Important Baroque Opera Composers


Jacopo Peri (1561–1633).  A Florentine who composed both the first opera ever, Dafne (1598), 
       and the first surviving opera, Euridice (1600).


Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) is generally regarded as the first major opera composer.
       L'Orfeo (1607) 
blended Peri's experiments in opera with the lavish spectacle of the intermedi,  
      a Renaissance theatrical spectacle.  

      Later, in Venice in the 1640s, he helped make opera a commercially viable form with Il ritorno 
      d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, one of the earliest operas in the present-day 
      operatic repertoire.


Heinrich Schütz (1585 - 1672) wrote what is traditionally considered to be the first German opera, 
      Dafne, performed at Torgau in 1627, the music of which has since been lost.


Francesca Caccini  (1587 - 1641)  Caccini's 1625 opera La liberazione di Ruggiero is considered to be 
      the first opera composed by a woman.  Her father was Giulio Caccini, composer and member of the 


Luigi Rossi (1597 - 1653) wrote two operas.   The first, Il palazzo incantato, was written for Rome.
       This aroused the interest of the French first minister, the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, who was 
       was eager to bring Italian culture to Paris and hired Rossi in 1646 to write an opera, L'Orfeo, for
       for the Paris carnival the following year.  

       During his stay in France, Rossi learned that his wife, Costanza, had died and his resulting grief 
       influenced the music.  The premiere was given a magnificent staging with the sets and stage 
       machinery designed by Giacomo Torelli.  Over 200 men were employed to work on the scenery. 
       The performance, which lasted six hours, was a triumph. 


Virgilio Mazzocchi  (1597- 1646) Chi soffre, speri  (1637) was the first comic opera.


Stefano Landi  (1587 - 39)  Il Sant'Alessio (1632) is not only the first opera to be written on a 
       historical subject, but it carefully describes the inner life of the saint, and attempts psychological 
       characterization of a type new to opera.  Most of the interspersed comic scenes, however, are 
       anachronistically (and hilariously) drawn from contemporary life in 17th-century Rome.


Francesco Cavalli  (1602–1676).  Among the most important of Monteverdi's successors, Cavalli 
       was a major force in spreading opera throughout Italy and also helped introduce it to France.  
       His Giasone was "the most popular opera of the 17th century."  (a list of Cavalli's operas)


Antonio Sartorio  (1630 - 1680)  was a leading composer of operas in his native Venice in the 1660s 
        and 1670s and was also known for composing in other genres of vocal music.  Between 1665 and  
        1667 he spent most of his time in Hanover, where he held the post of Kapellmeister to Duke Johann 
         Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg – returning frequently to Venice to compose operas for the 
        Carnival.  In 1676 he became vice maestro di capella at San Marco in Venice.  His two most 
        important operas were L'Adelaide and L'Orfeo, both from 1672.


Giovanni Legrenzi  (1626 - 1690) was active in most of the genres current in northern Italy in the
        late 17th century, including sacred vocal music, opera, oratorio, and varieties of instrumental music. 
       Though best known as a composer of instrumental sonatas, he was predominantly a composer of 
       liturgical music with a distinctly dramatic character.  Legrenzi composed nineteen operas from 1662
       - 1685, of which the most successful were Achille in Sciro (1664), La divisione del mondo, I due
       cesari (1683), Il Giustino (1683), and Publio Elio Pertinace (1684).  His operas were immensely 
       popular (and extravagantly presented) in their day, though, like his oratorios, few have survived.  


Antonio Cesti  (1623 - 1669) is known principally as a composer of operas, although he was also a
        composer of chamber cantatas.  His operas are notable for the pure and delicate style of their airs, 
        more suited to the chamber than to the stage.  His most celebrated operas were La Dori (Venice, 
        1663), Il pomo d'oro (Vienna, 1668) and Orontea (1656).   Il pomo d'oro (The Golden Apple) was 
        written for the wedding in Vienna of Emperor Leopold I in 1666, and first performed in 1668, in 
        a famously lavish production.  It was far more elaborate than contemporary Venetian operas, 
        including a large orchestra, numerous choruses, and various mechanical devices used to stage 
       things like gods descending from heaven (deus ex machina), naval battles, and storms.  Orontea 
       was revived seventeen times in the next thirty years, making it one of the most frequently per-
       formed operas on the continent in the mid-17th century.  It includes a well-known soprano aria 
       "Intorno all'idol mio" (English: "Around my idol").


