Domenico Cimarosa

Domenico Cimarosa (Italian: [doˈmeːniko tʃimaˈrɔːza] ^ⓘ; 17 December 1749 – 11 January 1801) was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan School and of the Classical period. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is Il matrimonio segreto (1792); most of his operas are comedies. He also wrote instrumental works and church music.

Cimarosa was principally based in Naples, but spent some of his career in various other parts of Italy, composing for the opera houses of Rome, Venice, Florence and elsewhere. He was engaged by Catherine the Great of Russia as her court composer and conductor between 1787 and 1791. In his later years, returning to Naples, he backed the losing side in the struggle to overthrow the monarchy there, and was imprisoned and then exiled. He died in Venice at the age of 51.

Cimarosa was born in Aversa, a town near Naples. His family name was Cimmarosa, which is how he is recorded on his baptismal record. He appears to have been an only child. His father, Gennaro, was a stonemason, and within days of Domenico's birth the family moved to Naples where Gennaro found employment on the construction of the Palace of Capodimonte. When Domenico was seven, Gennaro fell from scaffolding and was killed. His widow, Anna, was taken on as a laundress by the monastic order of the Church of San Severo, and Cimarosa received a good education—including musical training—from the monks and clergy of the church.

The organist of the monastery, Padre Polcano, took a particular interest in his education and Cimarosa progressed so well in his musical studies that he was admitted to Naples's leading college of music, the Conservatorio di S Maria di Loreto, in 1761, when he was twelve. His teachers were Gennaro Manna and Fedele Fenaroli for composition and Saverio Carcais, the maestro de violino. He was a capable keyboard player, violinist and singer, but composition was his primary concern as a student; in 1770 he, Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli and Giuseppe Giordani were senior students in the composition class.

As a student, Cimarosa wrote sacred motets and masses, but he first came to public notice with the premiere in 1772 of his first commedia per musica, Le stravaganze del conte, performed at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples. The work met with approval, and was followed in the same year by Le pazzie di Stelladaura e di Zoroastro. This work was also successful, and the fame of the young composer began to spread all over Italy. In 1774, he was invited to Rome to write an opera for the stagione of that year; and there he produced another comic opera called L'italiana in Londra. In 1777 he married Constanza Suffi, who died the following year.

In the 1770s and 1780s Cimarosa wrote numerous operas for the theatres of Italy. He was best known for his comedies, but wrote serious works from time to time, including Caio Mario (1780) and Alessandro nell'Indie (1781). As well as stage works he wrote church music. He was appointed supernumerary organist of the Neapolitan royal court in November 1779, and by the early 1780s he was a visiting maestro at the Ospedaletto di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.

For Rome, he composed operas for three different theatres in the late 1780s and early 1780s; these works included Il ritorno di Don Calandrino, L'italiana in Londra, Le donne rivali, Il pittore parigino and for La Scala, Milan, following the success there of a revival of L'impresario in angustie, he composed La Circe, a dramma per musica in three acts, with a story loosely based on the Odyssey. At some point in the 1780s Cimarosa married for the second time; his wife, Gaetana, née Pallante, was Constanza's step-sister; she and Cimarosa had two sons. She died in 1796.

In 1787, Cimarosa went to Saint Petersburg at the invitation of Empress Catherine II. He was one of a succession of Italian composers engaged by the Russian court over the years; others were Vincenzo Manfredini (from 1762 to 1769), Baldassare Galuppi (1765–1768), Tommaso Traetta (1768–1775), Giovanni Paisiello (1776–1784), and Giuseppe Sarti (1785–1801). He composed a serious opera, Cleopatra, and revised two of his existing comic pieces Le donne rivali and I due baroni di Rocca Azzurra. Other compositions for Catherine's court included a Requiem, in G minor (1787). Cimarosa was less successful in Saint Petersburg than some of his compatriots; the works of his subordinate, Martin y Soler, gained more favour with the empress, and this, combined with economies that meant losing most of the Italian singers, and Cimarosa's dislike of the severe Russian winters, led him to leave Russia in June 1791.