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• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

enters with the notary and, after some bribery, Rosina and the Count are married. Bartolo arrives too late and is forced to accept the situation. Personalities | Giovanni Paisiello | Classical Era | Opera ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Jo-van’-ne Pi-se-el’-lo) 1740–1816 Italian composer Paisiello was trained in Naples and had early successes as an opera composer there and in north Italy. He served as court composer to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg, 1776–84; there, in 1782, he wrote Il barbiere di Siviglia, his most admired comic opera. He returned to Italy and spent most of ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1740–1816, Italian Giovanni Paisiello scored his first successes in opera buffa. Compositions such as L’idolo cinese (‘The Chinese Idol’, 1767) were performed to enthusiastic audiences all over Italy. Paisiello’s talents rivalled those of other prominent composers, such as Cimarosa. Like Cimarosa and others, he caught the interest of Empress Catherine of Russia, who invited Paisiello to St ...

• Instruments
• Stringed

among Italian street musicians, though it was frowned upon by the more highbrow classical mandolinists. The Neopolitan mandolin’s success is reflected in its frequent appearances in art music. Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) and, most famously in Don Giovanni (1787), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) all used it in operas; Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837) ...

• Major Operas
• Early Romantic
• Opera

not under the name by which it is now known. The reason was that Rossini’s Il barbiere was faced with a rival – an opera on the same subject by Giovanni Paisiello, that had first been produced in St Petersburg in 1782. More than 30 years later, when the first performance of Rossini’s opera was about to take place, ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘The Marriage of Figaro’ The librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote that Le nozze di Figaro offered ‘a new kind of spectacle … to a public of such assured taste and refined understanding’, and it would be fair to say that after Figaro’s premiere on 1 May 1786, opera buffa was never quite the same again. There were precedents, of ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

, Pacchierotti sang at the inauguration of the Teatro la Fenice in Venice, but soon afterwards he retired to Padua. Introduction | Classical Era | Opera Personalities | Giovanni Paisiello | Classical Era | Opera The Voice | The Castrati | Early & Middle Baroque | Opera The Voice | The Training of the Castrati | Late Baroque | Opera ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

childhood, youth and early manhood. In London he imitated J. C. Bach; in Italy he wrote in the light, crisp orchestral style cultivated by such men as Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816) and Pasquale Anfossi (1727–97); after his visits to Vienna of 1768 and 1773, he was using the richer, more developed Viennese orchestral manner; after his months in ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical Era
• Opera

as dramma disentimento (‘sentimental drama’), dramma eroicomico (‘heroic-comic drama’) and drama tragicomico (‘tragicomic drama’). The term opera semiseria was apparently first used to describe the opera Nina (1789) by Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), which illustrated how a happy ending was essential to this form of opera, no matter what had gone before. In Nina, the eponymous heroine goes mad after ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Late Romantic

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 Cimarosa (1749–1801). Significantly, Glinka’s musical training was European: after studies in Moscow with John Field (1782–1837), he toured Europe and absorbed the Italian operatic styles of ...