), ItalyDied: January 8, 1713 - Rome, ItalyArcangelo Corelli was an Italian violinist and composer of Baroque music, who exercised a wide influence on his contemporaries and on the succeeding generation of composers. Little is known about his early life. He was born in Fusignano, Italy, in 1653, a full generation before J.S. Bach or Georg Frideric Handel, and studied in Bologna, a distinguished musical center, then established himself in Rome in the 1670's. His
master on the violin was Giovanni Battista Bassani. Matteo Simonelli, the well-known singer of the pope’s chapel, taught him composition.His first major success was gained in Paris at the age of 19, and to this he owed his European reputation. From Paris, Arcangelo Corelli went to Germany. By 1679 had entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had taken up residence in Rome in 1655, after her abdication the year before, and had established there an academy of literati that later became the Arcadian Academy. Thanks to his musical achievements and growing international reputation he found no trouble in obtaining the support of a succession of influential patrons. History has remembered him with such titles as "Founder of Modern Violin Technique," the "World's First Great Violinist," and the "Father of the Concerto Grosso." In 1681 he was in the service of the electoral prince of Bavaria; between 1680 and 1685 he spent a considerable time in the house of his friend and fellow violinist-composer Cristiano Farinelli (believed to be the uncle of the celebrated castrato Farinelli).In 1685 Arcangelo Corelli was in Rome, where he led the festival performances of music for Queen Christina of Sweden and he was also a favourite of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, grand-nephew of another Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni who in 1689 became Pope Alexander VIII. From 1689 to 1690 he was in Modena; the Duke of Modena was generous to him. In 1708 he returned to Rome, living in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni. His visit to Naples, at the invitation of the king, took place in the same year.His contributions can be divided three ways, as violinist, composer, and teacher. It was his skill on the new instrument known as the violin and his extensive and very popular concert tours throughout Europe, which did most to give that instrument its prominent place in music. It is probably correct to say that Corelli's popularity as a violinist was as great in his time as was Paganini's during the 19th century. Yet Corelli was not a virtuoso in the contemporary sense, for a beautiful singing tone alone distinguished great violinists in that day, and Corelli's tone quality was the most remarkable in all Europe according to reports. In addition, Corelli was the first person to organise the basic elements of violin technique.Arcangelo Corelli's popularity as a violinist was equalled by his acclaim as a composer. His music was performed and honoured throughout all Europe; in fact, his was the most popular instrumental music. It is important to note in this regard that a visit of respect to the great Corelli was an important part of the Italian tour of the young G.F. Handel. Yet Corelli's compositional output was rather small. All of his creations are included in six opus numbers, most of them being devoted to serious and popular sonatas and trio sonatas. In the Sonatas Op. 5 is found the famous "La Folia" Variations for violin and accompaniment. One of Corelli's famous students, Geminiani, thought so much of the Op. 5 Sonatas that he arranged all the works in that group as Concerti Grossi. However, it is in his own Concerti Grossi Op. 6 that Corelli reached his creative peak and climaxed all his musical contributions.Although Arcangelo Corelli was not the inventor of the Concerto Grosso principle, it was he who proved the potentialities of the form, popularised it, and wrote the first great music for it. Through his efforts, it achieved the same pre-eminent place in the baroque period of musical history that the symphony did in the classical period. Without Corelli's successful models, it would have been impossible for Antonio Vivaldi, G.F. Handel, and J.S. Bach to have given us their Concerto Grosso masterpieces.The Concerto Grosso form is built on the principle of contrasting two differently sized instrumental groups. In Corelli's, the smaller group consists of two violins and a cello, and the larger of a string orchestra. Dynamic markings in all the music of this period were based on the terrace principle; crescendo and diminuendi are unknown, contrasts between forte and piano and between the large and small string groups constituting the dynamic variety of the scores.Of all his compositions it was upon his Op. 6 that Arcangelo Corelli laboured most diligently and devotedly. Even though he wouldn't allow them to be published during his lifetime, they still became some of the most famous music of the time. The date of composition is not certain, for Corelli spent many years of his life writing and rewriting this music, beginning while still in his twenties.The Trio Sonata, an instrumental composition generally demanding the services of four players reading from three part-books, assumed enormous importance in Baroque music, developing from its earlier beginnings at the start of the 17th century to a late flowering in the work of G.F. Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, J.S. Bach and their contemporaries, alter the earlier achievements of Arcangelo Corelli in the form. Instrumentation of the trio sonata, possibly for commercial reasons, allowed some freedom of choice. Nevertheless the most frequently found arrangement became that for two violins and cello, with a harpsichord or other chordal instrument to fill out the harmony. The trio sonata was the foundation of the concerto grosso, the instrumental concerto that contrasted a concertino group of the four instruments of the trio sonata with the
full string orchestra, which might double louder passages.Arcangelo Corelli's dedications of his Sonatas mark his progress among the great patrons of Rome. He dedicated his first set of twelve Church Sonatas, Op. 1, published in 1681, to Queen Christina, describing the work as the first fruits of his studies. His second set of trio Sonatas, Chamber Sonatas, Op. 2, was published in 1685 with a dedication to a new patron, Cardinal Pamphili, whose service he entered in 1687, with the violinist Fornari and cellist Lulier. A third set of trio sonatas, a second group of twelve Church Sonatas, Op. 3, was issued in 1689, with a dedication to Francesco II of Modena, and a final set of a dozen Chamber Sonatas, Op. 4, was published in 1694 with a dedication to a new patron, Cardinal Ottoboni, the young nephew of Pope Alexander VIII, after Cardinal Pamphili's removal in 1690 to Bologna. Cardinal Ottoboni became Corelli's main patron, who made it possible for Corelli to pursue his career without monetary worries, and it would seem that no composer has ever had a more devoted or understanding patron.A. Corelli's achievements as a teacher were again outstanding. The style of execution introduced by Corelli and preserved by his pupils, such as Francesco Geminiani, Antonio Vivaldi, Pietro Antonio Locatelli, and many others, was of vital importance for the development of violin playing. It was A. Vivaldi who became Corelli's successor as a composer of the great Concerti Grossi and who greatly influenced the music of J.S. Bach. It has been said that the paths of all of the famous violinist-composers of 18th-century Italy lead to Arcangelo Corelli who was their "iconic point of reference." However, Corelli used only a limited portion of his instrument's . This may be seen from his writings; the parts for violin very rarely proceed above D on the highest string, sometimes reaching the E in 4th position on the highest string. The story has been told and retold that Corelli refused to play a passage which extended to A in altissimo in the overture to G.F. Handel’s oratorio il Trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno (premiered in Rome, 1708), and took serious offence when the composer played the note. Nevertheless, his compositions for the instrument mark an epoch in the history of chamber music. A. Corelli occupied a leading position in the musical life of Rome for some thirty years, performing as a violinist and directing performances often on occasions of the greatest public importance. He was received in the highest circles of the aristocracy, and for a long time presided at the celebrated Monday concerts in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni. His style of composition was much imitated and provided a model, both through a wide dissemination of works published in his lifetime and through the performance of these works in Rome.Corelli died a wealthy man in possession of a fortune of 120,000 marks and a valuable collection of pictures, the only luxury in which he had indulged. He left both to his benefactor and friend, who generously made over the money to Corelli's relatives. Corelli is buried in the Pantheon at Rome. But long before his death, he had taken a place among the immortal musicians of all time, and he maintains that exalted position today. One can still trace back many generations of violinists from student to teacher to Corelli.His compositions are distinguished by a beautiful flow of melody and by a mannerly treatment of the accompanying parts, which he is justly said to have liberated from the strict rules of counterpoint. He was the first composer specialising in instrumental music to become recognised as a 'classic', and one of the first to show clearly those qualities of restraint, balance, consistency, and attention to detail that one associates with the 18th century. His concerti grossi have often been popular in Western culture. For example, a portion of the Christmas Concerto, Op. 6 No. 8, is in the soundtrack of the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He is also referred to frequently in the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin.The trio sonatas established a style of fluent counterpoint which was taken as a universal model; the violin sonatas educated violinists everywhere in the essential technique of their instrument; the concertos, laid out in a typically Roman style with separate concertino (two violins, cello and continuo) and ripieno (the same, doubled orchestrally, plus violas), had a limited impact on the development of concerto form, but a stronger one on orchestration (see, for instance, the slow movement of J.S. Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto).J.S. Bach studied Corelli's music (making his own arrangements of it), and also had Corelli's music in the Leipzig library from which he conducted performances. J.S. Bach wrote a fugue for organ (BWV 579) on a subject of Corelli taken from the second movement of Op. 3 No. 4 of 1689. That apart, a general, diffused influence of Corelli is perceptible in his music. A 'walking bass', as used in the B minor Prelude in Part 1 of The Well-tempered Clavier (BWV 846-861), is a Corellian cliche; another is the half-close (Phrygian cadence) in the relative minor introducing, for example, the final movement of the Third Brandenburg Concerto. Works
Corelli composed 48 trio sonatas, 12 violin and continuo sonatas and 12 Concerti grossi.Six opuses are authentically ascribed to Corelli, together with a few other works.Op. 1: 12 sonatas da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1681)Op. 2: 12 sonatas da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1685)Op. 3: 12 sonatas da chiesa (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1689)Op. 4: 12 sonatas da camera (trio sonatas for 2 violins and continuo) (Rome 1694)Op. 5: 12 Suonati a violino e violone o cimbalo (6 sonatas da chiesa and 6 sonatas da camera for violin and continuo) (Rome 1700) The last sonata is a set of variations on La Folia.Op. 6: 12 concerti grossi (8 concerti da chiesa and 4 concerti da camera for concertino of 2 violins and cello, string ripieno and continuo) (Amsterdam 1714)Op. post.: 6 Sonate a tre WoO 5–10 (Amsterdam 1714)
Heinrich SchützBorn: October 9, 1585 - Köstritz, GermanyDied: November 6, 1672 - Dresden, GermanyHeinrich [Henrich] Schütz was a German composer and organist, generally regarded as the most important German composer before J.S. Bach and is often considered to be one of the most important composers of the 17th century along with Claudio Monteverdi. He wrote what is thought to be the first German opera, Dafne, performed at Torgau in 1627; however, the music has since been lost.Heinrich Schütz's musical talents were discovered by Moritz von Hessen-Kassel in 1599. After being a choir-boy he went on to study law at Marburg before going to Venice from 1609 to 1613 to study music with Giovanni Gabrieli. He subsequently had a short stint as organist at Kassel before moving to Dresden in 1615 to work as court composer to the Elector of Saxony.Heinrich Schütz held his Dresden post until the end of his life (sowing the seeds of what is now the Dresden Staatskapelle while there), but left Dresden itself on several occasions; in 1628 he went to Venice again, most likely meeting Claudio Monteverdi there - he may have studied with him - and in 1633, after the Thirty Years' War had disrupted life at the court, he took a post at Copenhagen. He returned full time to Dresden in 1641, and remained there for the rest of his life. He died from a stroke in 1672 at the age of 87.Heinrich Schütz's compositions show the influence of his two main teachers, Gabrieli (displayed most notably with Schütz's use of resplendent polychoral and concertato styles) and Monteverdi. Additionally, the influence of the Netherlandish composers of the 16th century is also prominent in his work. His best known works are in the field of sacred music, ranging from solo voice with instrumental accompaniment to a cappella choral music. Representative works include his three books of Symphoniae sacrae, the Psalms of David, the Sieben Worte Jesu Christi am Kreuz (the Seven Last Words on the Cross) and his three Passion settings. Schütz's music, while starting off in the most progressive styles early in his career, eventually grows into a style that is simple and almost austere, culminating with his late Passion settings. Practical considerations were certainly responsible for part of this change: the Thirty Years' War had devastated the musical infrastructure of Germany, and it was no longer practical or even possible to put on the gigantic works in the Venetian style which marked his earlier period.Heinrich Schütz was one of the last composers to write in a modal style, with non-functional harmonies often resulting from the interplay of voices; contrastingly, much of his music shows a strong tonal pull when approaching cadences. His music makes extensive use of imitation, in which entries often come in irregular order and at varied intervals. Fairly characteristic of Schütz's writing are intense dissonances caused by two or more voices moving correctly through dissonances against the implied harmony. Above all, his music displays extreme sensitivity to the accents and meaning of the text, which is often conveyed using special technical figures drawn from musica poetica, themselves drawn from or created in analogy to the verbal figures of Classical Rhetoric.Almost no secular music by Heinrich Schütz has survived, save for a few domestic songs (arien) and no purely instrumental music at all (unless one counts the short instrumental movement entitled "sinfonia" that encloses the dialogue of Die sieben Worte), even though he had a reputation as one of the finest organists in Germany.Heinrich Schütz was of great importance in bringing new musical ideas to Germany from Italy, and as such had a large influence on the German music which was to follow. The style of the north German organ school derives largely from Schütz (as well as from Netherlander Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck); a century later this music was to culminate in the work of J.S. Bach.
