Francesco Durante – composer and teacher

Musician devoted his life to passing on his composing skills to others

Francesco Durante numbered many famous
pupils when he taught in Naples

An esteemed composer of religious and instrumental music, Francesco Durante was born on this day in 1684 at Frattamaggiore near Naples.

Durante was a highly regarded teacher at the Sant'Onofrio Conservatorio and the Santa Maria di Loreto Conservatorio and was also Chapelmaster at the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesú Cristo in Naples.

He had some famous pupils, among whom were Niccoló Jommelli, Niccoló Piccinni and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who became leading composers of the Neapolitan School of 18th century opera.

Durante studied music in Rome and at Naples, where he was a pupil at San Onofrio and is believed to have studied under Alessandro Scarlatti. He began his own teaching career at the Sant'Onofrio Conservatorio in 1710.

Between 1728 and 1742 he also taught at Santa Maria Loreto and the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesú Cristo.  He succeeded Leonardo Leo as principal teacher at Sant'Onofrio Conservatorio in 1745.

There was always rivalry between Leo’s students and his own pupils, who at various times included the composers Giovanni Paisiello, Tommaso Traetta and Leonardo Vinci.

Durante’s own compositions included motets, masses, requiems and oratorios. A pastoral mass for four voices and a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah are considered among his best works. He also composed for the harpsichord and for stringed instruments.

A collection of his works was presented to the Bibliothèque National in Paris by a Neapolitan collector of art and music and the Imperial library in Vienna also houses a collection of his manuscripts. He seems to have composed mainly sacred works and is considered by experts to have been one of the best composers of church music of his period.

Durante, who was married three times, died in Naples in 1755, aged 71.

The Piazza Umberto I in Frattamaggiore, with the
campanile of the Basilica of San Sossio 

Travel tip:

Frattamaggiore, where Durante was born, is a comune of Naples, about 15km (9 miles) north of the city, and 15 km southwest of Caserta. Known as Fratta to the locals, Frattamaggiore was named a Benedictine city in 1997 and was awarded the title of City of Art in 2008. It is thought to date back to before Roman times, but the first recorded mention of Frattamaggiore was in 921 AD. The patron saint of Frattamaggiore is Saint Sossius, or Sosius. His remains were first preserved at Miseno, but after the town was destroyed by the Saracens his followers moved to live in Frattamaggiore. The saint’s relics were recovered by Benedictines and preserved in a convent in Naples, but after the convent was suppressed during Napoleonic times, his relics were transferred to Frattamaggiore where they are preserved in a basilica dedicated to him.

The entrance to the Sant'Onofrio
Conservatory at Porta Capuana

Travel tip:

The Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio at Porta Capuana, where Durante taught at the beginning and end of his career, was one of the four original Naples music conservatories. Founded in 1588, it was developed first as an orphanage. Almost one fifth of the students at the Conservatorio di Sant'onofrio were castrati. Its popularity declined during the Napoleonic period, and only 30 students remained when the conservatory merged with that of Santa Maria di Loreto in 1797. Porta Capuana is now a free-standing gateway that was once part of the Aragonese walls of the city and is situated between the city’s main railway station and the Duomo. The Conservatorio di Sant'onofrio, which was in time absorbed into the Naples Conservatory, used to be close to the Castel Capuano, which was originally a 12th century fortress but has been modified several times. Until recently, the castle was home to the city’s Hall of Justice, also known as the Vicaria, which housed legal offices and a prison.

More reading:

The opera buffa genius of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

Why Domenico Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto is seen as one of the greatest comic operas

First night at Teatro di San Carlo

Also on this day: 

1425: The birth of Bianca Maria Visconti, Duchess of Milan

1675: The birth of Pope Benedict XIV

1941: The birth of cartoonist Franco Bonvicini

1958: The birth of crime writer Maurizio De Giovanni

1996: The death of car designer Dante Giacosa

(Picture credits: conservatory gate by Baku; via Wikimedia Commons)

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Niccolò Piccinni – opera composer

Writer drawn into 18^th century Paris rivalry

Niccolò Piccinni was one of Italy's most
popular composers in the 18th century

The composer Niccolò Piccinni, one of the most popular writers of opera in 18^th century Europe, was born on this day in 1728 in Bari.

Piccinni, who lived mainly in Naples while he was in Italy, had the misfortune to be placed under house arrest for four years in his 60s, when he was accused of being a republican revolutionary.

He is primarily remembered, though, for having been invited to Paris at the height of his popularity to be drawn unwittingly into a battle between supporters of traditional opera, with its emphasis on catchy melodies and show-stopping arias, and those of the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who favoured solemnly serious storytelling more akin to Greek tragedy.

