Domenico Cimarosa
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.
[6] 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.
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.
[7] 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.
[8] 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.
The result was Il matrimonio segreto, to a text by Giovanni Bertati, based on the 1766 play, The Clandestine Marriage, by George Colman the Elder and David Garrick.
[a] The opera, performed at the Burgtheater on 7 February 1792, was so successful that Leopold had it played again the same evening in his private chambers – "the longest encore in operatic history" as one critic put it.
[7] They were performed in Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Prague and Stockholm, as well as Saint Petersburg, Vienna and all the main Italian cities.
[6] Cimarosa's La ballerina amante, a commedia per musica first performed in Naples was chosen as the inaugural work at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon, in June 1793.
The most important new works from this last phase of his career were Le astuzie femminili (1794) and two serious operas, Penelope (1794) and Gli Orazi e i Curiazi (1796); the first two of these were composed for Naples, and the last for La Fenice in Venice.
Cimarosa was imprisoned along with many of his political friends, and escaped the death sentence only through the intercession of influential admirers,[8] including Cardinals Consalvi and Ruffo and Lady Hamilton.
[11] Cimarosa avoided the rigidity of the traditional da capo aria, and wrote solo numbers consisting of more flexible divisions, with changes of tempo, metre and key to reflect the words of his librettists.
Il matrimonio segreto, an ensemble opera in the style of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, is composed of eight arias, four duets, three trios, a quartet, a quintet and two finales featuring all six characters.
Johnson and Lazarevich instance Il matrimonio segreto, in which a large orchestra "provides colour and exhibits independent motivic and rhythmic material that serves as commentary on the action".
[13] Johnson and Lazarevich write that Cimarosa's reputation during his lifetime reached a height unsurpassed until Rossini's heyday, and he continued to be highly regarded into the 19th century.
[15][b] Hector Berlioz, who hated Italian opera, was not an admirer: "I should throw to the devil the unique and interminable Matrimonio Segreto, which is nearly as tiresome as The Marriage of Figaro without being anything like so musical.
