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Music

Because the main emphasis in Italy during the XVIII and XIX centuries was opera, composers and musicians who did not specialise in this genre, but also wrote instrumental music, tended to emigrate, working in most cases for German Princes.

As a genre opera was in fact created in Italy, the date most commonly accepted in 1597, when Jacopo Peri's (1561-1633) mow lost Daphne was represented in Florence. The earliest extant opera is also by Peri, his Eurydice (1600). The word opera in Italian has no special meaning, meaning only "work" and was originally applied as there was no better way to call this new genre. One of the oldest and most famous of all opera houses is in Italy: the Teatro Alla Scala.It opened in the XVIII century with an opera by Antonio Salieri, L'Europa Riconosciuta.
		The Teatro alla Scala, in Milan

Perhaps the greatest (in sheer size, if not in quality) opera of all time was written by an Italian who had for a time worked in Florence before settling in Vienna: Marc’Antonio Cesti (1623-1669): Il Pomo d’Oro.

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), the German composer who later emigrated to England, becoming an opera impresario, spent some time learning the craft of opera writing in Italy, from 1707 to 1709. The Italian influence is noticeable not only in the operas of this period, like Rodrigo (1707), produced in Florence, but also in his Dixit Dominus (1707) and in two oratorios produced in Rome: Le Ressurezione (1709) and Il Trionfo del Tempo (1710).

Handel's greatest rival on the London stage was an Italian: Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1670-1747). The latter was in the English capital from 1720 to 1732. He left in disgrace, after being unmasked as a plagiarist. He died in Vienna.

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768), a Florentine, travelled and worked extensively in Germany and for two periods was working in London, While Joseph-Hector Fiocco (1703-1741). the son of an Italian composer, was born and lived in Flanders.

Though he spent most of his life in Venice, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678- 1741), died in Vienna and no one really knows what he was doing there. He had travelled in 1730 to Vienna and Prague and was in the Emperor’s favour. It is believed he had gone there a second time to live, but, as the Emperor died a few days after his arrival, the scheme fell through and he himself died a few days later.

Francesco Geminiani (1687- 1762), the composer and violinist, and a pupil of Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli, Lived in London for two long periods, where he played before George I with Handel at the keyboard. His best- known works are a set of concerti grossi, based on Corelli's ,written for his English public. He died in Dublin.

In Russia the Emperors took care of the arts, especially music. Two important Italian composers spent time in St. Petersburg: Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) and Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816). Paisiello remained eight years in St. Petersburg, in the service of Catherine the great, writing his masterpiece, The Barber of Seville, for the Russian stage. Cimarosa spent four years in Russia, though his masterpiece, Il Matrimonio Segreto, was written immediately after he left Russia. Up to the XVIII century virtually all opera, with the exception of French opera and some attempts at German singspiel, was written in Italian. Composers like Joseph Haydn (1737-1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) wrote extensively in Italian. One of Haydn Italian operas is Il Mondo della Luna, is based on a play by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) (see Writers).

Paisiello at the Clavichord, by Marie-Louise Elisabeth Vigée le Brun (1791)

Two other opera composers active in Russia at the court of Catherine the Great were Baldassarre Galuppi (1706-1785), the composer of many opere buffe, worked for her from 1765 to 1768, writing there an opera seria: Didone abbandonata; and Tommaso Michele Francesco Saverio Traetta (1727-1779), who wrote a series of operas for her, among which Antogone (1772). He left Russia in 1775.

There were not only opera composers in Russia working for Catherine the Great: there were also other musicians, like the violinists Tito Porta, Domenico dall'Oglio and Piero Peri.