WorksThe following are published works. Most of these contain multiple pieces of music; there are over 500 total surviving individual pieces by Schütz.Il primo libro de madrigali (first book of madrigals) (Venice, 1611)Psalmen Davids (Book 1) (Dresden, 1619)Historia der frölichen und siegreichen Aufferstehung ... (History of the Resurrection of Jesus) (Dresden, 1623)Cantiones sacrae (Freiberg, 1625)Psalmen Davids (Book 2) (Freiberg, 1628)Symphoniae sacrae (Book 1) (Venice, 1629)Musicalische Exequien (Dresden, 1636)Kleiner geistlichen Concerten (Book 1) (Leipzig, 1636)Symphoniae sacrae (Book 2) (Dresden, 1647)Geistliche Chor-Music (Dresden, 1648)Symphoniae sacrae (Book 3) (Dresden, 1650)Zwölff geistliche Gesänge (Dresden, 1657)Psalmen Davids (revision of Book 2) (Dresden, 1661)
Georg Philipp TelemannBorn: March 14, 1681 - Magdeburg, GermanyDied: June 25, 1767 - Hamburg, GermanyThe German composer, Georg Philipp Telemann, belonged to a family that had long been connected with the Lutheran Church. His father was a clergyman, his mother the daughter of a clergyman, and his elder brother also took orders, a path that he too might have followed had it not been for his exceptional musical ability. As a child he showed considerable musical talent, mastering the violin, flute, zither and keyboard by the age of ten and composing an opera (Sigismundus, on a text by Postel) two years later to the consternation of his family (particularly his mother's side), who disapproved of music. However, such resistance served only to reinforce his determination to persevere in his studies through transcription and modeling his works on those of such composers as Agostino Steffani, Johann Rosenmüller, Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Caldara. After preparatory studies at the Hildesheim Gymnasium, he matriculated in law (at his mother's insistence) at Leipzig University in 1701. That he had little intention of putting aside his interest in music is evident from his stop at Halle, en route to Leipzig, in order to make the acquaintance of the young Georg Frideric Handel.It was while he was a student at Leipzig University that a career in music became inevitable. At first it was intended that he should study language and science, but he was already so capable a musician that within a year of his arrival he founded the student Collegium Musicum with which he gave public concerts (and which J.S. Bach was later to direct), wrote operatic works for the Leipzig Theater, and in 1703 became musical director of the Leipzig Opera and was appointed organist at the Neue Kirche in 1704. While at the University he involved fellow-students in a great deal of public performance, to the annoyance of the Thomaskantor, Bach's immediate predecessor, Johann Kuhnau, who saw his prerogative now infringed.No doubt bored with the complaints of Johann Kuhnau and impatient to make something more of his life, Telemann did not stay long in Leipzig. In 1705 he accepted an appointment as Kapellmeister to the cosmopolitan court of Count Erdmann II of Promnitz at Sorau (now Zary), where the vogue for the French and Italian styles provided him with a new challenge. His association with the Sorau Kantor and theorist Wolfgang Caspar Printz and the reformist poet Erdmann Neumeister as well as the proximity to Berlin and contact with Polish folk music all proved stimulating. But Telemann's tenure was cut short by the imminent prospect of invasion by the Swedish army, causing the Court to be hurriedly disbanded. He visited Paris in 1707. His next appointment was at Eisenach as court Konzertmeister in charge of singers, with Pantaleon Hebenstreit as leader of the orchestra. His appointment there (some time between 1706 and 1708) just overlapped with the presence of Bach, who left in 1708 to take up posts at the Weimar court. Telemann had every reason to assume that this would be a period of relative stability and accordingly plunged into composing church cantatas, occasional pieces, orchestral and instrumental chamber music. His marriage ended tragically with his wife's death in 1711.A change of scene became necessary and so he went to the free imperial city of Frankfurt-am-Main to take up duties as Director of Municipal Music and also as Kapellmeister of the Barfüßerkirche. Together with his
activities as director of the "Frauenstein", a musical society in that same city, which presented weekly concerts, Telemann's new posts suited his talents very well. He composed occasional music for civic ceremonies, five year-long cycles of church cantatas, oratorios, orchestral music and a wealth of chamber music, much of which was published; only the opportunity to produce opera was lacking, though he continued to supply works to the Leipzig Opera. During this period he was also appointed Kapellmeister to the Prince of Bayreuth. He married again (gaining citizenship through marriage) and became a family man.While on a visit to Eisenach in 1716, he was honored with an appointment as a visiting Kapellmeister (he continued to send new works until 1729); he also served the court as a diplomatic correspondent. Further acknowledgment of his increasing stature came the following year when Duke Ernst of Gotha invited him to become Kapellmeister of all his various courts. This in turn forced improvements in his situation at Frankfurt. A trip to Dresden in 1719 for the festivities in honor of the newly married Prince Elector Friedrich August II and Archduchess Maria Josephia of Austria made possible a reunion with G.F. Handel, the opportunity to hear operas by Antonio Lotti and the dedication of a collection of violin concertos to the Konzertmeister and virtuoso violinist Johann Georg Pisendel.Then in 1721, the coveted post of Kantor of the Hamburg Johanneum, a post that traditionally carried with it teaching responsibilities and the directorship of Hamburg's five principal churches, became vacant, and Telemann was invited to succeed Joachim Gerstenbüttel. Here, at last, was a prestigious post that would provide him with seemingly unlimited opportunities to compose and perform. As Kantor, he would be stretched as never before: he was required to compose two cantatas a week, annually to produce a new Passion, and to provide occasional works for church and civil ceremonies. And such was his vitality and creative impetus that, in spite of heavy responsibilities, he apparently eagerly sought and fulfilled additional commissions from home and abroad.The prospect of being actively involved in the Hamburg Opera - his opera Der geduldige Socrates, had already been performed there earlier that year - was perhaps over-optimistic, for there was strong opposition among the city fathers to his participation. Telemann reacted characteristically by threatening to resign: he applied for the post of Kantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and in 1722 was chosen over J.S. Bach, Christoph Graupner and three other candidates. While the Hamburg City Council refused to grant his release, they were obliged to improve his salary and withdraw their objections to his association with the Hamburg Opera. Telemann thereupon redoubled his activities at Hamburg, increasing the number of public concerts given at the churches, the Drill-Hall and at a tavern known as the 'Lower Tree-House', at which a wide variety of sacred and secular music was performed. They were patronized by prominent Hamburg citizens and supported by paid admission. More to the point, he was made music director of the Hamburg Opera, remaining in that capacity until its closure in 1738. He produced both serious and comic works, many of whichhave been lost, or survive only as excerpts published in Der getreue Musikmeister. In addition to Telemann's own operas and those of Reinhard Keiser, G.F. Handel's London operas were performed there during Telemann's tenure.Der getreuer Musikmeister ("The Faithful Music Master") was founded in 1728 by Telemann and J.V. Görner (not to be confused with J.G. Görner, organist at Leipzig and J.S. Bach's contemporary). Intended as a "home music lesson", this German music periodical, the first of its kind, appeared every two weeks in the form of a four-page Lection meaning a reading or a lesson. It consisted of actual music, new music just composed and given its first circulation in this unusual fashion. Much of it was by Telemann himself, but other contemporary composers were also represented, such as R. Keiser, Christian Pezold, Görner, Francesco Antonio Bonporti, Jan Dismas Zelenka, Ritter and Stoltzer. Unfortunately the individual issues were not dated, nor is it known how long the periodical appeared for. 25 of these periodicals have come down to us with their contents.G.P. Telemann remained in Hamburg until his death in 1767, being succeeded in that position by his godson, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of Johann Sebastian. Though it is with Hamburg that we customarily associate his name, Telemann traveled widely, making many trips to Berlin where he was exposed to strains of Polish music imported from the East, and to Paris in 1737 where he absorbed much of the French idiom then current.G.P. Telemann's friendship with G.F. Handel continued: Händel corresponded with him on several occasions, and in 1750 went to the trouble of sending him from London "a crate of flowers, which experts assure me are very choice and of admirable rarity". His name appears (as 'Mr. Hendel, Docteur en Musique, Londres') on the list of subscribers to the most ambitious publication of Telemann's music during his lifetime, the Musique de Table, which appeared in three installments during the course of 1733. An
interesting side-note is that Telemann supervised the preparation of the engraved plates from which the parts were printed, these being made of pewter as opposed to the more usual and more expensive copper, by a new process apparently first employed in London about 1710 by Walsh and Hare, and introduced into Germany by Telemann himself. Further proof of Händel's esteem for Telemann's music is provided by the fact that Händel used ideas from no less than sixteen movements in the Musique de Table in his own compositions. Händel would jokingly relate that Telemann "could write a church piece in eight parts with the same expedition another would write a letter".
As a composer G.P. Telemann was indeed prolific, providing an enormous body of work, both sacred and secular. This included 1,043 church cantatas, and settings of the Passion for each year that he was in Hamburg, 46 in all. In Leipzig he had written operas, and he continued to involve himself in public performances in Hamburg, later taking on additional responsibility as musical director of the Hamburg opera. He was also commercially active in publishing and selling much of the music that he wrote.A musical form which G.P. Telemann practiced with remarkable assiduity was the orchestral suite - the Ouverture and its succession of dance movements, which originated with Lully in France but which was in fact cultivated almost exclusively by German composers. A contemporary German critic, Johann Adolph Scheibe, even declared in 1745 that Telemann was chiefly responsible for the enormous popularity of the orchestral suite in Germany, having begun by imitating the French style but soon becoming more expert in it than the French themselves. In an autobiographical article written in 1740 Telemann estimated that he had already composed six hundred suites - about a quarter of which have survived, nearly all in manuscript.Key factors in G.P. Telemann's meteoric rise to power and wealth as the most famous musician in Germany were his sense of humor and likable personality. He had the good fortune to be admired and envied, rather than resented, for his relentless pursuit and acquisition of major Court and Church positions. Telemann's self-confidence and productivity from an early age are extraordinary by any standard. Not only did he have the courage to challenge his superiors when they interfered with his plans to gain frequent performances and publication of his works, but there seemed to be no limit to the number of commissions he was willing and able to fulfill as composer. His salaried income at Hamburg was about three times what J.S. Bach earned at Leipzig, and he made a substantial profit on his many works published for sale to music enthusiasts.J.S. Bach's personal connections with Georg Philipp Telemann were numerous. He first met him while Telemann was Konzertmeister (later Kapellmeister) in Eisenach, at the same time that J.S. Bach was court organist in nearby Weimar. A manuscript, dating from c1709, of Telemann's Concerto in G major for two violins, Kross 2 V.G(1), survives in J.S. Bach's hand, and J.S. Bach also arranged Telemann's G minor Violin Concerto, Kross V.g. for keyboard in about 1713. In 1714 Telemann, by this time in Frankfurt, stood godfather to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (hence the second name, 'Philipp'). J.S. Bach was made Kantor in Leipzig in 1723 only after Telemann, by then director of music in Hamburg, and Christoph Graupner turned the post down. In 1729 J.S. Bach took over the directorship of the Leipzig collegium musicum founded by Telemann while a student at the university in 1702. Telemann was succeeded in Hamburg by his godson C.P.E. Bach.J.S. Bach's interest in, and respect for, Telemann's music is described by C.P.E. Bach in a letter to J.N. Forkel: 'In his last years he esteemed highly: Johann Joseph Fux, A. Caldara, George Frideric Handel, Reinhard Keiser, both Grauns, Telemann, Zelenka, Franz Benda, and in general everything that was worthy of esteem in Berlin and Dresden. Except for the first four, he knew the rest personally. In his younger years he was often with Telemann, who also held me at my baptism.' J.S. Bach performed various cantatas by Telemann in Leipzig (some of which were mistakenly included in the BG edition); performances of two of Telemann's Passions have been posited but not confirmed. J.S. Bach's name appears among the subscribers to Telemann's 'Paris' quartets (1738), and works by Telemann survive in several keyboard manuscripts from the J.S. Bach circle. J.S. Bach supplied a puzzle canon for Telemann's music magazine Der getreue Music-Meister (1728-1729). Telemann was probably the first composer to apply ritornello form to the sonata and the concerted French ouverture, genres taken up by J.S. Bach, and was the first to set Erdmann Neumeister's cantata texts, which served as a model for J.S. Bach's cantata librettists. J.S. Bach also shared Telemann's interest in combining national styles and genres.
