Niccolò Piccinni

From the age of fourteen, he was educated at the Conservatory of San Onofrio by Leonardo Leo and Francesco Durante,[1] thanks to the intervention of the Bishop of Bari (his father, although himself a musician, was opposed to his son following the same career).

It is the moment at which the self-consciously sentimental theatrical project of Carlo Goldoni (the opera's librettist)[3] is married with the developing musical language of classicism.

[5] It also set off a debate about the merits of the new sentimental style, especially in England, where conservative reactionaries were wary of the supposed feminizing influence of modern Italian music.

Antonio Baretti commented in 1768 that individuals “of weight and consideration” should not be blamed for condemning “those puny gentlemen” who, as enthusiasts of Italian opera, were able to “feel its minuet niceties, and to be of course in rapture with the languishing Cecchina’s of Piccini [sic].” This modern music, Baretti decried, “far from having any power of increasing courage or any manly virtues, has on the contrary a tendency towards effeminacy and cowardliness.”[6] Six years after this, Piccinni was invited by Queen Marie Antoinette to Paris.

All his later works were successful, but the directors of the Grand Opera conceived the idea of deliberately opposing him to Gluck by persuading the two composers to treat the same subject – Iphigénie en Tauride – simultaneously.

Piccinni remained popular, and on the death of Gluck, in 1787, proposed that a public monument be erected to his memory – a suggestion which the Gluckists refused to support.

[full citation needed] Piccinni produced over a hundred operas,[8] but although his later work shows the influence of the French and German stage, he belongs to the conventional Italian school of the 18th century.