Piccinni’s father was a musician but tried to discourage his son from following the same career. However, the Bishop of Bari, recognising Niccolò’s talent, arranged for him to attend the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio in Capuana in Naples.

He was a prolific writer. His first opera, a comedy entitled Le donne dispettose (The mischievous women) was staged at the Teatro dei Fiorentini in Naples in 1755 and after he had formed a working partnership with the acclaimed librettist Pietro Metastasio his catalogue of works was already well into double figures when the success of one particular composition won him popularity across Europe.

La buona figliuola (The good daughter), also known as La Cecchina, was essentially an opera buffa – a light-hearted comedy – for which the libretto was written by the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni.

Carlo Goldoni, the Venetian playwright, wrote
the libretto for Piccinni's first major success

It premiered at the Teatro delle Dame in Rome in 1760 and was so popular it enjoyed a two-year run, acquiring such a reputation as a crowd pleaser that it was soon attracting packed houses in every capital city in Europe.  What set it apart was that it was a comedy with dramatic elements and a soft sentimentality designed to touch the emotions of the audience.

The public enthusiasm for the story was such that a commercial spin-off industry developed around it almost in the manner of box-office successes of today, with fashion houses and shops trading on the La Cecchina name.

The new sentimental style caught on with other composers, eager to match Piccinni’s success, but at the same time there was a backlash among conservatives, who felt music, and opera in particular, should be about strength and manliness and saw this brand of modern Italian music as rather effete, promoting effeminacy and cowardliness rather than courage and moral virtue.

Among those composers who had their support was Gluck, the German who had found favour with the Hapsburg court in Vienna.  Gluck moved to Paris in the 1770s and when Queen Marie Antoinette invited Piccinni to live and work in the French capital, the directors of the Academie Royale de Musique, as the Paris Opera was then known, saw the commercial potential in pitting the two against one another.

They invited each to compose his own interpretation of the same texts and deliberately encouraged the Parisian public to fall into one or the other of two camps – the Gluckists and the Piccinnists. The antagonism between some factions became quite ugly.

The Piccinni statue in his
home city of Bari

The irony was that Piccinni admired Gluck and while in Paris, excited by the chance to compose pieces of greater substance, he collaborated with the celebrated French dramatist Jean-Francois Marmontel on several projects that he hoped would advance the cause of operatic reform that Gluck and his intellectual supporters were proposing.

The French Revolution in 1789 – two years after the death of Gluck - brought to an end Piccinni’s time in Paris and he returned to Naples, where he was given a warm welcome by King Ferdinand IV, whose wife Maria Carolina was the ill-fated Marie Antoinette’s sister, only to fall out of favour when his daughter’s marriage to a French democratic republican brought him under suspicion of connections and sympathies with the revolutionaries whose influence Ferdinand feared.

The king’s attitude towards any suspected republicans in Naples had been uncompromising and many were rounded up and shot. Piccinni was spared that fate but remained under house arrest for four years.

His fame long since faded, he spent the years after his release eking out an uncertain living in Naples, Venice and Rome before returning to Paris in 1798, where he was received with enthusiasm but struggled to make much money, although with the support of friends he was able to settle in the comfortable suburb of Passy, where he died in 1800 at the age of 72.

Piccinni’s life is commemorated with a statue in the Piazza della Prefettura in his home city of Bari in Puglia.

Porta Capuana in Naples used to be part of the city's
ancient Aragonese walls

Travel tip:

Capuana is the area of Naples close to Porta Capuana, a now free-standing gateway that was once part of the Aragonese walls of the city.  Situated roughly between the city’s main railway station and the Duomo.  The Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio, which was in time absorbed into the Naples Conservatory, used to be close to the Castel Capuano, originally a 12^th-century fortress which has been modified several times.  Until recently, the castle was home to the city’s Hall of Justice, also known as the Vicaria, comprising legal offices and a prison.

The pretty Via Margutta in Rome, close to where the
Teatro delle Dame stood in the 18th and early 19th centuries

Travel tip:

In the 18^th century, Rome’s Teatro delle Dame vied with the Teatro Capranica for the right to be called the city’s leading opera house, staging many premieres of works by the leading composers of the day. Built in 1713 specifically to stage opera seria – as opposed to opera buffa – and remained a major venue until the early 19^th century, when it was used more often for public dancing, acrobatic shows and plays in local Roman dialect.  Completely destroyed by fire in 1863, it stood where Via Aliberti joins Via Margutta in an area of pretty, narrow streets close to Piazza di Spagna in the direction of Piazza del Popolo.

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