François CouperinBorn: November 10, 1668 - Paris, FranceDied: September 11, 1733 - Paris, France
François Couperin was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. François Couperin was known as "Couperin le Grand" (Couperin the Great) to distinguish him from the other members of the musically talented Couperin familyFrançois Couperin was taught by his father, Charles Couperin, who died when François was 10, and by Jacques Thomelin. In 1685 he became the organist at the church of Saint-Gervais, Paris, a post he inherited from his father and that he would pass on to his cousin, Nicolas Couperin. Other members of the family would hold the same position in later years. In 1693 Couperin succeeded his teacher Thomelin as organist at the Chapelle Royale (Royal Chapel) with the title organiste du Roi, organist by appointment to the King. This was the Sun King, Louis XIV.In 1717 François Couperin became court organist and composer, with the title ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du Roi. With his colleagues, Couperin gave a weekly concert, typically on Sunday. Many of these concerts were in the form of suites for violin, viol, oboe, bassoon and harpsichord, on which he was a virtuoso player. WorksFrançois Couperin acknowledged his debt to the Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli. He introduced A. Corelli's trio sonata form to France. Couperin's grand trio sonata was subtitled Le Parnasse, ou l'Apothéose de Corelli (Parnassus, or the Apotheosis of Corelli). In it he blended the Italian and French styles of music in a set of pieces which he called Les Goûts réunis ("Styles Reunited").His most famous book, L'Art de toucher le clavecin (The Art of Harpsichord Playing, published in 1716), contained suggestions for fingerings, touch, ornamentation and other features of keyboard technique. They influenced J.S. Bach. Bach adopted the fingering system, including the use of the thumb, that Couperin set forth for playing the harpsichord.F. Couperin's four volumes of harpsichord music, published in Paris in 1713, 1717, 1722, and 1730, contain over 230 individual pieces, which can be played on solo harpsichord or performed as small chamber works. These pieces were not grouped into suites, as was the common practice, but ordres, which were Couperin's own version of suites containing traditional dances as well as descriptive pieces. The first and last pieces in an ordre were of the same tonality, but the middle pieces could be of other closely-related tonalities. These volumes were loved by J.S. Bach and, much later, Richard Strauss, as well as Maurice Ravel who memorialized their composer with Le Tombeau de Couperin (A Memorial to Couperin).Many of F. Couperin's keyboard pieces have evocative, picturesque titles and express a mood through key choices, adventurous harmonies and (resolved) discords. They have been likened to miniature tone poems. These features attracted Richard Strauss, who orchestrated some of them.Johannes Brahms's piano music was influenced by the keyboard music of F. Couperin. J. Brahms performed Couperin's music in public and contributed to the first complete edition of Couperin's Pièces de clavecin by Friedrich Chrysander in the 1880's.As the early-music expert Jordi Savall has pointed out, Couperin was the "poet musician par excellence." He believed in "the ability of Music (with a capital M) to express itself in sa prose et ses vers " (prose and poetry). He believed that if we enter into the poetry of music, we discover that it is "plus belle encore que la beauté" (more beautiful than beauty itself).Only one collection of organ music by François Couperin survives, the Pièces d'orgue consistantes en deux Messes (Pieces for organ consisting of two Masses), the first manuscript of which appeared around 1689-1690. At only age 21, Couperin likely had neither the funds nor the reputation to justify widespread publication, but the work was approved by his teacher, Michel Richard Delalande, who wrote that the music was "very beautiful and worthy of being given to the public." The two Masses were intended for different audiences: the first for parishes or secular churches ("paroisses pour les fêtes solemnelles"), and the second for convents or abbey churches ("couvents de religieux et religiouses"). These masses are divided into many movements in accordance with the traditional structure of the Latin Mass: Kyrie (5 mvts.), Gloria (9), Sanctus (3), Agnus (2), and two additional movements (an Offertoire and a Deo gratias to conclude each mass).In composing the masses, F. Couperin follows techniques used in masses by Nivers, Lebègue, and Boyvin, as well as other predecessors of the French Baroque era. In the paroisses Mass, he uses plainchant from the Missa cunctipotens genitor Deus as a cantus firmus in two Kyrie movements and the first Sanctus movement; the Kyrie Fugue also uses a chant incipit to derive its subject. The Mass for couvents contains no plainchant, as each convent and monastery maintained its own, nonstandard body of chant. Couperin departs from his predecessors in many ways, however; the melodies of the Récits are strictly rhythmic and more
directional than previous examples of the genre. Willi Apel writes that "this music shows a sense of natural order, a vitality, and an immediacy of feeling that breaks into French organ music like a fresh wind."The longest piece in the collection is the Offertoire sur les grands jeux of the first Mass. The form is akin to that of an expanded French overture, in three large sections: a prelude, a chromatic fugue in minor, and a gigue-like fugue. Bruce Gustafson has called the movement a "stunning masterpiece of the French classic repertory." The second Mass also contains an Offertoire with a similar form, but this movement is considered by some, along with the rest of the Mass, to be rather inferior to the first. Apel writes, "In general, [Couperin] did not expend the same care for this Mass, which was written for modest abbey churches, as for the other one, which he himself certainly presented on important holidays on the organ of Saint-Gervais."J.S. Bach's high opinion of François Couperin is attested by F. W. Marpurg, who wrote in 1750: 'I can do no more in praise of Couperin than to inform you that the learned J.S. Bach regarded him as worthy of approbation' (BDok iii, no. 632). J.S. Bach seems to have owned a copy of Couperin's Second livre de pieces de clavecin (Paris, 1716-1717), for the rondeau Les Bergeries was copied from it by J.S. Bach's wife Anna Magdalena Bach in her Clavierbüchlein of 1725, and the Allemande in A major 'à deux clavecins' from the same book was written out by J.S. Bach's eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach when he was still a child.The organ arrangement, attributed to J.S. Bach (BWV 587), of L'!mperiale from Les Nations (Paris, 1726) is of doubtful authenticity.
Tomaso Albinoni Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni was born in Venice in 1671, eldest son of a wealthy paper merchant. At an early age he became proficient as a singer and, more notably, as a violinist, though not being a member of the performers' guild he was unable to play publicly so he turned his hand to composition. His first opera, Zenobia, regina de Palmireni, was produced in Venice in 1694, coinciding with his first collection of instrumental music, the 12 Sonate a tre, Op.1. Thereafter he divided his attention almost equally between vocal composition (operas, serenatas and cantatas) and instrumental composition (sonatas and concertos).Until his father's death in 1709, he was able to cultivate music more for pleasure than for profit, referring to himself as "Dilettante Veneto" - a term which in 18th century Italy was totally devoid of unfavorable connotations. Under the terms of his father's will he was relieved of the duty (which he would normally have assumed as eldest son) to take charge of the family business, this task being given to his younger brothers. Henceforth he was to be a full-time musician, a prolific composer who according to one report, also ran a successful academy of singing. A lifelong resident of Venice, Albnoni married an opera singer, Margherita Raimondi (d 1721), and composed as many as 81 operas several of which were performed in northern Europe from the 1720s onwards. In 1722 he traveled to Munich at the invitation of the Elector of Bavaria to supervise performances of I veri amici and Il trionfo d'amore as part of the wedding celebrations for the Prince-Elector and the daughter of the late Emperor Joseph I.Most of his operatic works have been lost, having not been published during his lifetime. Nine collections of instrumental works were however published, meeting with considerable success and consequent reprints; thus it is as a composer of instrumental music (99 sonatas, 59 concertos and 9 sinfonias) that he is known today. In his lifetime these works were favorably compared with those of Corelli and Vivaldi, and his nine collections published in Italy, Amsterdam and London were either dedicated to or sponsored by an impressive list of southern European nobility. Albinoni was particularly fond of the oboe, a relatively new introduction in Italy, and is credited with being the first Italian to compose oboe concertos (Op. 7, 1715). Prior to Op.7, Albinoni had not published any compositions with parts for wind instruments. The concerto, in particular, had been regarded as the province of stringed instruments. It is likely that the first concertos featuring a solo oboe appeared from German composers such as Telemann or Handel. Nevertheless, the four concertos with one oboe (Nos. 3, 6, 9 and 12) and the four with two oboes (Nos. 2, 5, 8 and 11) in Albinoni's Op.7 were the first of their kind to be published, and proved so successful that the composer repeated the formula in Op.9 (1722). Though Albinoni resided in Venice all his life, he traveled frequently throughout southern Europe; the European nobility would also have made his acquaintance in Venice, now a popular destination city. With its commercial fortunes in the Adriatic and Mediterranean in decline, the enterprising City-State turned to
tourism as its new source of wealth, taking advantage of its fabled water setting and ornate buildings, and putting on elongated and elaborate carnivals which regularly attracted the European courts and nobility.Apart from some further instrumental works circulating in manuscript in 1735, little is known of Albinoni's life and musical activity after the mid-1720s. However, so much of his output has been lost, one can surely not put our lack of knowledge down to musical or composition inactivity. Much of his work was lost during the latter years of World War II with the bombing of Dresden and the Dresden State library – which brings us to the celebrated Adagio.In 1945, Remo Giazotto, a Milanese musicologist traveled to Dresden to complete his biography of Albinoni and his listing of Albinoni's music. Among the ruins, he discovered a fragment of manuscript. Only the bass line and six bars of melody had survived, possibly from the slow movement of a Trio Sonata or Sonata da Chiesa. It was from this fragment that Giazotto reconstructed the now-famous Adagio, a piece which is instantly associated with Albinoni today, yet which ironically Albinoni would doubtless hardly recognize. Albinoni died in 1751, in the city of his birth.12 Trio Sonatas6 Sinfoniae & 6 Concerti a 512 Baletti de Camera (a 3)6 Sonate da Chiesa for Violin & Bass12 Concertos12 Sonate da Camera for Violin & Bass12 Concertos for strings / oboe(s)6 Sonatas & 6 Baletti (a 3)12 Concertos for strings / oboe(s)
Henry Purcell Born in 1659, Henry Purcell was the finest and most original composer of his day. Though he was to live a very short life (he died in 1695) he was able to enjoy and make full use of the renewed flowering of music after the Restoration of the Monarchy. As the son of a musician at Court, a chorister at the Chapel Royal, and the holder of continuing royal appointments until his death, Purcell worked in Westminster for three different Kings over twenty-five years. In the Chapel Royal young Purcell studied with Dr. John Blow. Dr. Burney, the eighteenth century historian, is amusingly skeptical on this point: "..... he had a few lessons from Dr. Blow, which were sufficient to cancel all the instructions he had received from other masters, and to occasion the boast inscribed on the tomb-stone of Blow, that he had been 'Master to the famous Mr. Henry Purcell'." Legend has it that when, in 1679, Purcell succeeded Dr. Blow as organist of Westminster Abbey, the elder musician stepped aside in recognition of the greater genius, and it is true that on Purcell's death in 1695 Blow returned to the post, and would write a noble Ode on the Death of Purcell. In addition to his royal duties Purcell also devoted much of his talent to writing operas, or rather musical dramas, and incidental stage music; but he would also write chamber music in the form of harpsichord suites and trio sonatas, and became involved with the growing London public concert scene. Indeed one of the most important musical developments in Restoration London was the gradual establishment of regular public concerts. Even the few meetings that began as private concerns were eventually prevailed upon to admit the general public, such as the group that gave concerts in the Castle Tavern. Whereas other organizations charged only a shilling, their admittance fee was more than twice that sum, and before long they had enough capital to equip a music room in York Buildings. By the time Henry Purcell began to attend such concerts in the 1670s there were many highly skilled players of the violin, cello, and flute, as well as exponents of the (for London) relatively new art of playing continuo instruments, the most usual being the organ and the harpsichord. In 1683 a group of gentlemen amateurs, and professional musicians started a "Musical Society" in London to celebrate the "Festival of St. Cecilia, a great patroness of music" which any music-lover so desirous may still celebrate yearly on November 22nd. They asked Henry Purcell, then only 24, to be the first to write an Ode for their festivals; Purcell was to compose two more such Odes for the Society. The writing of incidental theater music seems not to have been regarded by Purcell as embarrassing or beneath his dignity as Organist of Westminster Abbey. He was in the very midst of a tradition that not only permitted but actually encouraged well-known church musicians to provide lighter music for the theatre and