Mikhail Stepanovich Bortnyansky (1751-1825), a composer of sacred music for the Russian Orthodox Church and a pupil of Galuppi in Russia, followed his master to Italy, where he remained for a time.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ( Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart) (1756–1791) travelled to Italy thrice between January 1769 and March 1771. His operas Mitridate Rè di Ponto (1770), Ascanio in Alba (1771), and Lucio Silla (1772), were written and performed in Milan. During one of these trips, when he was in the Sistine Chapel, he listened to Gregorio Allegri's Miserere a closely-guarded score of the Church, and was able to write it out from memory, which is only half a feat, if we consider this piece repeats itself seven times!

Mozart’s principal Italian operas are known as the da Ponte trilogy, after the poet and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838), who supplied libretti for all three operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan Tutte.

The founder of French opera was in fact a Florentine, Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632-1687), better-known as Jean-Baptiste Lully. He is credited with adapting Italian recitative to the French language, thus paving the way for a national opera. Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), the writer of the famous keyboard sonatas, went to Lisbon in the 1720s, moving to Madrid with Maria Barbara, the Portuguese princess, when she became Queen of Spain. Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), the brilliant ’cellist from Lucca, went to the Spanish court in 1769, writing a great part of his production there. Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842) is best known as the director of the Paris Conservatoire, where he was much maligned by Berlioz. He wrote many operas, mostly in French. Niccolò Jomelli (1714-1774), Tommaso Traetta (1727-1779) and Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851) are three other Italian opera composers who found fortune aborad, at Paris and Vienna, respectively.
		Jean Baptiste Lully

Cattarino Camillo Cavos (1775-1840), the son of the director of the Fenice theatre in Venice, went to Russia as member of a troupe in 1795. After this was disbanded, he remained in St. Petersburg, entering the imperial service. He is credited with writing some of the first operas in Russian. The principal one is Ivan Susanin, based on the same subject that would inpire Glinka to write A Life for the Tsar 20 years later. His children and grandchildren contributed extensively to Russian culture in the XIX century. One of his sons, Ivan Catterinovich Cavos (1805 - 1861), served for 30 years in the Imperial St. Petersburg theaters, where he was the director of Italian opera. Other of his descendants also became famous (see Cinema, Painting and Architecture).

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), the musical rival of Mozart in Vienna (though not in real life) wrote a series of Italian operas for the Viennese and Italian stages. His was the first opera ever staged at the Teatro alla Scala of Milan, L’Europa Riconosciuta, and which was recently restaged when the refurbished theatre was reopened in 2005, the first staging since the original inaugural night.

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), the composer of The Barber of Seville, after travelling to Vienna, England and France, settled in Paris in 1824. His last operas, among which Il Viaggio a Reims and William Tell were written for the Parisian stage.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883), the composer of Tristan and Isolde, died in Venice.

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), the violin virtuoso, guitarist and composer, settled in France, dying in Nice. He commissioned Hector Berlioz (see The Prix de Rome) to write a work for his new viola. This turned out to be Harold in Italy. Paganini, disappointed with the lack of a brilliant solo part, never plaid the work.

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857), the founder of the Russian national school, on his physician's recommendation, spend three years in Italy, before deciding his mission was to return to Russia and do to develop Russian national music. He was relatively successful in this task, though in both his operas, A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Ljudmila, Italian influence is very present. Pjiotr Il'ich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), the Russian composer, travelled to Europe and stayed for a period in Italy. The house where he lived in Florence has a plaque which celebrates his stay there in the 1870 and two pieces by him are inspired by his time in Italy and by the music he heard here: The Capriccio Italiano and the string sextet Souvenir de Florence. Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), considered as one of the great pianists, as well as composer, was born in Italy, but spent almost his entire life in Germany. He is best remembered as the transcriber of works of Bach for the piano, like the Chaconne in d minor, originally for violin solo.
		Tchaikovsky as a young man

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (1797–1848), the composer of Don Pasquale. L'elisir d'Amore and Lucia di Lammermoor, moved to Paris in 1838. His opera La Fille du Régiment (1840) was written for the French stage.

Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (1801-1835), the composer of I Puritani died near Paris and was for a time buried at the Père Lachaise.

