(Gas’-pa-ra Spôn-te’-ne) 1774–1851 Italian composer Spontini was the central figure in French serious opera between 1800 and 1820. Many of Spontini’s early Italian comic operas are now lost, and he achieved only modest success before settling in Paris in 1803. He was composer for Empress Joséphine from 1805, and in 1810 was appointed director of the Théâtre-Italien. His reputation was ...
1774–1851, Italian Gaspare Spontini’s early career was blighted by insecurity after the French, under Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Italy in 1796. Spontini, it seems, decided that his future lay in France, but after arriving in Paris in 1800 he found his musical style was unsuited to the prevailing genre, opéra comique. Spontini turned instead to ...
1811–96, French The French composer Ambroise Thomas was a staunch anti-Wagnerian, regarding this and other ‘modern’ influences as dangerous to French music. Thomas’s music, which included nine stage works written between 1837 and 1843, was firmly in the French musical tradition. Of these works, the most successful was La double échelle (‘The Double Ladder’, 1837). Thomas ...
1806–54, German The German soprano Henriette Sontag made her debut in 1821 as the princess in Boieldieu’s Jean de Paris (1812). In 1823, in Vienna, Weber asked Sontag to create the title role in his Euryanthe (1822–23) after seeing her in Rossini’s La donna del lago. He was justified when her appearance in Berlin in 1825 caused an ...
(Loo’-es Shpôr) 1784–1859 German composer, violinist and conductor Spohr was a prolific composer of instrumental music and also wrote operas that foreshadow Wagner’s leitmotif technique. He first studied in his native Brunswick, and Mozart soon became his idol. He was a virtuoso violinist and between 1807 and 1821 went on many tours to the major European cities with his wife ...
(Loo-e’-je Ka-roo-be’-ne) 1760–1842 Italian composer and teacher Cherubini was a dominant figure in French musical life, particularly as a composer of operas, but also as director of the Paris Conservatoire. He studied with Giuseppe Sarti in Bologna and Milan (1778–81) before returning to his native Florence. After a brief period in London, where he composed La finta principessa (‘The ...
1813–83, German If – to quote Mark Twain – Wagner’s music ‘is not as bad as it sounds’, then the composer’s life was by no means as turpitudinous as it is generally claimed to be. Idolized by his friends and supporters as a family man who was kind to animals and plagued by self-doubts, he was demonized by his ...
The early Romantic era was a period that saw a move in all the arts towards greater expression and a loosening of structures and forms. In music this meant an expanding and freeing up of existing classical forms such as the symphony, and the development of newly expressive genres such as the symphonic poem. Opera took on bigger, more ...
Through a long history of tradition, the language of opera is Italian. The early history of the art-form is rooted in the language – Mozart’s greatest operas are set to Italian librettos – and the wealth of Italian opera composers in the early nineteenth century (Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Cherubini, Spontini, Mercadante) is testimony to the ...
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