Output included operas, religious music and Venetian dialect songs
Antonio Buzzolla, a composer who was at various times a musician, conductor and choirmaster, was born on this day in 1815 in Adria, a town in the southern part of the Veneto region, situated between the mouths of the Po and Adige rivers.
An illustration of Antonio Buzzolla, thought
to show him at the age of 25 in 1840
Buzzolla, who was once a student of the opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, composed five operas of his own, as well as producing a substantial catalogue of religious music while serving as maestro di cappella at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
Yet during his life he was best known for composing ariette and canzonette - brief songs of a melodic, playful or sometimes sentimental nature - written in Venetian dialect. These songs became popular in the city, both for the light-hearted entertainment they provided and for the contribution they made to Venice’s musical identity.
It was a sign of the respect in which Buzzolla was held among his peers that he was invited by Giuseppe Verdi to contribute to a requiem mass he was organising for his fellow opera giant Gioachino Rossini following the latter’s death in 1869.
Buzzolla was born into a musical family. His father, Angelo Buzzolla, was maestro di cappella - choirmaster - at what was then Adria's cathedral. Angelo, who was also an accomplished violinist, provided his son with a well-rounded musical education that saw him become proficient on a range of instruments, including violin, flute, organ, piano and piccolo, by the age of 16.
At this point, he left Adria to live in Venice, a city rich in opportunities to further his career. He had not been studying there long when he was invited to play in the orchestra at the Gran Teatro La Fenice, the city’s principal opera house, at first as a flautist before being promoted to second violin.
At the same time, he began to try his hand at composition, leading him to write his first opera, Il Ferramondo, which premiered at the Teatro Gallo, formerly the Teatro San Benedetto, in Venice in December, 1836, and was also performed in Trieste and Mantua.
The reception for Il Ferramondo was positive enough to persuade Buzzolla to go to Naples to study composition at the Conservatory of San Pietro a Maiella. His teachers included Donizetti and, later, Saverio Mercadante. His output there included a cantata for the Neapolitan court and vocal pieces performed at the Teatro San Carlo.
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| Teatro La Fenice in Venice, where Buzzolla was an orchestra member |
With his reputation now extending beyond Italy, Buzzolla took up a position as director of Italian Opera at the Berlin court of Frederick William IV of Prussia, to whose children he became tutor. From Berlin he toured Russia, Poland and France before being appointed director of the Théâtre de la comédie italienne in Paris, in 1846.
He returned to Venice again in 1848, directing two more operas, Amleto and Elisabetta di Valois, at Teatro la Fenice. He also conducted his own Requiem for four voices and large orchestra at the Basilica di San Marco.
In 1848, Venice briefly became an independent state following the uprising against the occupying army of Austria, and Buzzolla demonstrated his commitment to the cause by co-directing a patriotic concert at La Fenice in November of that year, featuring excerpts from Verdi's Macbeth and Attila alongside works by Rossini and Donizetti.
Buzzolla’s operas were respected by his fellow composers and well received by audiences, yet his output was small. It was dwarfed, in fact, by his catalogue of short songs, which were mostly performed in Venice’s salons or at domestic gatherings in middle-class homes.
Written in the tradition of bel canto opera, which emphasises the beauty of the voice, these lyrical pieces had light-hearted themes based on everyday life in Venice, highlighting romance and nature in particular.
Buzzolla’s Canzonette Veneziane, a collection of 12 light-hearted songs in Venetian dialect, was published by Ricordi in 1852.
After the successful staging of Elisabetta di Valois in 1850, Buzzolla announced it would be his last opera. Where other composers of the mid-19th century, such as Giovanni Pacini and Errico Petrella, relentlessly exploited the popularity of opera by composing literally dozens of them, Buzzolla was less commercially driven and decided to devote himself to sacred music, the culmination of which was his appointment in 1855 as maestro of the Cappella Marciana, the choral and instrumental ensemble that provides musical service at Basilica di San Marco.
He held the prestigious position until his death in 1871, after which his body was interred in a tomb on the Isola di San Michele, the island in the Venetian Lagoon that houses the city’s main cemetery.
Travel tip:
Adria in the Veneto, once a thriving seaport on
the Adriatic coast, is now several miles inland
Adria, where Antonio Buzzolla was born and grew up, is a town in the Veneto about 23km (14 miles) east of Rovigo and just over 60km (36 miles) south of Venice. It is situated between the lower courses of the Adige and Po rivers. Today it lies inland, but in antiquity it was a major port on the Adriatic Sea, so influential that the sea itself took its name from the town. It thrived in particular during the Etruscan and Greek civilisations but fell into decline during the Roman era as the Po and Adige progressively silted up, pushing the coastline further east and robbing Adria of its direct maritime access. Over time it was absorbed into the territories of Ravenna and Venice before coming under French and Austrian rule. After incorporation in the new Kingdom of Italy in 1867, the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought land reclamation, new road networks and agricultural expansion. The Adria of today, with a population of around 19,500, is a relatively modern town with an economy based on agriculture, commerce, and light manufacturing. As a town boasting one of the longest continuous settlements in the whole of Italy, going back perhaps to the 12th century BC, it is home to the huge collection of relics preserved at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Adria. The Conservatorio Statale di Musica Antonio Buzzolla was established in Adria in 1975, and named in his honour.
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Travel Tip:
The cemetery island of San Michele, with the
neighbouring island of Burano in the distance
The Isola di San Michele, where Buzzolla was buried, has been the home of Venice’s principal cemetery since the early 19th century. Situated between Venice and the island of Murano, it had previously been home to a Camaldolese monastery, built in the 13th century, and the Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, which was designed by the architect Mauro Codussi and built in 1469 as the first Renaissance church in Venice. The island was also used as a prison at one time. In 1807, when Venice was occupied by the French under Napoleon, the neighbouring island of San Cristoforo was designated as the city’s cemetery, only for it to become clear after only a few years that it was not big enough. In 1835, work began to fill in the narrow canal between the two islands to create one much larger island. Annibale Forcellini, an architect and engineer, was given the task of designing the cemetery complex, which retains the Chiesa di San Michele near the entrance and includes a domed chapel built in memory of the ancient Chiesa di San Cristoforo, which had been demolished during the construction of the original cemetery. As well as housing the remains of ordinary Venetian citizens, the cemetery has a sufficient number of illustrious occupants to have become a tourist attraction. In addition to Buzzolla, the remains of the poet Ezra Pound, the entrepreneur and Venice Film Festival founder Giuseppe Volpi, the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, the writers Carlo and Gasparo Gozzi, the football manager Helenio Herrera, the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono, and others, are buried there.
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More reading:
How the overlooked work of Giovanni Pacini has enjoyed a revival
Nabucco - the Verdi opera that became a symbol of the Risorgimento
The Venetian lawyer who led fight to drive out the Austrians
Also on this day:
1603: The birth of Sicilian painter and architect Pietro Novelli
1886: The birth of football manager Vittorio Pozzo
1939: The election of wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII
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