Giuseppe Cambini

Louis-Gabriel Michaud,[1] French scholar and François-Joseph Fétis,[2] Belgian musicologist, drafted his biography, and Cambini himself speaks about his past in an article published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804.

[5][6][8] Fétis wrote about his unfortunate operatic debut in Naples in 1766, after which, during his return to Livorno by the sea, Cambini was kidnapped by pirates, who treated him terribly until his liberation by a Venetian aristocrat.

[5][7] In the article found in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804, Cambini claims to have played the viola in a string quartet with Luigi Boccherini, Pietro Nardini and his teacher Manfredi for six months in 1767.

[6] He accepted editorial commissions (in 1795, the editor Gavreaux asked him to attend to the reprinting of methods for violin by Francesco Geminiani,[27][7] and in 1799 Nademann and Lobry hired him to edit one for flute).

[28][5][6][8] At the beginning of the 1800s, Cambini signed contracts with periodicals and magazines, including the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung[29] and Tablettes de Polymne, which published his articles until 1811.

[5][6][7] Michaud affirms that he died in Holland in 1818,[1] information that satisfies scholars and has a certain amount of credibility,[7][18] while Fétis recounts his painful and tragic admission to a mental hospital in Bicêtre, where he was found dead in 1825.

In fact, only the music of Le Tuteur avare, written in collaboration with Pasquale Anfossi in 1787 (today preserved at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille)[32] remains of his operas.

From 1784 to 1786, the publisher released the work of the then unknown Kraus under the name of the more famous Cambini in order to sell more copies, causing the misunderstanding of attribution, which was not resolved until 1989.

[43] Cities around the world that preserve at least five manuscripts are: Basel (Universitätsbibliothek), Cheb (Státní okresní archiv), Keszthely (Helikon Kastélymúzeum Könyvtára), Leutkirch im Allgäu (Fürstlich Waldburg-Zeilsches Archiv), Lille (Bibliothèque Municipale), Lund (Universitetsbiblioteket), New Haven (Music Library at Yale University), Prague (Biblioteca Nazionale Ceca), Steinfurt (Fürst zu Bentheimsche Musikaliensammlung Burgsteinfurt Collection, managed by Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität within the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek di Münster), Stockholm (Musik- och teaterbiblioteket) and Västerås (Stadsbibliotek).

[45] Around 1936,[46] the Quartet of Rome (Francesco Montelli and Oscar Zuccarini, violins; Aldo Perini, viola; Luigi Silva, violoncello), recorded Quartetto in Re maggiore by Cambini adapted by Fausto Torrefranca.

The 78 rpm disc of the first publication are preserved at the Istituto centrale per i beni sonori e audiovisivi di Roma, and are digitalized on Internet Culturale.