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(To-ma’-zo Tra-ât’-te) 1727–79 Italian composer Trained in Naples, Traetta began his career as an opera composer there and in Rome. He was appointed to the Parma court in 1758, where his first few operas included two based on translations of texts used by Rameau, so bringing French structure into Italian opera (Ippolito ed Aricia, 1759; I tintaridi, ...

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1727–79, Italian The Italian composer Tommaso Traetta reflected Gluck’s ideals for opera, in which orchestration, choral scenes, dance and solo arias were combined. One example of these principles was Traetta’s setting of an Italian translation of the text Rameau had used in his own Hippolyte et Aricie (‘Hippolytus and Aricia’, 1759), which married the French and Italian ...

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• Classical Era
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1762–96 English composer Born in London of Italian and English parentage, Storace studied in Naples and first worked in Florence. He was back in London in the 1780s and spent time in Vienna, where his sister Nancy was a singer (she was the first Susanna in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro); he was a friend of Mozart’s. Back in London ...

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1762–96, English The English composer Stephen Storace wrote his first two operas – Gli sposi malcontenti (‘The Discontented Newlyweds’, 1785) and Gli equivoci (‘The Misunderstandings’, 1786) – for Vienna. His next two works, written for London after 1787, were not particularly successful, and subsequently Storace concentrated on English dialogue operas, either full-length or in the form ...

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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. ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
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‘Titus’ Clemency’ Premiered in Prague on 6 September 1791, Mozart’s last opera is based on an old Metastasio libretto, updated (with added ensembles and choruses) for contemporary taste. Popular in the early nineteenth century, it then went into eclipse. Nowadays, though, La clemenza di Tito is valued on its own terms rather than as a pale ...

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• Classical Era
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(Khres’-tof Vil’-le-balt fun Glook) 1714–87 Bohemian composer Gluck was born in Erasbach, by the Czech-German border; his native language may well have been Czech. His father, a forester, was opposed to a musical career, but the boy left home at 13 to study in Prague, where he took musical posts and went briefly to the university. At ...

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1725–92, Italian The castrato Gaetano Guadagni first sang as a contralto, but later retrained as a soprano. Although he had no early training, Handel hired him to sing in his oratorios Messiah and Samson. In 1754–55, Guadagni made up for his lack of training by studying with Gioacchino Gizziello (1714–61) in Lisbon and with the English actor ...

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c. 1730–94, Italian Mattia Verazi was the author of around 20 libretti, most of them written for performance in Italy. Among the first was Ifigenia in Aulide (1751), which was set to music by Jommelli. Some 10 years later, Verazi was at the court in Mannheim, which later moved to Munich. Verazi went too. The most important ...

• Styles & Forms
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• 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 ...