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• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Librettist
• Poet

(Pi-et’-tro Met-ta-shta-syo) 1698–1782 Italian librettist and poet Metastasio was the leading Italian librettist of his era, and creator of the tradition of a particular kind of serious opera. He was born in Rome, worked initially there and in Venice, and settled in Vienna in 1730 as poet to the imperial Habsburg court. He wrote numerous texts for music, ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1698–1782, Italian The Italian poet Metastasio wrote 27 large-scale opera libretti, some of which were set to music up to 100 times. He created a genre of opera – Metastasian opera – that not only bore his name, but set new patterns for libretti during the 50 years he spent in Vienna. Invited to the imperial court in ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Instrumentalist
• Late Baroque

(Pe-a’-tro An-ton’-yo Lo-ka-tel’-le) 1695–1764 Italian composer and violinist Locatelli studied at Bergamo and Rome, where he played for Cardinal Ottoboni. After a short appointment as virtuoso da camera (court virtuoso) at the Mantuan court (1725–27), Locatelli travelled throughout Austria and Germany appearing as a virtuoso – on one occasion with Leclair. He settled in Amsterdam in 1729 where he taught, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Pe-a’-tro Mas-kan’-ye) 1863–1945 Italian composer The son of a baker, Mascagni studied law before becoming a conductor and piano teacher. In 1890, while a conductor in Cerignola, he shot into the limelight with his prize-winning one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana which, at its legendary premiere at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, received an unprecedented 60 curtain calls. Based ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1665–1733, Italian Pariati was born in Reggio Emilia, and was secretary to the Duke of Modena. He spent time in Madrid, wrote works for Barcelona and spent three years in an Italian prison. He lived in Venice for 15 years, until he was appointed a court poet at Vienna in 1714. While in Venice he worked with ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1863–1945, Italian Mascagni was a precocious talent and surprised nobody by disobeying his father’s wishes and pursuing musical studies at the Milan Conservatory. There he shared a room with Puccini, to whom he would remain close throughout his life, but he was not inclined to study and soon left to tour Italy as a conductor with various companies. ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

‘Rustic Chivalry’ Composed: 1888 Premiered: 1890, Rome Libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci after Giovanni Verga’s play Early on Easter Day, Turiddu is heard offstage serenading Lola. The villagers start arriving for church. Santuzza stops Mamma Lucia, Turiddu’s mother, and asks where she may find him. He is supposed to have gone to another village to ...

• Major Operas
• Classical Era
• Opera

‘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 ...

• Personalities
• Late Baroque
• Opera

1697–1781, Italian Venetian mezzo-soprano Faustina Bordoni was brought up by the composers Alessandro (1669–1750) and Benedetto Marcello (1686–1739). She made her debut in Pollarolo’s Ariodante in 1716, and was based in her home city until 1725, singing in operas by her teacher Gasparini, as well as Albinoni and Lotti. Between 1726 and 1728, she performed in ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer
• Theorist

(Jo-van’-ne Bat-tes’-ta Mär-te’-ne) 1706–84 Italian theorist and composer Padre Martini, as he was always known, was the most influential theorist and musical thinker of his time. He was born in Bologna, traditionally a centre of learning, where he studied with his father and leading musicians before entering a monastery. He returned to Bologna as organist and then as ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Fränts Yo’-sef Hi’-dan) 1732–1809 Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was the most celebrated musician of the late-eighteenth century and the first of the great triumvirate (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) of Viennese classical composers. A tireless explorer and innovator, he did more than anyone to develop the dramatic potential of the sonata style. When he composed his cheerful F major Missa brevis ...

• Personalities
• Classical Era
• Opera

1754–1806, Spanish The Spanish composer Martín y Soler wrote his first opera, entitled La Madrilena (‘The Girl from Madrid’, 1776), which was probably a zarzuela. Afterwards, Martín went to Italy, where he gained a reputation for writing both serious and comic operas that were performed in Lucca, Parma, Turin, Venice and Naples. Soon his ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

The humanist principles of the Enlightenment removed opera from the extravagant world of baroque and landed it in entirely new territory. After 1720, Baroque became a target for changes initiated by the scholar Gian Vincenzo Gravina of the Arcadian Academy in Rome. Baroque operas based on classical myths had developed exaggerated and ultimately ludicrous forms. Under the Enlightenment principles that ...

• 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 ...

• 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 ...