opera, and this was an accepted practice in the great continental cities as well as in London. Most of Purcell's theatre music was written between 1690 and 1695 (the year of his death), and within that relatively brief period he supplied music for more than forty plays. Much of the instrumental music was published in 1697, when the composer's widow compiled A Collection of Ayres, Compos'd for the Theatre, and upon Other Occasions. This body of music, viewed as a whole, shows that Purcell gave to the theatre some of his happiest melodic inspirations, distributed among solemn overtures, cheerful or pathetic airs, and delightful dances of every imaginable kind. There is hardly a department of music, as known in his day, to which Purcell did not contribute with true distinction. His anthems were long since accorded their place in the great music of the church; there are enough fine orchestral movements in his works for the theatre to establish him in this field; his fantasies and sonatas entitle him to honor in the history of chamber music; his keyboard works, if less significant in themselves, hold their place in the repertory; his one true opera. Dido and Aeneas, is an enduring masterpiece, and his other dramatic works (sometimes called operas) are full of musical riches. And, most especially, Purcell's songs themselves would be sufficient to insure his immortality. His sensitivity to his texts has been matched by few masters in musical history; when he had worthy poetry to set, he could hardly fail to produce a masterpiece. Henry Purcell 10 September 1659 (?)[2]– 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers; no other native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar.Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane, Old Pye Street, Westminster. Henry Purcell Senior,[3] whose older brother Thomas Purcell (d. 1682) was also a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England.[4] Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell (d. 1717), the youngest of the brothers, was also a prolific composer who wrote the music for much of the final act of The Indian Queen after Henry Purcell's death. Henry Purcell's family lived just a few hundred yards west of Westminster Abbey from the year 1659 and onward.[5]
After his father's death in 1664, Purcell was placed under the guardianship of his uncle who showed him great affection and kindness.[6] Thomas was himself a gentleman of His Majesty's chapel, and arranged for Henry to be admitted as a chorister. Henry studied first under Captain Henry Cooke (d. 1672),[7] Master of the Children, and afterwards under Pelham Humfrey (d. 1674), Cooke's successor.[8] Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673, when he became assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, who held the post of keeper of wind instruments to the King.[5]
Purcell is said to have been composing at nine years old, but the earliest work that can be certainly identified as his is an ode for the King's birthday, written in 1670.[9] (The dates for his compositions are often uncertain, despite considerable research.) It is assumed that the three-part song "Sweet tyranness, I now resign" was written by him as a child.[6] After Humfrey's death, Purcell continued his studies under Dr. John Blow. He attended Westminster School and in 1676 was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey.[4] Henry Purcell's earliest anthem "Lord, who can tell" was composed in 1678. It is a psalm that is prescribed for Christmas Day and also to be read at morning prayer on the fourth day of the month.[10]
In 1679, he wrote some songs for John Playford's Choice Ayres, Songs and Dialogues and also an anthem, the name of which is not known, for the Chapel Royal. From a letter written by Thomas Purcell, and still extant, we learn that this anthem was composed for the exceptionally fine voice of the Rev. John Gostling, then at Canterbury, but afterwards a gentleman of His Majesty's chapel. Purcell wrote several anthems at different times for Gostling's extraordinary basso profondo voice, which is known to have had a range of at least two full octaves, from D below the bass staff to the D above it. The dates of very few of these sacred compositions are known; perhaps the most notable example is the anthem "They that go down to the sea in ships." In gratitude for the providential escape of King Charles II from shipwreck, Gostling, who had been of the royal party, put together some verses from the Psalms in the form of an anthem and requested Purcell to set them to music. The work is a very difficult one, opening with a passage which traverses the full extent of Gostling's range, beginning on the upper D and descending two octaves to the lower.In 1679, Blow, who had been appointed organist of Westminster Abbey in 1669, resigned his office in favour of his pupil.[11] Purcell now devoted himself almost entirely to the composition of sacred music, and for six years severed his connection with the theatre. However, during the early part of the year, probably before taking up his new office, he had produced two important works for the stage, the music for Nathaniel
Lee's Theodosius, and Thomas d'Urfey's Virtuous Wife.[11] Between 1680 and 1688 Purcell wrote music for seven plays.[12] The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689.[11] It was written to a libretto furnished by Nahum Tate, and performed in 1689 in cooperation with Josias Priest, a dancing master and the choreographer for the Dorset Garden Theatre. Priest's wife kept a boarding school for young gentlewomen, first in Leicester Fields and afterwards at Chelsea, where the opera was performed.[13] It is occasionally considered the first genuine English opera, though that title is usually given to Blow's Venus and Adonis: as in Blow's work, the action does not progress in spoken dialogue but in Italian-style recitative. Both works run to less than one hour. At the time Dido and Aeneas never found its way to the theatre, though it appears to have been very popular in private circles. It is believed to have been extensively copied, but only one song was printed by Purcell's widow in Orpheus Britannicus, and the complete work remained in manuscript until 1840, when it was printed by the Musical Antiquarian Society under the editorship of Sir George Macfarren. The composition of Dido and Aeneas gave Purcell his first chance to write a sustained musical setting of a dramatic text. It was his only opportunity to compose a work in which the music carried the entire drama.[12] The story of Dido and Aeneas derives from the original source in Virgil's epic the Aeneid.[14]
Soon after Purcell's marriage, in 1682, on the death of Edward Lowe, he was appointed organist of the Chapel Royal, an office which he was able to hold simultaneously with his position at Westminster Abbey.[15] His eldest son was born in this same year, but his life was short lived.[16] His first printed composition, Twelve Sonatas, was published in 1683.[17][18] For some years after this, he was busy in the production of sacred music, odes addressed to the king and royal family, and other similar works.[19][20] In 1685, he wrote two of his finest anthems, "I was glad" and "My heart is inditing", for the coronation of King James II.[15] One of Purcell's most elaborate, most important and most magnificent works was a birthday ode for Queen Mary. It is titled Come ye Sons of Art, and was written by Nahum Tate and set by Purcell.[21]
In 1687, he resumed his connection with the theatre by furnishing the music for Dryden's tragedy, Tyrannick Love. In this year, Purcell also composed a march and quick-step, which became so popular that Lord Wharton adapted the latter to the fatal verses of Lillibullero; and in or before January 1688, he composed his anthem "Blessed are they that fear the Lord" by express command of the King. A few months later, he wrote the music for D'Urfey's play, The Fool's Preferment. In 1690, he composed the music for Betterton's adaptation of Fletcher and Massinger's Prophetess (afterwards called Dioclesian)[22] and Dryden's Amphitryon. During the first ten years of his mastership, Purcell composed much- precisely how much we can only guess. In 1691, he wrote the music for what is sometimes considered his dramatic masterpiece, King Arthur, with the libretto by Dryden and first published by the Musical Antiquarian Society in 1843. Another one of Purcell's operas is King Arthur, or The British Worthy in 1691.[13] In 1692, he composed The Fairy-Queen (an adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), the score of which (his longest for theatre)[23] was rediscovered in 1901 and published by the Purcell Society.[24] The Indian Queen followed in 1695, in which year he also wrote songs for Dryden and Davenant's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (recently, this has been disputed by music scholars[25]), probably including "Full fathom five" and "Come unto these yellow sands". The Indian Queen was adapted from a tragedy by Dryden and Sir Robert Howard.[23] In these semi-operas (another term for which at the time was "dramatic opera"), the main characters of the plays do not sing but speak their lines: the action moves in dialogue rather than recitative. The related songs are sung "for" them by singers, who have minor dramatic roles.Purcell's Te Deum and Jubilate Deo were written for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1693, the first English Te Deum ever composed with orchestral accompaniment. This work was annually performed at St Paul's Cathedral until 1712, after which it was performed alternately with Handel's Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate until 1743, when both works were replaced by Handel's Dettingen Te Deum.[26]
He composed an anthem and two elegies for Queen Mary II's funeral.[27] Besides the operas and semi-operas already mentioned, Purcell wrote the music and songs for Thomas d'Urfey's The Comical History of Don Quixote, Boudicca, The Indian Queen and others, a vast quantity of sacred music, and numerous odes, cantatas, and other miscellaneous pieces. The quantity of his instrumental chamber music is minimal after his early career, and his keyboard music consists of an even more minimal number of harpsichord suites and organ pieces.[28] In 1693, Purcell composed music for two Comedies: The Old Bachelor, and The Double Dealer. Purcell also composed for five other plays within the same year.[11] In July 1695, Henry Purcell composed an ode for the Duke of Gloucester for his sixth birthday. The ode is titled Who can from joy
refrain?[29] Purcell's four-part sonatas were issued in 1697.[11] In the remaining six years of his life, Henry Purcell wrote music for forty two plays.[11]
Purcell died in 1695 at his home in Dean's Yard, Westminster, at the height of his career. He was believed to be 35 or 36 years old at the time. The cause of his death is unclear: one theory is that he caught a chill after returning home late from the theatre one night to find that his wife had locked him out. Another is that he succumbed to tuberculosis.[30] The beginning of Purcell's will reads:
"In the name of God Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the City of Westminster, gentleman, being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God) do by these presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament. And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving wife, Frances Purcell, all my estate both real and personal of what nature and kind soever..."[31]
Purcell is buried adjacent to the organ in Westminster Abbey. The music that he had earlier composed for Queen Mary's funeral was performed during his as well. Purcell was universally mourned as 'a very great master of music.' Following his death, the officials at Westminster honoured him by unanimously voting that he be buried with no expense in the north aisle of the Abbey.[32] His epitaph reads: "Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq., who left this life and is gone to that blessed place where only his harmony can be exceeded."[33]
Henry Purcell fathered six children by his wife Frances, four of whom died in infancy. His wife, as well as his son Edward (1689–1740) and daughter Frances, survived him.[11] Frances the elder died in 1706, having published a number of her husband's works, including the now famous collection called Orpheus Britannicus, in two volumes, printed in 1698 and 1702, respectively. Edward was appointed organist of St Clement Eastcheap, London, in 1711 and was succeeded by his son Edward Henry Purcell (d. 1765). Both men were buried in St Clement's near the organ gallery.
After his death, Purcell was honoured by many of his contemporaries, including his old friend John Blow, who wrote "An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell (Mark how the lark and linnet sing)" with text by his old collaborator, John Dryden. More recently, the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a famous sonnet entitled simply "Henry Purcell", with a headnote reading: "The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally."Purcell also had a strong influence on the composers of the English musical renaissance of the early 20th century, most notably Benjamin Britten, who created and performed a realisation of Dido and Aeneas and whose The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is based on a theme from Purcell's Abdelazar. Stylistically, the aria "I know a bank" from Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream is clearly inspired by Purcell's aria "Sweeter than Roses", which Purcell originally wrote as part of incidental music to Richard Norton's Pausanias, the Betrayer of His Country.Purcell is honoured together with Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 28 July.[34] In a 1940 interview Ignaz Friedman stated that he considered Purcell as great as Bach and Beethoven. In Victoria Street, Westminster, England, there is a bronze monument to Purcell (right), sculpted by Glynn Williams and erected in 1994.Purcell's works have been catalogued by Franklin Zimmerman, who gave them a number preceded by Z. A Purcell Club was founded in London in 1836 for promoting the performance of his music, but was dissolved in 1863. In 1876 a Purcell Society was founded, which published new editions of his works. A modern day Purcell Club has been created, and provides guided tours and concerts in support of Westminster Abbey.So strong was his reputation that a popular wedding processional was incorrectly attributed to Purcell for many years. The so-called Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary was in fact written around 1700 by a British composer named Jeremiah Clarke as the Prince of Denmark's March.In 2009 Pete Townshend of The Who, an English rock band that established itself in the 1960s, identified Purcell's harmonies as an influence on the band's music (in songs such as "Won't Get Fooled Again" (1971) and "I Can See for Miles" (1967)).[35]
Michael Nyman, at the request of the director, built the score of Peter Greenaway's 1982 film, The Draughtsman's Contract on ostinati by Purcell from various sources, one misattributed. He credited Purcell as a "music consultant." Another of Purcell's ostinati, in fact the aforementioned Cold Genius aria, was used in Nyman's Memorial
Purcell is among the Baroque composers who has had a direct influence on modern rock and roll; according to Pete Townshend of The Who, Purcell was among his influences, particularly evident in the opening bars of The Who's "Pinball Wizard".[36] The processional section from Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary," was also adapted for the synthesiser by Wendy Carlos to serve as the theme music for the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. Noted cult New Wave artist Klaus Nomi regularly performed "The Cold Song" from King Arthur during his career, including a version on his debut self-titled album, Klaus Nomi, from 1981; his last public performance before his untimely death was an interpretation of the piece done with a full orchestra in December 1982 in Munich. Purcell wrote the song for a bass, but numerous countertenors have performed the piece in homage to Nomi.In the 1995 film England, My England, the life of Purcell (played by Michael Ball) was depicted as seen through the eyes of a playwright in the 1960s who is trying to write a play about him.In the 21st century, the soundtrack of the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice features a dance titled "A Postcard to Henry Purcell." This is a version by composer Dario Marianelli of Purcell's Abdelazar theme. In the German-language 2004 movie, Der Untergang ([the] Downfall (film), the music of Dido's Lament is used repeatedly as the end of the Third Reich culminates.
