Gaspare Spontini

Spontini, after Nicolas-Eustache Maurin

Spontini's signature

Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 1774 – 24 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor from the classical era. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French opera, and composed over twenty works.

Biography

Born in Maiolati, Papal State (now Maiolati Spontini, Province of Ancona), he spent most of his career in Paris and Berlin, but returned to his place of birth at the end of his life. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French opera. In his more than twenty operas, Spontini strove to adapt Gluck's classical tragédie lyrique to the contemporary taste for melodrama, for grander spectacle (in Fernand Cortez for example), for enriched orchestral timbre, and for melodic invention allied to idiomatic expressiveness of words.

As a youth, Spontini studied at the Conservatorio della Pietà de' Turchini, one of four active

Though Spontini's earlier successes were comedies, with the encouragement of

Under the changed political climate of the Bourbon Restoration, Spontini, closely identified with the former Empire, saw his opera Olimpie (1819, revised 1821, 1826) meet with indifference, leading him to leave Paris for Berlin, where his operas had already achieved success. There he became Kapellmeister and chief conductor at the Königliches Opernhaus, and in this period he composed the Prussian National Anthem "Borussia". There he also met the young Mendelssohn, but deprecated the 17-year old's opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho.^[4]

In 1842, a disillusioned Spontini, chagrined at the success of Giacomo Meyerbeer and others in Germany, returned to Italy, where he died in 1851.^[5]

Bibliography (French) Gaspare Spontini by Patrick Barbier, bleu nuit éditeur, 2017, 176 p. (

For the opera

• Li puntigli delle donne (1796)
• L'eroismo ridicolo [scores] (1798)
• Teseo riconosciuto (1798)
• La fuga in maschera (1800)
• Le metamorfosi di Pasquale (1802)
• Milton (1804)
• Julie, ou Le pot de fleurs (1805)
• La vestale
  (1807)
• Fernand Cortez (1809)
• Olimpie (1819)
• Nurmahal, oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir (1822)
• Agnes von Hohenstaufen (1829)

Other compositions

• L'eccelsa gara^[6] – Cantata, on a text by Luigi Balocchi (1806)
• Tout le monde a tort – Vaudeville (1806)
• Bacchanale des Danaïdes [scores], for Antonio Salieri's Les Danaïdes (1817)
• Borussia – Prussian anthem, on a text by Johann Friedrich Leopold Duncker [de] (1818)
• Tout deuil [scores] (1820)
• Lalla Rûkh – Festspiel, on a text by S. H. Spicker, after Thomas Moore (1821)

Modern revivals

During the 20th century, Spontini's operas were only rarely performed, although several had their first revivals in years. Perhaps the most famous modern production was the revival of La vestale with Maria Callas at La Scala at the opening of the 1954 season, to mark the 180th anniversary of the composer's birth. The stage director was famed cinema director Luchino Visconti. That production was also the La Scala debut of tenor Franco Corelli. Callas recorded the arias "Tu che invoco" and "O Nume tutelar" from La vestale in 1955 (as did Rosa Ponselle in 1926). In 1969, conductor Fernando Previtali revived the opera, with soprano Leyla Gencer and baritone Renato Bruson. (An unofficial recording is in circulation.) In 1993, conductor Riccardo Muti recorded it in the original French language with Karen Huffstodt, Denyce Graves, Anthony Michaels-Moore and Dimitri Kavrakos.

Other revivals of Spontini include Agnes von Hohenstaufen in Italian as

Sources

• Gerhard, Anselm (n.d.). "Spontini, Gaspare", in
  Grove Music Online
  , (subscription required), accessed 13 September 2014.
• Tim Blanning and Hagen Schulze
  New York: Oxford University Press.
• Todd, R. Larry (2003), Mendelssohn, A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-19-511043-2
  .
• Gaspare Spontini (French) [archive] by Patrick Barbier, bleu nuit éditeur, 2017, 176 p. (
  ISBN 978-2-3588-4067-5
  )

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gaspare Spontini.

• Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini of Jesi
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Spontini, Gasparo Luigi Pacifico" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 732–733.
• Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Gasparo Luigi Pacifico Spontini" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Free scores by Gaspare Spontini at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)