Premiered: 1707, Venice Libretto by Girolamo Frigimelica Roberti Act I King Farnace and Stratonica, Mitridate’s mother, have usurped the Pontus throne by killing Mitridate’s father. Mitridate, the true heir, has sought refuge in Egypt; his sister, Laodice, awaits his return and dreams of avenging her father’s death. Egypt and Pontus are set to form ...
1660–1725, Italian Sicilian-born Alessandro Scarlatti came to the attention of the Italian opera world with his first opera, Gli equivoci nel sembiante (‘Mistaken Identities’, 1679), which he wrote when he was only 19. The work was soon being staged by opera houses outside Rome, but this was not the limit of Scarlatti’s new renown. At around the same ...
(Al-es-san’-dro Skär-lat’-te) 1660–1725 Italian composer Scarlatti was born in Sicily but spent most of his working life in Rome, where he studied, and in Naples. He made important and prolific contributions to the genres of opera, oratorio, serenata and cantata forms, composing a much smaller quantity of instrumental and keyboard music. His musical talent attracted the attention ...
(A-lel’-san’-dro Stra-del’-la) 1644–82 Italian composer By the age of 20 Stradella was composing for the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden, who appointed him servitore di camera (servant of the chamber). He enjoyed the patronage of several leading families, but was forced to leave Rome briefly in 1669 after attempting to embezzle money from the church. An ill-judged affair with one ...
(Do-man’-e-ko Skär-lat’-te) 1685–1757 Italian composer and harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti was the son of Alessandro Scarlatti. He was born in Naples and lived there until 1704, when he joined his father in Rome. The following year he travelled to the cities of Florence and Venice; during his time in the latter he met the great composer of the era, Handel. Scarlatti ...
1639–82, Italian Alessandro Stradella was in his native Rome, writing intermezzi and other music for revivals of operas by Cavalli and Cesti, when he became embroiled in a quarrel with the Catholic authorities. He then had to leave Rome and decamped to Genoa, where he arrived in 1678. By that time, Stradella had composed several operas ...
1630–80, Italian Nothing is known of the first 30 years of Antonio Sartorio’s life, except that he was Venetian. He made his first appearance in the historical records in 1661, when the first of his 15 operas, Gl’amori infruttuosi di Pirro (‘Pirro’s Hopeless Love’, 1661) was performed in Venice. In 1664, Sartorio was appointed Kappellmeister at ...
1685–1759, German Handel composed 42 operas between 1704 and 1740, but most of these were neglected and seldom performed after his lifetime. In the twentieth century, Handel’s music dramas and in particular his operas underwent a renaissance that has established him as the definitive theatre composer of the late Baroque period. Handel was a maverick composer who pursued ...
c. 1704–c. 1760, Italian Carestini studied in Milan from the age of 12, and gave his debut there in 1719. He studied with Antonio Maria Bernacchi, and sang alongside his teacher in his Roman debut of Alessandro Scarlatti’s La Griselda (1721). He spent most of the 1720s singing in operas by Leonardo Vinci (c. 1696–1730), Porpora and Hasse ...
(Yo-han A’-dam Rin’-ken) 1623–1722 Netherlandish-German composer Reincken studied the organ with Heinrich Scheidemann (c. 1595–1663) at St Catharine’s, Hamburg, becoming his assistant then successor. Reincken was both teacher and virtuoso organist. Many musicians travelled to hear him play, including Georg Böhm (1661–1733), Buxtehude and J. S. Bach. In 1720 Bach himself played on the organ of St Catharine’s before ...
(Yo’-han A’-dolf Has’-se) 1699–1783 German composer and tenor Born just outside Hamburg, Hasse became the leading Italian opera composer of his time. He began his career as a tenor, went to Italy for training (under Alessandro Scarlatti, 1660–1725, and others), and had operas given in Naples; he married Faustina Bordoni (1700–81), a famous soprano who had sung for ...
1699–1783, German At the age of 22, Johann Adolf Hasse had his first opera, Antioco (1721), produced before being sent to Italy to study under Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725). In Naples, Hasse’s ‘dialect comedies’ Sesostrate (1726) and La sorella amante (‘The Loving Sister’, 1729) made him something of a local celebrity. Hasse’s Artaserse (1730), staged in Venice, ...
Spanning nearly the entire seventeenth century, the Early Baroque era was a time of great change in music. In the Italian cities that led musical taste at the end of the Renaissance, a flowering of new genres of vocal music accompanied by instruments supplanted the unaccompanied Mass and motet. Among these, the opera and oratorio still exist in ...
The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were infused with a spirit of scientific and philosophical enquiry. In 1722’s Traité de l’harmonie (‘Treatise on Harmony’), Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–64), who dominated French opera in the 1730s – Castor et Pollux (1737) – set out the rules of the tonal method that composers had long been developing in practice. At the same time, ...
Opera first reached Naples when Venetian companies brought their productions to the city after 1648. At that time, the city was recovering from the spate of murders and massacres that had taken place during the revolt against Spanish rule led by the fisherman Tommaso Aniello Masaniello. Masaniello was killed in 1647 by agents working for the Spanish Viceroy Count d’Onate. ...
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