The composer Filippo Taglioni (1777 - 1871), the father of the Romantic Ballet, worked all over Europe, mainly in Paris, Vienna, Germany and Sweden. He was the first choreographer of La Sylphide. His daughter, Marie Taglioni (1804 -1884), for whom he created this ballet, was born in Sweden, worked for a time for the Paris Opera Ballet and the St. Petersburg's Russian Imperial Ballet. She died in Marselles. The Russian Imperial Ballet, under the direct patronage of the Tsar, spared no expense to make dancing a high art form. Two of the greatest names of Ballet music were not Russian, however, but italian: Cesare Pugni (1802 - 1870) and Riccardo Drigo (1846 - 1930). Pugni began his career as an opera composer, but soon found his vein as a composer and arranger of ballet music. Before settling in Russia, he was active in Milan, London and Paris. In St. Petersburg he worked with such names as Marius Petipa. Drigo, like Pugni, is now largely forgotten, but he has one claim to notoriety, as being the one who prepared the most widely used version of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. He also conducted the premières of Tchaikovsly's other Ballets: Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, of his opera, The Queen of Spades, and of Glazunov's Ballet Raymonda.
		Marie Taglioni (Ca 1831), Victoria and Albert Museum

Some of the operas of Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) were commissioned by foreign theatres: La Forza del Destino, commissioned by the Imperial Theatre of Saint Petersburg for the 1861 season, but not performed until 1862, Les vêpres siciliennes (1855) and Don Carlos (1867), both commissioned by the Opéra de Paris and, of course, Aida (1870), which was commissioned by the Khedive of Egypt for the Cairo Opera House, where it premièred in 1871 (and not, as often assumed, written for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869).

Giacomo (Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria) Puccini (1858-1921) wrote several operas especially for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The Girl of the Golden West (La Fanciulla del West), on an American subject (the gold-rush in California) was premièred at the Met in 1910., such as Madama Butterfly, though premièred in Milan, is basted on an American short story and has as main character an American sailor in Japan, Pinkerton.

		Antonio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896), the Brazilian composer, was sent to study music in Milan after the successful start of his operatic career, by the Emperor of Brazil. While there he wrote his best-known work, Il Guarany, based on a Brazilian subject. His opera was well received by such composers as Rossini and Verdi, and Gomes was decorated by the King of Italy himself. He spent three years in Italy, went back to Brazil, but soon returned, marrying an Italian pianist. He travelled between Italy and Brazil several times and died in his native land soon after arriving yet another time. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968), born to a Jewish family in Florence, stidued in Bologna. Following the proclamation of anti-Semitic laws in Italy, was forced to abandon Tuscany and move to the US, where he died. His best-known works are his concerti for guitar and orchestra. Among his pupils in the US were Henry Mancini and André Previn. Hans Werner Henze (1926), the German opera composer, has lived in Tuscany for a number of years; having written works fo the Italian stage.
Antônio Carlos Gomes

Florence also has another claim to fortune besides the creation of the opera: it was there that the piano was invented in 1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) a native of Padua recruited by the Medici. Its full name was clavicembalo con piano e forte (harpsichord with soft and loud), referring to the fact that dynamic variation was possible, which up to that point was not feasible. There also seems evidence it had been invented earlier, in 1700, when it was referred to as Arpicimbalo del piano e forte (harp-harpschord with soft and loud). There are only three pianos by Cristofori in existence, the earliest dating from 1720.

The name was shortened to pianoforte and, in most languages except Italian, to piano. In Russian it is called pianino, which is the Italian for small piano. A variant name (now chiefly used to designate period instruments) is fortepiano.

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), The son of a Roman father and a Swiss mother, and remembered for his piano studies Gradus ad Parnassum and for his piano sonatas, established himself in England at an early age (1766), first taking lessons and working and later active as pianist, composer and piano manufacturer and publisher. He wrote 4 symphonies, the third of which includes a set of variations on God save the King, in homage to his adoptive land. From 1807 he was the publisher of Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770-1827) works, besides being the teacher of John Field (1782-1837),(who incidentally spent nine months in Naples) the Irish pianist, creator of the Nocturne and who would emigrate to Russia.