Francesco ManfrediniFrancesco Onofrio Manfredini (22 June 1684 – 6 October 1762) was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and church musician.He was born at Pistoia to a trombonist. He studied violin with Giuseppe Torelli in Bologna, then a part of the Papal States, a leading figure in the development of the concerto grosso. He also took instruction in composition from Giacomo Antonio Perti, maestro di capella of the Basilica of San Petronio from 1696 when the orchestra was temporarily disbanded.Although he composed oratorios, only his secular works remain in the repertoire.[1] A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi; his extant work shows the influence of the latter.[2]
He became a violinist, circa 1700, in the orchestra of the Church of San Spirito in Ferrara. In 1704, however, he returned to Bologna, employed again in the re-formed orchestra of San Petronio. He became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica in the same year he published his first compositions, a set of twelve chamber sonati he named Concertini per camera, Op. 1. In 1709, he also published Sinfonie da chiesa, Op. 2, ostensibly chamber pieces, they, in fact, complemented the earlier chamber sonati.[3]
After 1711, Manfredini spent an extended stay in Monaco, apparently in the service of Prince Antoine I. The prince had been a pupil of Louis XIV's favorite composer Jean Baptiste Lully, whose conductor's baton he had inherited. The precise nature of his relationship to the court of Monaco, and the length of his stay, are not known. Manfredini is first mentioned in court records in 1712. In 1718 he would publish, in Bologna, his Concerti Grossi for two violins and basso continuo, Op. 3, Nos. 1-12 which is dedicated to that ruler. Also copies of his Sinfonie, Op. 2 were found in the princely library. One indication of the nature of the relationship is that Prince Antoine stood as godfather to Manfredini's son Antonio Francesco; four other children were born to him during his stay in the principality.[4]
Given even this slim evidence, it can be inferred that both parties were satisfied by the arrangement since the composer does not reappear in the historical records until the year 1727, when had returned to Pistoia as maestro di capella at St. Phillip's Cathedral, a post he would hold until his death in 1762.[5]
Much of his music is presumed to have been destroyed after his death; only 43 published works and a handful of manuscripts are known. To quote his Naxos biography, "His groups of Concerti Grossi and Sinfonias show a highly accomplished composer, well versed in the mainstream Italian school of composition."[6]
The Naxos label has released a 1991 recording of the Opus 3 (catalog number: 8.553891),[7] recorded by the Slovakian Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Jaroslav Krček. The liner notes further suggest that his name "may have...disappeared had he not composed a Christmas Concerto (No. 12 of Op. 3).... [T]hese concerti grossi...demonstrate a gift for easy melodic invention."Two of his sons, Vincenzo and Giuseppe, had careers of some note. The former was appointed maestro di capella of the Italian opera in St. Petersburg. Giuseppe became a castrato singer.[8]
Francesco Onofrio Manfredini was born during a particularly fertile period for the production of great composers. Born within 16 months of him were Rameau, Walther, Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Domenico Scarlatti. Against the glare of these first-magnitude stars (and the not much older Telemann and Vivaldi), the lesser but noteworthy talent of Manfredini is easy to overlook. His father was a trombonist in the parish church of Pistoia. He was sent to Bologna as a teenager to
study violin with Giuseppe Torelli and counterpoint with Perti. In 1700, the 16-year-old Manfredini went to Ferrara to take a job as first violinist in the Church of the Holy Spirit. In 1704, the orchestra of Bologna's church of San Petronio was reconstituted. Since its dissolution was the reason Manfredini had left Bologna in the first place, he returned and joined it, also becoming a member of the Accademia Filarmonica. He published a set of concerti in 1704. In 1707, as Manfredini was preparing to visit or move to Venice, a friend named Aldrovandini, with the intent of traveling to Venice with him, accidentally drowned on his way to joining Manfredini. It's not clear whether Manfredini went ahead with his planned trip, nor is much known about Manfredini's doings for the next 20 years. There is speculation that he joined the court of Prince Antoine I of Monaco. During these years, he published additional sets of incidental music, a group of 12 Sinfonie da chiesa, and 12 concerti. He also wrote an oratorio, Tommaso Moro. In 1724, he returned to Pistoia to become maestro di cappella of St. Philip's Cathedral there. Shortly afterwards, he published four oratorios, presumably all written in the years 1725-1728. He remained in that post until his death 35 years later. Manfredini was not a prolific composer, or if he was, an undue amount of his work has been lost, but there are 43 published instrumental works, nine oratorios (music lost), and a couple of unpublished works. Although he lacks a distinctive personal "sound," his instrumental music is attractive, with the group of six posthumous sonatas (London, 1764) being the best representation of his talents. Unfortunately for his reputation, he became something of a symbol for the mediocre, run-of-the-mill Baroque composer in the 1970s when musicologist H.C. Robbins Landon wrote an article, "A Pox on Manfredini," intended to decry the record companies' trend of recording the "complete music" of Baroque composers, no matter how unimportant. While Landon's main point was not ill-taken, he did unnecessarily disparage Manfredini's music.
Francesco Onofrio Manfredini (22 June 1684 – 6 October 1762) was an Italian Baroque composer, violinist, and church musician.He was born at Pistoia to a trombonist. He studied violin with Giuseppe Torelli in Bologna, then a part of the Papal States, a leading figure in the development of the concerto grosso. He also took instruction in composition from Giacomo Antonio Perti, maestro di capella of the Basilica of San Petronio from 1696 when the orchestra was temporarily disbanded.Although he composed oratorios, only his secular works remain in the repertoire.[1] A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi; his extant work shows the influence of the latter.[2]
He became a violinist, circa 1700, in the orchestra of the Church of San Spirito in Ferrara. In 1704, however, he returned to Bologna, employed again in the re-formed orchestra of San Petronio. He became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica in the same year he published his first compositions, a set of twelve chamber sonati he named Concertini per camera, Op. 1. In 1709, he also published Sinfonie da chiesa, Op. 2, ostensibly chamber pieces, they, in fact, complemented the earlier chamber sonati.[3]
After 1711, Manfredini spent an extended stay in Monaco, apparently in the service of Prince Antoine I. The prince had been a pupil of Louis XIV's favorite composer Jean Baptiste Lully, whose conductor's baton he had inherited. The precise nature of his relationship to the court of Monaco, and the length of his stay, are not known. Manfredini is first mentioned in court records in 1712. In 1718 he would publish, in Bologna, his Concerti Grossi for two violins and basso continuo, Op. 3, Nos. 1-12 which is dedicated to that ruler. Also copies of his Sinfonie, Op. 2 were found in the princely library. One indication of the nature of the relationship is that Prince Antoine stood as godfather to Manfredini's son Antonio Francesco; four other children were born to him during his stay in the principality.[4]
Given even this slim evidence, it can be inferred that both parties were satisfied by the arrangement since the composer does not reappear in the historical records until the year 1727, when had returned to Pistoia as maestro di capella at St. Phillip's Cathedral, a post he would hold until his death in 1762.[5]
Much of his music is presumed to have been destroyed after his death; only 43 published works and a handful of manuscripts are known. To quote his Naxos biography, "His groups of Concerti Grossi and Sinfonias show a highly accomplished composer, well versed in the mainstream Italian school of composition."[6]
The Naxos label has released a 1991 recording of the Opus 3 (catalog number: 8.553891),[7] recorded by the Slovakian Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Jaroslav Krček. The liner notes further suggest that his name "may have...disappeared had he not composed a Christmas Concerto (No. 12 of Op. 3).... [T]hese concerti grossi...demonstrate a gift for easy melodic invention."Two of his sons, Vincenzo and Giuseppe, had careers of some note. The former was appointed maestro di capella of the Italian opera in St. Petersburg. Giuseppe became a castrato singer.[8]
Luigi Boccherini
Luigi Rodolfo Boccherini (Lucca, Italy, February 19, 1743 – Madrid, Spain, May 28, 1805) was an Italian classical era composer and cellist whose music retained a courtly and galante style while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. Boccherini is most widely known for one particular minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275), and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). This last work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version. Boccherini composed several guitar quintets including the "Fandango" which was influenced by Spanish music.Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, into a musical family. At a young age he was sent by his father, a cellist and double bass player, to study in Rome. In 1757 they both went to Vienna where they were employed by the court as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, where he was employed by Infante Luis Antonio of Spain, younger brother of King Charles III. There he flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, leading to his immediate dismissal. Then he accompanied Don Luis to Arenas de San Pedro, a little town at the Gredos mountains; there and in the closest town of Candeleda, Boccherini wrote many of his most brilliant works.Among his late patrons was the French consul Lucien Bonaparte, as well as King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an amateur cellist, flautist, and avid supporter of the arts. Boccherini fell on hard times following the deaths of his Spanish patron, two wives, and two daughters, and he died almost in poverty in Madrid in 1805, being survived by two sons. His blood line continues to this day in Spain.[citation needed] He was buried in the Pontifical Basilica of St. Michael until 1927, when Benito Mussolini repatriated his remains to the Church of San Francesco of his native Lucca.WorksMuch of his chamber music follows models established by Joseph Haydn; however, Boccherini is often credited with improving Haydn's model of the string quartet by bringing the cello to prominence, whereas Haydn had frequently relegated it to an accompaniment role. Rather, some sources for Boccherini's style are in the works of a famous Italian cellist, Giovanni Battista Cirri, who was born before Boccherini and before Haydn, and in the Spanish popular music.A virtuoso cellist of high caliber, Boccherini often played violin repertoire on the cello, at pitch, a skill he developed by substituting for ailing violinists while touring. This supreme command of the instrument brought him much praise from his contemporaries (notably Pierre Baillot, Pierre Rode, and Bernhard Romberg), and is evident in the cello parts of his compositions (particularly in the quintets for two cellos, treated often as cello concertos with string quartet accompaniment).He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over one hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos (a type which he pioneered, in contrast with the then common scoring for two violins, two violas and one cello), a dozen guitar quintets, not all of which have survived, nearly a hundred string quartets, and a number of string trios and sonatas (including at least 19 for the cello). His orchestral music includes around 30 symphonies and 12 virtuoso cello concertos.Boccherini's works have been catalogued by the French musicologist Yves Gérard (born 1932) in the Gérard catalog, published in London (1969), hence the "G" numbers applied to his output.With a ministerial decree dated 27 April 2006, the Opera Omnia of the composer Luigi Boccherini was promoted to the status of Italian National Edition.Boccherini's style is characterized by the typical Rococo charm, lightness, and optimism, and exhibits much melodic and rhythmic invention, coupled with frequent influences from the guitar tradition of his adopted country, Spain.Neglected after his death—the dismissive sobriquet "Haydn's wife" dates from the nineteenth century— his works have been gaining more recognition since the late 20th century, in print, record, and concert hall. His "celebrated minuet" (String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275)) was popularized through its use in the film The Ladykillers. His famous "Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid" (String Quintet in C Major, Op. 30 No. 6, G324), became popular through its use in films such as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.His distinctive compositions for string quintet (two violins, one viola, two celli), long neglected after his death, have been brought back to life by the Boccherini Quintet in the second half of the 20th century, when two of its founding members discovered a complete collection of the first edition of the 141 string quintets in Paris and began playing and recording them around the world.
Luigi Boccherini (February 19, 1743 – May 28, 1805) was a classical era composer and cellist from Italy, mostly known for one particular minuet from one of his string quintets, and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). This last work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, in a musical family. At a young age his father, a cellist and double bass player, sent Luigi to study in Rome (1757), and after various concert tours, his talents eventually brought him to the Spanish court in Madrid, where he was employed by Don Luis, the younger brother of King Charles III. There he flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, leading to his immediate dismissal.Among his patrons was the French consul Lucien Bonaparte, as well as King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an amateur cellist, flutist, and avid supporter of the arts. Boccherini fell on hard times following the deaths of his Spanish patron, two wives, and two daughters, and he died in poverty in 1805, being survived by two sons. His blood line continues to this day.Boccherini is sometimes referred to as the 'wife of Haydn', because much of his chamber music closely resembles the Austrian master's. However, Boccherini is often credited with improving Haydn's model of the string quartet by bringing the cello to prominence, whereas Haydn had always relegated it to an accompaniment role.A virtuoso cellist of the first caliber, Boccherini often played violin repertoire on the cello, at pitch, a skill he developed by substituting for ailing violonists while touring. This supreme command of the instrument brought him much praise from his contemporaries (notably Baillot, Rode, and Romberg), and is evident in the cello parts of his compositions (particularly in the quintets for two cellos, treated oftentimes as cello concertos with string quartet accompaniment).He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over a hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos (a type which he pioneered, in contrast with the then common scoring for two violins, two violas and one cello), nearly a hundred string quartets, and a number of string trios and sonatas (including at least 19 for the cello), as well as a series of guitar quintets. His orchestral music includes around 30 symphonies and 12 virtuoso cello concertos.Boccherini's works have been catalogued by the French musicologist Yves Gérard (born 1932), published in London (1969), hence the 'G' numbers for his output.Boccherini's style is characterized by the typical Rococo charm, lightness, and optimism, and exhibits much melodic and rhythmic invention, coupled with frequent influences from the guitar tradition of his adopted country, Spain. Unjustly neglected, his works have been gaining more recognition lately, in print, record, and concert hall.
