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• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Instrumentalist
• Late Baroque

(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 ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

(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 ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Do-ma’-ne-ko Che-ma-rô’-za) 1749–1801 Italian composer Trained in Naples, Cimarosa quickly launched himself on an operatic career with successes in Naples, Rome and Venice. In 1787 he was invited to St Petersburg. On the way home he paused at Vienna, where his Il matrimonio segreto (‘The Secret Marriage’) had a huge success in 1792 – uniquely, the entire opera ...

• Personalities
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

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 ...

• Major Operas
• Early & Middle Baroque
• Opera

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 ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1749–1801, Italian The prolific Italian composer Domenico Cimarosa, who was born near Naples, first attracted attention with his opera Le stravaganze del conte (‘The Eccentricity of the Count’, 1772). By 1787, Cimarosa had produced one success after another, with 15 operas written for opera houses in Rome and Naples. In 1787, however, Cimarosa accepted ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘The Secret Marriage’ Composed: 1792 Premiered: 1792, Vienna Libretto by Giovanni Bertati, after George Colman and David Garrick Act I Carolina, Geronimo’s daughter, is secretly married to Paolino, her father’s clerk. The couple are trying to find a way to tell Geronimo of their marriage; he would not approve of such a lowly match. Paolino comes ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...

• Classical

The story of classical music is not bound up simply with the traditions of any one country: it is tied up with the cultural development of Europe as a whole. This section attempts to pick out the composers from each successive age who, looked at from one point of view, exerted the greatest influence on their contemporaries and subsequent ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

1709–70 English composer Avison was a teacher, writer, concert promoter and organist of St Nicholas’s Church, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, from 1735. As well as composing several sets of his own concertos, published over a period of some 30 years, he arranged 12 of Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas as concerti grossi (1744), orchestrating them skilfully. Along with almost ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

1685–1759 English composer George Frideric Handel is one of the best known of all Baroque composers. His gift for melody, his instinctive sense of drama and vivid scene-painting, and the extraordinary range of human emotions explored in his vocal compositions make his music instantly accessible. Works such as Messiah (1741), Water Music (1717) and Music for the Royal Fireworks ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Baroque

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, ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

More sophisticated diplomatic relations between states in the late Baroque era resulted in a time of relative peace – for a short period at least – during which the arts flourished. As in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras, writers, artists and musicians turned to the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome for their standards and their in­spiration. At ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Late Baroque

In the late Baroque era music both consolidated earlier developments and looked forward to the new styles of the classical era. The output of the two greatest composers of the time, J. S. Bach and Handel, reflects the general trends in music. The main forms – notably the sonata, concerto and opera – became longer and more complex ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Late Baroque

By the eighteenth century many musicians had become accustomed to travelling far from their native cities or countries in search of employment, or in response to invitations from rulers of different states. In the late-Baroque period this type of wandering existence had become a standard feature of musical life in Europe, involving singers, instrumentalists and composers, in ...