Nino Rota (1911-1979) is perhaps the best-known XX century Italian composer. He is best remembered as writing the music for a number of Fellini films, such as La Strada and Amarcord. He worked with other directors however, such as Luchino Visconti (The Leopard), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather II) and King Vidor.

Gian Carlo Menotti (1911) has made his career in the USA as an opera composer. He is primarily known for the Christmas opera he composed for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors. He has composed many other ones, such as The Consul, The Medium and The Telephone. In 1958 he created the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, to celebrate the achievements of both Europe and America. It takes place annually at the same time in Italy and in Charleston, in the US.

Napoleon took back to Paris with him, after one of his Italian campaigns, an opera troupe, among them was Giuseppina Grassini and (1773-1850) and the castrato Girolamo Crescenti, who was decorated with the Legion of Honour.

		The famous castrato Farinelli (Carlo Broschi) (1705-1782) travelled extensively, eventually settling in Spain. Italy will forever be associated with opera and the entire world has heard of the Italian tenor, and it is true that one can recognise one as soon as one hears one. Whereas it is true that this has always been the strong point of Italian music, pure music has to a certain extent been neglected. This means there is a wealth of Italian singers, such as Luciano Pavarotti (1935), Ceclia Bartoli (1966) Katia Ricciarelli (1946), Franco Corelli (1921-2003), Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957), Mario Lanza (1921-1959), Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), Tito Schipa (1888-1965), and even the crossover tenor Andrea Bocelli (1958). Of these Mario Lanza was also active as an actor in Hollywood. Roberto Alagna (1963), the famous tenor, was born in France from a talented Sicilian family.
Franco Corelli

The Russian Pianist Lazar Naumovich Berman (1930 - 2005) left Russia in 1990, coming to Italy, settling in Florence in 1995, while Andras Shchiff (1953), the Hungarian pianist, divides his time between London and Florence.

This does not mean that Italy does not have its musicians: I can cite some pianists, such as Arturo Benedetti-Michelangeli (1920-1995) and Maurizio Pollini (1942). Salvatore Accardo (1941) has been active as a violinist for a long time, while Riccardo Muti (1941), Daniele Gatti, Riccardo Chailly (1953), Claudio Abbado (1933), Roberto Abbado (1954) and Claudio Scimone (1934) are some of the better-known conductors. There are not many orchestras, most of them being attached to opera houses, such as the Orchestra del Teatro Alla Scala di Milano and the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. The Rai also has its orchestra, but I have not heard of it for some time. There are, however, a number of chamber groups active, such as Europa Galante (conductor Fabio Biondi), the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, I Solisti Aquilani, I Solisti di Milano, I Musici and I Solisti Veneti. Riccardo abbado is very critical of the modern Italian musical establishment, living and working abroad and only coming to Italy as a guest conductor.

The English conductor Sir John (Giovanni Battista) Barbirolli (1899-1970) is of Italian origin, while the most famous of all Italian conductors, Arturo Toscanini (1967-1957) conducted some of the most important orchestras in the world, such as La Scala and the NBC, which was created in the USA for him, soon after leaving Europe for good in 1937, because of his opposition to Fascism. He began his career in Rio de Janeiro, substituting another conductor, who had been hissed earlier during a performance of Verdi’s Aida.

Among popular artists I can mention Frank (Francis Albert) Sinatra (1915-1998), the son of a Sicilian father and a Ligurian mother and Liza May Minnelli (1946), the American signer and actress, is the daughter of the half-Italian film director Vincente Minnelli and of Judy Garland, the American singer and actress. The best-known modern popular singer is Madonna Veronica Louise Ciccone (1958).