Gioachino RossiniGioachino Antonio Rossini[1] (Giovacchino Antonio Rossini in the baptismal certificate)[2] (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces. His best-known operas include the Italian comedies Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola and the French-language epics Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell (William Tell). A tendency for inspired, song-like melodies is evident throughout his scores, which led to the nickname "The Italian Mozart." Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history.[3]
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born into a family of musicians in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy. His father, Giuseppe, was a horn player and inspector of slaughterhouses. His mother, Anna, was a singer and a baker's daughter. Rossini's parents began his musical training early, and by the age of six he was playing the triangle in his father's musical group.Rossini's father was sympathetic to the French Revolution and welcomed Napoleon Bonaparte's troops when they arrived in northern Italy. When Austria restored the old regime in 1796, Rossini's father was sent to prison and his mother took him to Bologna, making a living as a leading singer at various theatres of the Romagna region. Her husband would ultimately join her in Bologna. During this time, Rossini was frequently left in the care of his aging grandmother, who had difficulty supervising the boy.He remained at Bologna in the care of a pork butcher while his father played the horn in the orchestras of the theatres at which his wife sang. The boy had three years of instruction in the playing of the harpsichord from Giuseppe Prinetti, originally from Novara, who played the scale with two fingers only; Prinetti also owned a
business selling beer and had a propensity to fall asleep while standing. These qualities made him a subject for ridicule in the eyes of the young Rossini.He was eventually taken from Prinetti and apprenticed to a blacksmith. In Angelo Tesei, he found a congenial music master, and learned to sight-read, play accompaniments on the piano and sing well enough to take solo parts in the church when he was ten years of age. Important from this period are six sonate a quattro, or string sonatas, composed in three days, unusually scored for two violins, cello and double bass. The original scores were found in the Library of Congress in Washington DC after World War II, dated from 1804 when the composer was twelve. Often transcribed for string orchestra, these sonatas reveal the young composer's affinity for Haydn and Mozart, already showing signs of operatic tendencies, punctuated by frequent rhythmic changes and dominated by clear, songlike melodies.In 1805 he appeared at the theatre of the Commune in Ferdinando Paer's Camilla, his only public appearance as a singer. He was also a capable horn player, treading in the footsteps of his father. Around this time, he composed individual numbers to a libretto by Vincenza Mombelli called Demetrio e Polibio, which was handed to the boy in pieces. Though it was Rossini's first opera, written when he was thirteen or fourteen, the work was not staged until the composer was twenty years old, premiering as his sixth official opera.In 1806 Rossini became a cello student under Cavedagni at the Conservatorio di Bologna. The following year he was admitted to the counterpoint class of Padre Stanislao Mattei (1750–1825). He learned to play the cello with ease, but the pedantic severity of Mattei's views on counterpoint only served to drive the young composer's views toward a freer school of composition. His insight into orchestral resources is generally ascribed not to the strict compositional rules that he learned from Mattei, but to knowledge gained independently while scoring the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. At Bologna, he was known as "il Tedeschino" ("the Little German") on account of his devotion to Mozart.Through the friendly interposition of the Marquis Cavalli, his first opera, La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract), was produced at Venice when he was a youth of 18 years. But two years before this he had already received the prize at the Conservatorio of Bologna for his cantata Il pianto d'Armonia sulla morte d’Orfeo. Between 1810 and 1813 at Bologna, Rome, Venice and Milan, Rossini produced operas of varying success, most notably La pietra del paragone and Il signor Bruschino, with its brilliant and unique overture. In 1813, Tancredi and L'italiana in Algeri were even bigger successes, and catapulted the 20-year-old composer to international fame.The libretto for Tancredi was an arrangement by Gaetano Rossi of Voltaire's tragedy Tancrède. Traces of Ferdinando Paer and Giovanni Paisiello were undeniably present in fragments of the music. But any critical feeling on the part of the public was drowned by appreciation of such melodies as "Di tanti palpiti... Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò", which became so popular that the Italians would sing it in crowds at the law courts until called upon by the judge to desist.By his 21st birthday Rossini had established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public. He continued to write operas for Venice and Milan during the next few years, but their reception was tame and in some cases unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi. In 1815 he retired to his home in Bologna, where Domenico Barbaia, the impresario of the Naples theatre, contracted an agreement that made him musical director of the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo at Naples. He would compose one opera a year for each. His payment was to be 200 ducats per month; he was also to receive a share from the gambling tables set in the theatre's "ridotto", amounting to about 1000 ducats per annum. This was an extraordinarily lucrative arrangement for any professional musician at that time.He visited the Naples conservatory, and, although less than four years senior to Mercadante, he said to the Director Niccolò Zingarelli, "My compliments Maestro – your young pupil Mercadante begins where we finish."[4]
Some older composers in Naples, notably Zingarelli and Paisiello, were inclined to intrigue against the success of the youthful composer, but all hostility was rendered futile by the enthusiasm that greeted the court performance of his Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, in which Isabella Colbran, who subsequently became the composer's wife, took a leading part. The libretto of this opera by Giovanni Schmidt was in many of its incidents an anticipation of those presented to the world a few years later in Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth. The opera was the first in which Rossini wrote out the ornaments of the airs instead of leaving them to the fancy of the singers, and also the first in which the recitativo secco was replaced by a recitative accompanied by a string quartet.The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia)
Rossini's most famous opera was produced on February 20, 1816, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. The libretto, a version of Pierre Beaumarchais' stage play Le Barbier de Séville, was newly written by Cesare Sterbini and not the same as that already used by Giovanni Paisiello in his own Barbiere, an opera which had enjoyed European popularity for more than a quarter of a century. Much is made of how quickly Rossini's opera was written, scholarship generally agreeing upon two or three weeks. Later in life, Rossini claimed to have written the opera in only twelve days. It was a colossal failure when it premiered as Almaviva; Paisiello's admirers were extremely indignant, sabotaging the production by whistling and shouting during the entire first act. However, not long after the second performance, the opera became so successful that the fame of Paisiello's opera was transferred to Rossini's, to which the title The Barber of Seville passed as an inalienable heritage.Later in 1822, a 30-year-old Rossini succeeded in meeting Ludwig van Beethoven, who was then aged 51, deaf, cantankerous and in failing health. Communicating in writing, Beethoven noted: “Ah, Rossini. So you’re the composer of The Barber of Seville. I congratulate you. It will be played as long as Italian opera exists. Never try to write anything else but opera buffa; any other style would do violence to your nature.”[5]
Marriage and mid-careerBetween 1815 and 1823 Rossini produced 20 operas. Of these Otello formed the climax to his reform of serious opera, and offers a suggestive contrast with the treatment of the same subject at a similar point of artistic development by the composer Giuseppe Verdi. In Rossini's time the tragic close was so distasteful to the public of Rome that it was necessary to invent a happy conclusion to Otello.Conditions of stage production in 1817 are illustrated by Rossini's acceptance of the subject of Cinderella for a libretto only on the condition that the supernatural element should be omitted. The opera La Cenerentola was as successful as Barbiere. The absence of a similar precaution in construction of his Mosè in Egitto led to disaster in the scene depicting the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, when the defects in stage contrivance always raised a laugh, so that the composer was at length compelled to introduce the chorus "Dal tuo stellato soglio" to divert attention from the dividing waves.In 1822, four years after the production of this work, Rossini married the renowned opera singer Isabella Colbran. In the same year, he moved from Italy to Vienna where his operas were the rage of the audiences. He directed his Cenerentola in Vienna, where Zelmira was also performed. After this he returned to Bologna, but an invitation from Prince Metternich to come to Verona and "assist in the general re-establishment of harmony" was too tempting to refuse, and he arrived at the Congress in time for its opening on October 20, 1822. Here he made friends with Chateaubriand and Dorothea Lieven.In 1823, at the suggestion of the manager of the King's Theatre, London, he came to England, being much fêted on his way through Paris. In England he was given a generous welcome, which included an introduction to King George IV and the receipt of £7000 after a residence of five months. The next year he became musical director of the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris at a salary of £800 per annum. Rossini’s popularity in Paris was so great that Charles X gave him a contract to write five new operas a year, and at the expiration of the contract he was to receive a generous pension for life.End of careerDuring his Paris years, between 1824 and 1829, Rossini created the comic opera Le Comte Ory and Guillaume Tell]] (William Tell). The production of Guillaume Tell in 1829 brought his career as a writer of opera to a close. He was thirty-eight years old and had already composed thirty-eight operas. Guillaume Tell was a political epic adapted from Schiller’s play (1804) about the thirteenth century Swiss patriot who rallied his country against the Austrians. The libretto was by Étienne Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, but their version was revised by Armand Marrast.[6] The music is remarkable for its freedom from the conventions discovered and utilized by Rossini in his earlier works, and marks a transitional stage in the history of opera, the overture serving as a model for romantic overtures throughout the 19th century. Though an excellent opera, it is rarely heard uncut today, as the original score runs more than four hours in performance. The overture is one of the most famous and frequently recorded works in the classical repertoire.In 1829 he returned to Bologna. His mother had died in 1827, and he was anxious to be with his father. Arrangements for his subsequent return to Paris on a new agreement were temporarily upset by the abdication of Charles X and the July Revolution of 1830. Rossini, who had been considering the subject of Faust for a new opera, did return, however, to Paris in November of that year.Six movements of his Stabat Mater were written in 1832 by Rossini himself and the other six by Giovanni Tadolini, a good musician who was asked by Rossini to complete the work. However, Rossini composed the rest of the score in 1841. The success of the work bears comparison with his achievements in opera, but his
comparative silence during the period from 1832 to his death in 1868 makes his biography appear almost like the narrative of two lives—the life of swift triumph and the long life of seclusion, of which biographers give us pictures in stories of the composer's cynical wit, his speculations in fish culture, his mask of humility and indifference.His first wife died in 1845, and on August 16, 1846, he married Olympe Pélissier, who had sat for Vernet for his picture of Judith and Holofernes. Political disturbances compelled Rossini to leave Bologna in 1848. After living for a time in Florence, he settled in Paris in 1855, where he hosted many artistic and literary figures. Rossini had been a well-known gourmand and an excellent amateur chef his entire life, but he indulged these two passions fully once he retired from composing, and today there are a number of dishes with the appendage "alla Rossini" to their names that were either created by or specifically for him. Probably the most famous of these is Tournedos Rossini, still served by many restaurants today.In the meantime, after years of various physical and mental illnesses, he had slowly returned to music, composing obscure little works intended for private performance. These included his Péchés de vieillesse ("Sins of Old Age"), which are grouped into 14 volumes, mostly for solo piano, occasionally for voice and various chamber ensembles. Often whimsical, these pieces display Rossini’s natural ease of composition and gift for melody, showing obvious influences of Beethoven and Chopin, with many flashes of the composer’s long buried desire for serious, academic composition. He died at the age of 76 from pneumonia at his country house at Passy on Friday, November 13, 1868. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. In 1887, his remains were moved to the Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze, in Florence, at the request of the Italian government.18 cantatas21 instrumental music10 sacred music39 operas
Gaetano Donizetti Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore (1832), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Don Pasquale (1843), all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment (both from 1840). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera.The youngest of three sons, Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter located just outside the city walls. His family was very poor with no tradition of music, his father being the caretaker of the town pawnshop. Nevertheless, Donizetti received some musical instruction from Simon Mayr, a German composer of internationally successful operas who had become maestro di capella at Bergamo's principal church in 1802.Donizetti was not especially successful as a choirboy, but in 1806 he was one of the first pupils to be enrolled at the Lezioni Caritatevoli school, founded by Mayr, in Bergamo through a full scholarship. He received detailed training in the arts of fugue and counterpoint, and it was here that he launched his operatic career. After some minor compositions under the commission of Paolo Zanca, Donizetti wrote his fourth opera, Zoraida di Granata. This work impressed Domenico Barbaia, a prominent theatre manager, and Donizetti was offered a contract to compose in Naples. Writing in Rome and Milan in addition to Naples, Donizetti achieved some popular success in the 1820s (although critics were often unimpressed), but was not well known internationally until 1830, when his Anna Bolena was premiered in Milan. He almost instantly became famous throughout Europe. L'elisir d'amore, a comedy produced in 1832, came soon after, and is deemed one of the masterpieces of 19th-century opera buffa (as is his Don Pasquale, written for Paris in 1843). Shortly after L'elisir d'amore, Donizetti composed Lucia di Lammermoor, based on the Sir Walter Scott novel The Bride of Lammermoor. It became his most famous opera, and one of the high points of the bel canto tradition, reaching stature similar to Bellini's Norma.After the success of Lucrezia Borgia (1833) consolidated his reputation, Donizetti followed the paths of both Rossini and Bellini by visiting Paris, but his opera Marin Faliero suffered by comparison with Bellini's I puritani, and he returned to Naples to produce his already-mentioned masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. As Donizetti's fame grew, so did his engagements, as he was further hired to write in both France and Italy. In 1838, he moved to Paris after the Italian censor objected to the production of Poliuto (on the grounds that
such a sacred subject was inappropriate for the stage); there he wrote La fille du régiment, which became another success.As a conductor, he led the premiere of Rossini's Stabat Mater.Donizetti's wife, Virginia Vasselli, gave birth to three children, none of whom survived. Within a year of his parents' deaths, his wife died from cholera. By 1843, Donizetti exhibited symptoms of syphilis and probable bipolar disorder. After being institutionalized in 1845, he was sent to Paris, where he could be cared for. After visits from friends, including Giuseppe Verdi, Donizetti was sent back to Bergamo, his hometown. After several years in the grip of insanity, he died in 1848 in the house of the noble family Scotti. After his death Donizetti was buried in the cemetery of Valtesse but in the late 19th century his body was transferred to Bergamo's Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore near the grave of his teacher Simon Mayr.Donizetti is best known for his operatic works, but he also wrote music in a number of other forms, including some church music, a number of string quartets, and some orchestral works.He was the younger brother of Giuseppe Donizetti, who had become, in 1828, Instructor General of the Imperial Ottoman Music at the court of Sultan Mahmud II (1808–1839).Donizetti was a prolific composer. He composed about 75 operas, 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces.
