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• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Bal-das-sa’-ra Ga-loop’-pe) 1706–85 Italian composer Galuppi had great influence on the development of opera buffa. Most of his career was spent in his native Venice, apart from spells in London in the 1740s and St Petersburg in the 1760s. He was maestro di cappella at the famous St Mark’s basilica and worked at the girls’ orphanage-conservatories. His music is largely notable ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1706–85, Italian Baldassare Galuppi wrote his first opera, La fede nell’incostanza (‘Faith in Inconstancy’, 1722), when he was 16. It failed. Undeterred, Galuppi studied with Antonio Lotti (1667–1740) to improve his technique. Eventually, in 1729, he achieved his first big success, in Venice, with Dorinda. This opened the door to a brilliant career in ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

c. 1759–c. 1803, Italian Adriana Ferrarese was known as ‘La Ferrarese’ from her birthplace, Ferrara. In 1785, in London, she sang in Demetrio by Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842). Da Ponte, her mentor, wrote libretti for operas by Vicente Martín y Soler (1754–1806) and Salieri in which she took part. However, Mozart was not particularly impressed ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Kärl Dit’-ters fun Dit’-ters-dôrf) 1739–99 Austrian composer One of the most important Viennese composers in the age of Haydn and Mozart, Dittersdorf held appointments as violinist, composer and Kapellmeister in Vienna, Grosswardein (now Oradea, Romania) and other courts in the Austrian Empire. He was a prolific composer, particularly of symphonies (among them 12 based on texts from ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Romantic

Glinka, the ‘father of Russian music’, was the first composer to forge a distinctively Russian style. Previously, during the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, music at the Imperial court had been directed by leading Italian opera composers such as Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85), Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) and Domenico ...

• Classical
• Renaissance

‘Renaissance’ is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’. It has been used since the nineteenth century to describe the period between c. 1300 and 1600. Three hundred years is a long time for a single historical or cultural period, and the strain shows in any attempt to define the term ‘Renaissance’. The cultural phenomenon central to the Renaissance was a revival ...

• Houses & Companies
• Late Baroque
• Opera

During the early eighteenth century a few composers enjoyed regular close collaboration with a favourite librettist, such as Fux with Pariati, or both Vinci and Porpora with the young Metastasio. However, such examples were rare, and instead it was common for a popular libretto created for one major Italian opera centre to be adapted for the needs ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Renaissance

Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (‘The Book of the Courtier’) was published in 1528 and became the most influential book of manners of its time. It was still being reprinted well into the eighteenth century and was translated into many languages. The Courtier presents a series of evening conversations purported to have taken place at the court of Urbino, ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Classical Era

Developments in philosophy during the early decades of the eighteenth century saw rationalist and humanist ideals displacing mysticism in a new age of ‘Enlightenment’. By the middle of the century, principles of natural order and balance were being explored in the arts. Composers attempted to give a clear sense of where their music was going in terms of themes and ...