Jean-Baptiste Lully  (1632–1687).  In close collaboration with the librettist Philippe Quinault, Lully 
        founded the tradition of tragédie en musique, combining singing, dance and visual spectacle, which 
        would remain the most prestigious French operatic genre for almost a hundred years.  Cadmus et 
        Hermione (1673) is often regarded as the first example of French opera.  (a list of Lully's operas)


Alessandro Stradella  (1643 - 1682) Il Trespolo tutore (Trespolo the Tutor), a 1687 comic opera is a 
        predecessor to 18th century opera buffa.


Henry Purcell  (1659–1695) was the first English operatic composer of significance.  His masterwork 
        is Dido and Aeneas (1688?), probably influenced by John Blow's Venus and Adonis (c. 1683)


Transitional figure from Middle to Late Baroque eras:


        What is opera seria?

André Campra  (1660 - 1744)  was the leading French opera composer in the period between 
        Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, Campra wrote several tragédies en musique 
        and opéra-ballets that were extremely well received. He also wrote three books of cantatas 
        as well as religious music, including a requiem.

Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) is considered the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera and is 
        a key figure in the development of opera seria.  He claimed to have composed over 100 operas, 
        of which La Griselda is a notable example.  (a list of Scarlatti's operas)

        Scarlatti was primarily a composer of vocal music, with several quality oratorios ( La Maddalena
        1685; La Giuditta, 1693; Christmas Oratorio, c. 1705), the excellent Saint Cecilia Mass (1721) 
        which is one of the first attempts at the style which reached its height in the great masses of J.S. 
        Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, and 500 chamber-cantatas for solo voice which are the most 
        intellectual type of chamber-music of their period.  


Antonio Vivaldi (1678 – 1741) is best known today for his four violin concertos The Four Seasons
        but he was also a successful opera composer and impresario. (A list of Vivaldi's operas)


(librettist) Pietra Mastatasio (1698 - 1782) is considered the most important writer of opera seria 
        libretti and was also an important poet.


        Article "French Opera between Lully and Rameau"


Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) was the most important French opera composer of the 18th
        century.  Following in the genre established by Lully, he endowed his works with a great  rich-
        ness of invention.  Rameau's musical daring provoked great controversy in his day, but he was
        an important influence on Gluck.  Beyond opera, Rameau, is very important for his keyboard 
        compositions  (a list of Rameau's operas).   


George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) was one of the very greatest composers of the Baroque era.  
       Born in Germany, Handel settled in London at age 25 after spending three years in Italy.  An 
       independent composer and an impresario,  Handel became wealthy mostly by writing and staging 
       Italian operas.  His opera seria set the standard in his day.  Probably the most performed one today 
        is Guilio Cesare, his 1724 historical opera about Julius Caesar.  (a list of Handel's operas).  Handel 
        nearly went broke when Italian opera fell out of favor in the  1730s, but his 1742 English oratorio 
        Messiah revived his career.  

Nicola  Porpora (or Niccolò Porpora) (1686 – 1768) was a successful Italian composer of operas, 
       oratorios, and cantatas who sometimes collaborated with the great librettist Metastacio.  Porpora  
       is even better known as a teacher of singing whose most famous students were the castratos 
       Farinelli and Caffarelli and composer Joseph Haydn.    An opera example is Semiramide 
       riconosciuta (1729). (a list of Porpora's operas)

Johann Adolph Hasse (1699 – 1783) was an 18th-century German composer, singer and teacher 
       of music.  Immensely popular in his time, Hasse was best known for his prolific operatic output,
       though he also composed a considerable quantity of sacred music.  He was a great friend of 
       librettist Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti he frequently set, Hasse was a pivotal figure in the 
       development of opera seria and 18th-century music. (a list of Hasse's operas)


Transitional composers between Baroque and Classical Era

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736).  Though Pergolesi also composed opera serias, his most 
       influential work as an opera composer was the short opera buffaLa serva padrona.  This work 
       has Enlightenment characteristics of commoners mocking the aristocracy.  Pergolesi also wrote 
       some wonderful religious works, his most significant being his Stabat Mater of 1736.  Pergolesi 
       died of tuberculosis at age 26. 


Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714 – 1787) was a key figure in the transformation of Baroque into the 
       Classical era opera, paving the way for Mozart, though his influence stretched much further into
       the 19th century, with both Berlioz and Wagner acknowledging their debt to him.  In his reform 
       operas from Orfeo ed Euridice onwards, he sought to throw off the formal conventions of opera 
       seria and write music of "beautiful simplicity" (his own words).

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