Antonio SalieriBorn: 18-Aug-1750Birthplace: Legnago, Venice, ItalyDied: 7-May-1825Location of death: Vienna, AustriaCause of death: unspecifiedRemains: Buried, Zentralfriedhof, Vienna, AustriaAntonio Salieri (18 August 1750 – 7 May 1825) was an Venetian classical composer, conductor and teacher born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, but who spent his adult life and career as a faithful subject of the Habsburg monarchy.Salieri was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera. As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protege of Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers.Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 to 1792, Salieri dominated Italian language opera in Vienna. During his career he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Venice, Rome, and Paris. His dramatic works were widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime. As the Austrian imperial Kapellmeister from 1788 to 1824, he was responsible for music at the court chapel and attached school. Even as his works dropped from performance, and he wrote no new operas after 1804, he still remained one of the most important and sought after teachers of his generation and his influence was felt in every aspect of Vienna's musical life. Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Liszt were among the most famous of his pupils.Salieri's music slowly disappeared from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868, and was rarely heard after that period until the revival of his fame in the late 20th century. This revival was due to the dramatic and highly fictionalized depiction of Salieri in the play and film Amadeus (play 1979, film 1984), by Peter Shaffer and Milos Forman respectively. His music today has regained some modest popularity via recordings. It is also the subject of increasing academic study and a small number of his operas have returned to the stage. In addition there is now a Salieri Opera Festival[1] sponsored by the Fondazione Culturale Antonio Salieri and dedicated to rediscovering his work and those of his contemporaries. It is developing as an annual autumn event in his native town of Legnago where a theater has been re-named in his honor.Antonio Salieri began his musical studies in his native town of Legnago; he was first taught at home by his older brother Francesco Salieri (a former student of the violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini), and he received further lessons from the organist of the Legnago Cathedral, Giuseppe Simoni, a pupil of Padre Giovanni Battista Martini.[2] Salieri would recall little from his childhood in later years except a passion for sugar, reading and music. He twice ran away from home without permission to hear his elder brother play violin concertos in neighboring churches on festival days (resulting in the loss of his beloved sugar), and he
also recounted being chastised by his father after failing to greet a local priest with proper respect. Salieri responded to the reprimand by saying that the priest's organ playing displeased him because it was in an inappropriately theatrical style.[3] Sometime between 1763 and 1764 Salieri suffered the death of both parents and was briefly taken in by an anonymous brother, a monk in Padua, and then for unknown reasons in 1765 or 1766 he became the ward of a Venetian nobleman named Giovanni Mocenigo (which Giovanni is at this time unknown), a member of the powerful and well connected Mocenigo family.[2] It is possible that Antonio's father and Giovanni were friends or business associates, but this is obscure. While living in Venice Salieri continued his musical studies with the organist and opera composer Giovanni Battista Pescetti, then following Pescetti’s sudden death he studied with the opera singer Ferdinando Pacini or Pasini. It was through Pacini that Salieri gained the attention of the composer Florian Leopold Gassmann, who, impressed with his talents and concerned for his future, took the young orphan to Vienna where he personally directed and paid for the remainder of his musical education.[4]
Salieri and Gassmann arrived in Vienna on 15 June 1766. Gassmann's first act was to take Salieri to the Italian Church to consecrate his teaching and service to God, an event that left a deep impression on Salieri for the rest of his life.[5] Salieri's education included instruction in Latin and Italian poetry by Fr. Don Pietro Tommasi, instruction in the German language, and European literature. His music studies revolved around vocal composition, and thoroughbass. His musical theory training in harmony and counterpoint was rooted in Johann Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum,[6] which Salieri translated during each Latin lesson.[7] As a result Salieri continued to live with Gassmann even after Gassmann’s marriage, an arrangement that lasted until the year of Gassmann's death and Salieri's own marriage in 1774.[8] Few of Salieri’s compositions have survived from this early period. In his old age Salieri hinted that these works were either purposely destroyed, or had been lost with the exception of a few works for the church.[9] Among these sacred works there survives a Mass in C major written without a "Gloria" and in the antique a cappella style (presumably for one of the church’s penitential seasons) and dated 2 August 1767.[10] A complete opera composed in 1769 (presumably as a culminating study) La Vestale ("The Vestal Virgin") has also been lost.[11]
Beginning in 1766 Gassmann introduced Salieri to the daily chamber music performances held during Emperor Joseph II's evening meal. Salieri quickly impressed the Emperor, and Gassmann was instructed to bring his pupil as often as he wished.[12][13] This was the beginning of a relationship between monarch and musician that would last until Joseph's death in 1790. Salieri met Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi better known as Metastasio and Christoph Willibald Gluck during this period at the famous Sunday morning salons held at the home of the Martinez family. Here Metastasio had an apartment and participated in the weekly gatherings. Over the next several years Metastasio gave Salieri informal instruction in prosody and the declamation of Italian poetry,[14] and Gluck became an informal advisor, friend and confidante.[15][16] It was toward the end of this extended period of study that Gassmann was called away on a new opera commission and a gap in the theater’s program allowed for Salieri to make his debut as a composer of a completely original opera buffa. Salieri's first full opera was composed during the winter and carnival season of 1770; Le donne letterate and was based on Molière's Les Femmes Savantes ("The Learned Ladies") with a libretto by Giovanni Gastone Boccherini a dancer in the court ballet, and a brother of the famous composer.[17] The modest success of this opera would launch Salieri's 34 year operatic career as a composer of over 35 original dramas.[18]
Early Viennese period and operas (1770–1778)Following the modest success of Le donne letterate Salieri received new commissions writing two additional operas in 1770 both with libretti by Boccherini. The first a pastoral opera, L'amore innocente ("Innocent Love") was a light hearted comedy set in the Austrian mountains,[19] and the second was based on an episode from Cervantes Don Quixote – Don Chisciotte alle nozze di Gamace ("Don Quixote at the Marriage of Camacho").[20] In these first works, drawn mostly from the traditions of mid-century opera buffa, Salieri showed a penchant for experimentation and for mixing the established characteristics of specific operatic genres. Don Chisciotte was a mix of ballet and opera buffa, and the lead female roles in L'amore innocente were designed to contrast and highlight the different traditions of operatic writing for soprano, even borrowing stylistic flourishes from opera-seria in the use of coloratura in what was a short pastoral comedy more in keeping with a Roman Intermezzo.[21] The mixing and pushing against the boundaries of established operatic genres would be a continuing hallmark of Salieri's own personal style, and in his choice of material for the plot (as in his first opera), he manifested a lifelong interest in subjects drawn from classic drama and literature.
Salieri's first great success was in the realm of serious opera. Commissioned for an unknown occasion Salieri's Armida was based on Torquato Tasso's epic poem La Gerusalemme liberata ("Jerusalem Delivered") and premiered on 2 June 1771.[22] Armida is a tale of love and duty in conflict and is saturated in magic. The opera is set during the First Crusade and it features a dramatic mix of ballet, aria, ensemble and choral writing combining theatricality, scenic splendor and high emotionalism. The work clearly followed in Gluck's footsteps and embraced his reform of serious opera begun with Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste. The libretto to Armida was by Marco Coltellini the house poet for the imperial theaters. While Salieri followed the precepts set forth by Gluck and his librettist Ranieri de' Calzabigi in the preface to Alceste; Salieri also drew on some musical ideas from the more traditional opera-seria and even opera buffa, creating a new synthesis in the process. Armida was translated into German and widely performed, especially in the northern German states, where it helped to establish Salieri's reputation as an important and innovative modern composer[23] It would also be the first opera to receive a serious preparation in a piano and vocal reduction by Carl Friedrich Cramer in 1783.[24][25]
Armida was soon followed by Salieri's first truly popular success; a commedia per musica in the style of Carlo Goldoni La fiera di Venezia ("The Fair of Venice"). La fiera was written for Carnival in 1772 and premiered on 29 January. Here Salieri returned to his collaboration with the young Boccherini who crafted an original plot. La fiera would feature characters singing in three languages, a bustling portrayal of the Ascension-tide Fair and Carnival in Venice, and large and lengthy ensembles and choruses. It also included an innovative scene that would combine a series of on stage dances with singing from both solo protagonists and the chorus. A pattern to be imitated by later composers, most famously and successfully by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Don Giovanni. Salieri would also write several bravura aria's for a soprano playing the part of a middle class character that would combine coloratura and concertante woodwind solos, another innovation for a comic opera that was to be widely imitated.Salieri's next two operas were not particular or lasting successes, of the two only La secchia rapita ("The Stolen Bucket"), deserves mention. A parody of Metastasian opera-seria it featured dazzling parodies of the high flown and emotive aria's found in that genre, as well as bold and innovative orchestrations, including the first known use of three tympani. Again a classic of Renaissance literature was the basis of the libretto by Boccherini, in this case a comic mock-epic by Tassoni, in which a war between Modena and Bologna ensues over a stolen bucket. This uneven work was followed by another popular comedic success La locandiera ("Mine Hostess"), an adaptation of the classic and popular spoken stage comedy La locandiera by Carlo Goldoni, the libretto was prepared by Domenico Poggi.The majority of Salieri's modest number of instrumental works also date from this time. Salieri's instrumental works have been judged by various critics and scholars to lack the inspiration and innovation found in his writing for the stage. These orchestral works are mainly in the gallant style and though they show some development toward the late classical they reflect a general weakness in comparison to his operatic works of the same and later periods. These works were written for mostly unknown occasions and artists. They include two concertos for pianoforte, one in C major and one in B flat major, (both 1773); a concerto for organ in C Major in two movements, (the middle movement is missing from the autograph score, or perhaps, it was an improvised organ solo) (also 1773); two concertante works: a concerto for oboe, violin and cello in D major (1770), and a flute and oboe concerto in C major (1774). These works are among the most frequently recorded of Salieri's compositions.Upon Gassmann's death on 22 January,[26] most likely due to complications from an accident with a carriage some years earlier, Salieri succeeded him as assistant director of the Italian opera in early 1774.[27] In 1774 Salieri married Therese Helferstorfer on 10 October, she was the daughter of a recently deceased financier and official of the court treasury.[28] Sacred music was not a high priority for the composer during this stage of his career, but he did compose an Alleluia for chorus and orchestra in 1774, perhaps for his own wedding, or in thanksgiving for it.During the next three years Salieri was primarily concerned with rehearsing and conducting the Italian opera company in Vienna and teaching. His three complete operas written during this time show the development of his compositional skills, but included no great success, either commercially, or artistically. His most important compositions during this period were a symphony in D major, performed in the summer of 1776, and the oratorio La passione di Gesù Cristo with a text by Metastasio performed during Advent of 1776.After the financial collapse of the Italian opera company in 1777 due to financial mis-management, Joseph II decided to end the performance of Italian opera, French spoken drama, and ballet. Instead the two court owned theaters would be reopened under new management, and partly subsidized by the Imperial Court, as a
new National Theater. The re-launched theaters would promote German language plays and musical productions that reflected Austrian (or as Joseph II would have said) German values, traditions and outlook. The Italian opera buffa company was therefore replaced by a German language Singspiel troupe. For Joseph and his supports of Imperial reform, besides encouraging any first buddings of pan-national pride that would unite his multi-lingual and ethnic subjects under one common language; they also hoped to save a considerable amount of money in the process. Beginning in 1778 Emperor wished to have new works, in German, composed by his own subjects and brought on the stage with clear Imperial support. This in effect left Salieri's role as assistant court composer in a much reduced position. Salieri also had never truly mastered the German language, and he now felt no longer competent to continue as assistant opera director. A further blow to his career was landed when the spoken drama and musical Singspiel were placed on an equal footing. For the young composer there would be few, if any, new compositional commissions to receive from the court. Salieri was left with few financial options and he began casting about for new opportunities.However, in 1778 Gluck turned down an offer to compose the inaugural opera for La Scala in Milan; upon the suggestion of Joseph II and with the approval of Gluck, Salieri was offered the commission, which he gratefully accepted. Joseph II granted Salieri permission to take a year long leave of absence (later extended) thus enabling him to write for La Scala and to undertake a tour of Italy. Salieri's Italian tour of 1778–80 began with the production of Europa riconosciuta ("Europa Recognized") for La Scala (which was revived in 2004 for the same opera house's re-opening following extensive renovations). From Milan Salieri included stops in Venice and Rome and finally a return to Milan. During this tour he wrote three new comic operas and he also collaborated with Giacomo Rust on one opera, Il Talismano ("The Talismand"). Of his Italian works one, La scuola de' gelosi ("The School for Jealousy"), a witty study of amorous intrigue and emotion, would prove a popular and lasting international success.Upon his return at imperial behest to Vienna in 1780, he wrote one German singspiel Der Rauchfangkehrer or (The Chimney Sweep) which premiered in 1781. Salieri's Chimney Sweep and Mozart's work for the same company in 1782, Die Entführung aus dem Serail ("The Abduction from the Seraglio") would be the only two major successes to emerge from the German singspiel experiment, and only Mozart's opera would survive on the stage beyond the close of the 18th century. In 1783 the Italian opera company was revived with singers partly chosen and vetted by Salieri during his Italian tour,[29] the new season would open with a slightly re-worked version of Salieri's recent success La scuola de' gelosi. Salieri then returned to his rounds of rehearsing, composition and teaching. However, his time at home in Vienna would be quickly brought to a close when an opportunity to write an opera for Paris arose, again through the patronage of Gluck Salieri traveled abroad to fulfill an important commission.The opera Les Danaïdes ("The Danaids") is a five-act tragédie lyrique; the plot was based on an ancient Greek legend that had been the basis for the first play in a trilogy by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliants. The original commission that reached Salieri in 1783–84 was to assist Gluck in finishing a work for Paris that had been all but completed; in reality, Gluck had failed to notate any of the score for the new opera and gave the entire project over to his young friend. Gluck feared that the Parisian critics would denounce the opera by a young composer known mostly for comic pieces and so the opera was originally billed in the press as being a new work by Gluck with some assistance from Antonio Salieri, then shortly before the premiere of the opera the Parisian press reported that the work was to be partly by Gluck and partly by Salieri, and finally after popular and critical success were won on stage the opera was acknowledged in a letter to the public by Gluck as being wholly by the young Antonio. Les Danaïdes was received with great acclaim and its popularity with audiences and critics alike produced several further requests for new works for Paris audiences by Salieri. Les Danaïdes followed in the tradition of reform that Gluck had begun in the 1760s and that Salieri had emulated in his earlier opera Armida. Salieri's first French opera contained scenes of great solemnity and festivity; yet overshadowing it all was darkness and revenge. The opera depicted politically motivated murder, filial duty and love in conflict, tryannicide and finally eternal damnation. The opera with its dark overture, lavish choral writing, many ballet scenes, and electrifying finale depicting a glimpse of hellish torture kept the opera on the stage in Paris for over forty years. A young Hector Berlioz recorded the deep impression this work made on him in his Mémoires.[30]
