Francesco Cavalli

A central figure of Venetian musical life, Cavalli wrote more than thirty operas, almost all of which premiered in the city's theaters.

He became a singer (boy soprano) at St Mark's Basilica in Venice in 1616, where he had the opportunity to work under the tutorship of Claudio Monteverdi.

He established so great a reputation that he was summoned to Paris from 1660 (when he revived his opera Xerse) until 1662, producing his Ercole amante.

The development is particularly interesting to scholars because opera was still quite a new medium when Cavalli began working, and had matured into a popular public spectacle by the end of his career.

Manuscript scores of twenty-six are extant, preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Library of St Mark) in Venice.

The American musicologist Thomas Walker, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, considered seven of Ivanovich's attributions and another two by other authors as doubtful.