Nicolò Gabrielli

Born in Naples, at the time when the city was the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Nicolò Gabrielli was the scion of a distinguished yet decayed aristocratic family originally from Gubbio and settled thereafter in Tropea and Palermo.

In 1840 he was appointed musical director of the Royal Theatre of San Carlo in Naples, a position that enabled him to travel all over Italy and abroad and make acquaintance with the international society.

In 1854 he was invited by Napoleon III to join the imperial court in Paris, where he debuted at the Opéra with a ballet, Gemma (1854, libretto by Théophile Gautier and choreography by former ballerina Fanny Cerrito).

The popularity of the comte Gabrielli, as he was known in the aristocratic and artistic circles du tout Paris, gradually decreased after the fall of Napoleon III and the advent of the Third French Republic.

A cantique composed by Nicolò Gabrielli was adopted by the Protestant communities of the French-speaking part of Switzerland as their unofficial hymn, and was later included in the work Chants populaires de Suisse romande pour voix mixtes, published at Geneva in 1887.