Upon returning to Vienna following his success in Paris, Salieri met and befriended Lorenzo Da Ponte and had his first professional encounters with Mozart. Da Ponte would write his first opera libretto for Salieri, Il ricco d'un giorno ("A Rich Man for a Day") in 1784, it was not a success. Salieri next turned to Giambattista Casti as a librettist, a more successful set of collaboration flowed from this pairing. In the mean time Da
Ponte would begin work with Mozart on Le nozze di Figaro ("The Marriage of Figaro"). (For the famous relationship between Mozart and Salieri please see below.) Salieri soon produced one of his greatest works with the text by Casti La grotta di Trofonio ("The Cave of Trofonius") in 1785, the first opera buffa published in full score by Artaria. Shortly after this success Joseph II had Mozart and Salieri each contribute a one-act opera and/or singspiel for production at a banquet in 1786. Salieri collaborated with Casti to produce a parody of the relationship between poet and composer in Prima la musica e poi le parole ("First the Music and then the Words"). This short work also highlighted the typical backstage antics of two high flown sopranos. Salieri then returned to Paris for the premiere of his tragédie lyrique Les Horaces ("The Horati") which proved a failure. However the failure of this work was more than made up for with his next Parisian opera Tarare with a libretto by Beaumarchais. This was intended to be the nec plus ultra of reform opera, a completely new synthesis of poetry and music that was an 18th-century anticipation of the ideals of Richard Wagner. He also created a sacred cantata Le Jugement dernier ("The Last Judgement"). The success of his opera Tarare was such that it was soon translated into Italian at Joseph II behest by Lorenzo Da Ponte as Axur, Re d'Ormus ("Axur, King of Hormuz") and staged at the royal wedding of Franz II in 1788.In 1788 Salieri returned to Vienna where he remained for the rest of his life. In that year he became Kappellmeister of the Imperial Chapel upon the death of Joseph Bonno; as Kappellmeister he conducted the music and musical school connected with the chapel until shortly before his death, being official retired from the post in 1824.His Italian adaptation of Tarare, Axur would prove to be his greatest international success. Axur was widely produced throughout Europe and it even reached South America with the exiled royal house of Portugal in 1824. Axur and his other new compositions completed by 1792 would mark the height of Salieri's popularity and his influence. Just as his apogee of fame was being reached abroad, his influence in Vienna would begin to diminish with the death of Joseph II in 1789. Joseph's death deprived Salieri of his greatest patron and protector. During this period of imperial change in Vienna and revolutionary ferment in France, Salieri composed two additional extremely innovative musical dramas to libretti by Giovanni Casti. Due, however, to their satiric and overtly liberal political inclinations, both operas were seen as unsuitable for public performance in the politically reactive cultures of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor and later Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor. This resulted in two of his most original operas being consigned to his desk drawer, namely Cublai, gran kan de' Tartari ("Kublai Grand Kahn of Tartary") a satire on the autocracy and court intrigues at the court of the Russian Czarina, Catherine the Great, and Catilina ("Cataline") a semi-comic-semi-tragic account of the Catiline conspiracy that attempted to overthrow the Roman republic during the consulship of Cicero. These operas were composed in 1787 and 1792 respectively. Two other operas of little success and longterm importance were composed in 1789, and one great popular success La Cifra ("The Cipher").As Salieri's political position became very insecure he was retired as director of the Italian opera in 1792. He continued to write new operas per imperial contract until 1804, when he voluntarily withdrew from the stage. Of his late works for the stage only two works gained wide popular esteem during his life, Palmira, regina di Persia ("Palmira, Queen of Persia") 1795 and Cesare in Farmacusa ("Caesar on Pharmacusa"), both drawing on the heroic and exotic success established with Axur. His late opera based on William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle ("Falstaff, or the Three Tricks"), (1799) has found a wider audience in modern times than its original reception promised. His last opera was a German language singspiel Die Neger, ("The Negroes"), a melodrama set in colonial Virginia with a text by Georg Friedrich Treitschke (the author of the libretto for Beethoven's Fidelio) performed in 1804 and was a complete failure.When Salieri retired from the stage, he recognized that artistic styles had changed and he felt that he no longer had the creative capacity to adapt or the emotional desire to continue. Also as Salieri aged he moved slowly away from his more liberal political stances as he saw the enlightened reform of Joseph II's reign, and the hoped for reforms of the French revolution, replaced with more radical revolutionary ideas. As the political situation threatened and eventually overwhelmed Austria, which was repeatedly crushed by French political forces, Salieri's first and most important biographer Mosel described the emotional effect that this political, social, and cultural upheaval had on the composer. Mosel noted that these radical changes, especially the invasion and defeat of Austria, and the occupation of Vienna intertwined with the personal losses that struck Salieri in the same period led to his withdrawal from operatic work. Related to this Mosel quotes the aged composer concerning the radical changes in musical taste that were underway in the age of Beethoven, "From that period [circa 1800] I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner
completely contrary to that of my own times. Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity."[31]
As his teaching and work with the imperial chapel continued, his duties required the composition of a large number of sacred works, and in his last years it was almost exclusively in religious works and teaching that Salieri occupied himself. Among his compositions written for the chapels needs were two complete sets of vespers, many graduals, offertories, and four orchestral masses. During this period he lost his only son in 1805 and his wife in 1807.Salieri continued to conduct publicly (including the performance of Haydn's The Creation, during which Haydn collapsed, and several premiers by Beethoven including the 1st and 2nd Piano Concertos and Wellington's Victory). He also continued to help administer several charities and organize their musical events.His remaining secular works in this late period fall into three categories: first, large scale cantatas and one oratorio Habsburg written on patriotic themes or in response to the international political situation, pedagogical works written to aid his students in voice, and finally simple songs, rounds or canons written for home entertainment; many with original poetry by the composer. He also composed one large scale instrumental work in 1815 intended as a study in late classical orchestration: Twenty-Six Variations for the Orchestra on a Theme called La Folia di Spagna. The theme is likely folk derived and is known as La Folia. This simple melodic and harmonic progression had served as an inspiration for many baroque composers, and would be used by later romantic and post-romantic composers. Salieri's setting is a brooding work in the minor key, which rarely moves far from the original melodic material, its main interest lies in the deft and varied handling of orchestral colors. La Folia was the most monumental set of orchestral variations before Brahms' Variations on a Theme by Haydn.His teaching of budding young musicians continued, and among his pupils in composition (usually vocal) were Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Casimir Cartellieri, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert and many other luminaries of the early Romantic period. He also instructed many prominent singers throughout his long career. All but the wealthiest of his pupils received their lessons for free, a tribute to the kindness Gassmann had shown Salieri as a penniless orphan.Salieri was committed to medical care and suffered dementia for the last year and a half of his life. He died in Vienna on 7 May 1825, and was buried in the Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof on 10 May. At his memorial service on 22 June 1825 his own Requiem in C minor — composed in 1804 – was performed for the first time. His remains were later transferred to the Zentralfriedhof. His monument is adorned by a poem written by Joseph Weigl, one of his pupils:Rest in peace! Uncovered by dustEternity shall bloom for you.Rest in peace! In eternal harmoniesYour spirit now is dissolved.It expressed itself in enchanting notes,Now it is floating to everlasting beauty.WORKS42 Operas95 Insertion arias and ensembles6 Ballets and incidental music13 Secular cantatas18 Secular choirs340 (circa) Songs, ensembles and canons with or without piano5 Oratories and sacred cantatas7 Masses and single movements2 Requiem masses14 Graduals32 Offertories9 Psalms2 Litanies10 Hymns17 Introitus12 Motets and sacred arias and chants6 Concertos
9 Symphonies, overtures and variations7 Serenades5 Marches7 Chamber musicRevisions of other composers' works and joint compositions with other composers "La Betulia liberata" by Florian Leopold Gassmann: abridgements in recitatives and arias, and
additional choirs taken from other compositions of Gassmann's (1820) "Il Talismano": joint composition by Salieri (first act) and Giacomo Rust (second and third act)
(1779) "Iphigénie en Tauride" by Christoph Willibald Gluck: Italian version called "Ifigenia in Tauride" in
Lorenzo Da Ponte's translation (1783) "Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia" for voice and piano: joint composition by Salieri, Mozart and
Cornetti (1785) - lost - "Requiem" by Niccolò Jommelli: additional instrumentation of two oboes, two bassoons and two
trombones (for Christoph Willibald Gluck's solemn requiem on April 8, 1788) "Stabat Mater" in F minor by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: version for soloists, choir and orchestra,
instrumentation by Franz Xaver Süssmayr
Giovanni PaisielloGiovanni Paisiello (or Paesiello) (May 9, 1740 – June 5, 1816) was an Italian composer of the Classical era.Paisiello was born at Taranto and educated by the Jesuits there. He became known for his beautiful singing voice and in 1754 was sent to the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio at Naples, where he studied under Francesco Durante, and eventually became assistant master. For the theatre of the Conservatorio, which he left in 1763, he wrote some intermezzi, one of which attracted so much notice that he was invited to write two operas, La Pupilla and Il Mondo al Rovescio, for Bologna, and a third, Il Marchese di Tidipano, for Rome.His reputation now firmly established, he settled for some years at Naples, where, despite the popularity of Niccolò Piccinni, Domenico Cimarosa and Pietro Guglielmi, of whose triumphs he was bitterly jealous, he produced a series of highly successful operas, one of which, L'ldolo cinese, made a deep impression upon the Neapolitan public.In 1772 Paisiello began to write church music, and composed a requiem for Gennara di Borbone, of the reigning dynasty. In the same year he married Cecilia Pallini, and the marriage was a happy one. In 1776 Paisiello was invited by the empress Catherine II of Russia to St Petersburg, where he remained for eight years, producing, among other charming works, his masterpiece, Il barbiere di Siviglia, which soon attained a European reputation. The fate of this opera marks an epoch in the history of Italian art; for with it the gentle suavity cultivated by the masters of the 18th century died out to make room for the dazzling brilliance of a later period.When, in 1816, Gioachino Rossini set a revised version of the libretto to music, under the title of "Almaviva ossia la inutil precauzione" the fans of Paisiello stormed the stage. Rossini's opera, now known as Il barbiere di Siviglia, is now acknowledged as Rossini's greatest work, while Paisiello's opera is only infrequently produced -- a strange instance of poetical vengeance, since Paisiello himself had many years previously endeavoured to eclipse the fame of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi by resetting the libretto of his famous intermezzo, La serva padrona.Paisiello left Russia in 1784, and, after producing Il Re Teodoro at Vienna, entered the service of Ferdinand IV of Naples, where he composed many of his best operas, including Nina and La Molinara. After many vicissitudes, resulting from political and dynastic changes, he was invited to Paris (1802) by Napoleon, whose favor he had won five years previously by composing a march for the funeral of General Hoche. Napoleon treated him munificently, while cruelly neglecting two more famous composers, Luigi Cherubini and Etienne Méhul, to whom the new favorite transferred the hatred he had formerly borne to Cimarosa, Guglielmi and Piccinni.Paisiello conducted the music of the court in the Tuileries with a stipend of 10,000 francs and 4800 for lodging, but he entirely failed to conciliate the Parisian public, who received his opera Proserpine so coldly that, in 1803, he requested and with some difficulty obtained permission to return to Italy, upon the plea of his wife's ill health. On his arrival at Naples Paisiello was reinstated in his former appointments by Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat, but he had taxed his genius beyond its strength, and was unable to meet the
demands now made upon it for new ideas. His prospects, too, were precarious. The power of the Bonaparte family was tottering to its fall; and Paisiello's fortunes fell with it. The death of his wife in 1815 tried him severely. His health failed rapidly, and constitutional jealousy of the popularity of others was a source of worry and vexation.Paisiello is known to have composed 94 operas, which are known for their gracefully beautiful melodies. Perhaps the best-known tune he ever wrote is Nel cor più non mi sento from La Molinara, immortalized when Beethoven composed variations based on it. Paisiello also wrote a great deal of church music, including eight masses; as well as fifty-one instrumental compositions and many stand-alone songs. Manuscript scores of many of his operas were presented to the library of the British Museum by Domenico Dragonetti.The library of the Gerolamini at Naples possesses an interesting manuscript compilation recording Paisiello's opinions on contemporary composers, and exhibiting him as a somewhat severe critic, especially of the work of Pergolesi.The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music [1] notes that "Paisiello was one of the most successful and influential opera composers of his time. Most of his over 80 operas are comic and use a simple, direct and spirited style, latterly with sharper characterization, more colorful scoring and warmer melodies (features that influenced Mozart). His serious operas have less than the conventional amount of virtuoso vocal writing; those for Russia are the closest to Gluck's 'reform' approach."Paisiello was primarily an opera composer. His instrumental works are therefore imbued with a similar vocally conceived melodic line, granted they may be lacking in the sophisticated counterpoint and motivic work of Haydn and Mozart's music. This characterization, however, does not do justice to the extreme drama and topical contrast in all his works such as the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor. Essentially he had mastered all the techniques which made for good opera, and this made his works widely popular and admired throughout Europe.100 operas20 catatas seculares12 Oratorios, Passions & Sacred Cantatas48 Religious works for Bonaparte's chapels11 Masses11 Pieces for the Ordinary of the Mass38 Canticles, Hymns & Psalms5 Motets25 Instrumental Works11 Works of doubtful authenticity
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