Agostino Steffani

[4] Steffani's education was completed at the expense of Ferdinand Maria, Elector of Bavaria, who appointed him Churfürstlicher Kammer- und Hofmusikus and granted him a liberal salary.

After receiving instruction from Johann Kaspar Kerll, in whose charge he lived, Steffani was sent in 1673 to study in Rome, where Ercole Bernabei was his master, and among other works he composed six motets, the original manuscripts of which are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge.

[1] On his return to Munich with Bernabei in 1674, Steffani published his first work, Psalmodia vespertina, a part of which was reprinted in Giovanni Battista Martini's Saggio di contrappunto in 1774.

[1] The scores are preserved at Buckingham Palace, where, in company with five volumes of songs and three of duets, they form part of the collection brought to England by the Elector of Hanover in 1714, when ascending as King George I of Great Britain.

[1] Steffani was sent on this mission in 1696, with the title of envoy extraordinary, after which Pope Innocent XI, in recognition of certain privileges he had secured for the Hanoverian Catholics, consecrated him bishop of Spiga on the Sea of Marmora (modern day Biga in Turkey).

[citation needed] In 1698, he was sent as ambassador to Brussels, and after the death of Ernest Augustus in the same year he entered the service of the Elector Palatine, John William, at Düsseldorf, where he held the offices of privy councillor and protonotary of the Holy See.

All these compositions are in advance of the age in which they were written, and in his operas Steffani shows an appreciation of the demands of the stage, noted as remarkable during a period at which the musical drama was gradually approaching the character of a merely formal concert, with scenery and dresses.

Steffani is remembered for his chamber duets, which, like those of his contemporary Carlo Maria Clari (1669–1745), are chiefly written in the form of cantatas for two voices, accompanied by a figured bass.