Composer information: Paisiello, Giovanni
1. Life.
Paisiello received his education first at the Jesuit school in Taranto and then, between 1754 and 1763, at the Conservatorio di S Onofrio, Naples. According to his autobiographical sketch (published in Choron and Fayolle), he composed his first short opera, a comic intermezzo, while still a conservatory student. At about the time he left the S Onofrio he attracted the attention of a young nobleman, Giuseppe Carafa, who appointed him musical director of the small opera company he was forming at the time. It was due to Carafa that Paisiello acquired his first commissions to write works for the Teatro Marsigli-Rossi, Bologna, in 1764. The second of these, I francesi brillanti, failed at its first performance but was more successful when it was transferred to Modena two weeks later. This led to a commission from Modena for some new music for an opera originally by Guglielmi, La donna di tutti i caratteri. Paisiello’s revision, Madama l’umorista, contained much new music; its success led in turn to requests for new operas for other north Italian theatres.
Paisiello regarded himself as Neapolitan, and he preferred living and working in Naples to anywhere else. In 1766 he returned to Naples; as freelance composer his chief activity was setting comic operas for the Nuovo and Fiorentini theatres, where his chief rival was Piccinni. But he was also happy to accept commissions for serious operas at the S Carlo. Signs that the court, and in particular the King of Naples, Ferdinand IV, approved of his music are the three operas (Lucio Papirio dittatore, Olimpia and the so-called Festa teatrale in musica) staged at the S Carlo between June 1767 and May 1768. Thereafter however the royal approval seems to have been withdrawn, possibly because of Paisiello’s unusual behaviour over his marriage to a widow, Cecilia Pallini. In the summer of 1768 he contracted to marry her but then tried to withdraw from the bargain, using various excuses. Pallini appealed, perhaps to the Queen of Naples, and Paisiello was confined in prison until the marriage was solemnized on 15 September. He received no further recognition from the court until 1774, when his short Il divertimento de’ numi was performed at the royal palace, and no further commission came from the S Carlo until mid-1776.
Paisiello was unable to fulfil this commission because in 1776 he received and accepted an invitation from Catherine II of Russia to become her maestro di cappella in St Petersburg for three years at an annual salary of 3000 roubles. He left Naples for Russia on 29 July. His duties in St Petersburg included composing all the theatrical pieces ordered by the court and directing the court’s orchestra and opera company. His new patroness maintained her small Italian opera company less out of personal affection for opera than with an eye to its political prestige value. Her relative indifference to music explains perhaps why Paisiello composed fewer stage works in Russia than he had done in a comparable period of time in Naples. Fortunately for him the empress liked him enough to renew his contract in September 1779 for another three years at an increased salary of 4000 roubles. And in 1781 she offered him a further four-year contract from September 1782, the date when his existing contract was due to expire. Paisiello accepted this latest offer, although he was starting to have second thoughts about staying in Russia much longer. His relationship with the court became strained in November 1783 after he had quarrelled with the newly formed committee of court theatres. Using his wife’s ill-health as an excuse, he asked to be granted permission to return to Italy. Rather than lose her maestro altogether, Catherine granted him paid leave for a year. Once out of Russia, however, he made no attempt to return.
One reason why Paisiello did not go back to St Petersburg was his nomination by King Ferdinand of Naples on 9 December 1783 as compositore della musica de’ drammi of the Neapolitan court. This was the result of a determined campaign by Paisiello to persuade the king, through the intercession of friends and intermediaries, to give him an official court position. During this campaign Paisiello sent his latest scores to Ferdinand through the diplomatic mail. His nomination was announced 17 days after Il barbiere di Siviglia (one of the operas he had sent from Russia) was performed at the Palace of Caserta in the king’s presence on 22 November 1783.
As the king’s compositore Paisiello had no regular duties at court and no regular salary. Perhaps for this reason he did not reach Naples until October or November 1784, spending the summer of that year in Vienna, where he composed Il re Teodoro in Venezia (performed at the Burgtheater on 23 August). His first offering to the Neapolitan court after his return was Antigono, first given at the S Carlo on 12 January 1785. Shortly after its successful première, on 7 March the king granted him a pension, the conditions of which were published in the Gazetta civica napoletana of 18 March: Paisiello was in future obliged to write an annual opera for the S Carlo and other occasional music as needed; in return he was to receive 1200 ducats annually, half from the treasury and half from the S Carlo (in effect payment for his annual opera); he was forbidden to leave Naples to compose music for anywhere else without royal permission; lastly, he was to receive the pension ‘even if he could no longer compose in the service of His Majesty’. Paisiello faithfully obeyed these conditions for the next five years, and wrote no operas for theatres outside Naples during that period. On 29 October 1787 the king also appointed him maestro della real camera with an annual salary of 240 ducats. This appointment put Paisiello in charge of all secular music at court. His positions as court composer and maestro della real camera, with their large pension and salary, made him the most favoured musician in the city.
In 1790 Paisiello seems to have suffered some kind of physical or mental breakdown. He had contracted to write three operas for different Neapolitan theatres during the autumn and winter season of 1789–90 when Ferdinand gave him the extra task of composing Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (performed outside Caserta on 25 June 1789). This put him behind schedule with the other works. He was able to finish the first, I zingari in fiera, basically on time for the Fondo theatre in the autumn. But the other two, for the Fiorentini and the S Carlo theatres, both of which should have been staged the following carnival, did not appear until later in the year. The late completion of Zenobia in Palmira brought him into dispute with the impresario of the S Carlo, who maintained that he had failed to fulfil his annual contract. Paisiello petitioned the king to be relieved of all further duties to the theatre and once more gained his wish. On 30 October 1790 Ferdinand ordained that he should in future receive his full pension without being obliged to write music for the S Carlo. This left him free to write operas for theatres outside Naples if he wished, and in fact he wrote three such works for Padua, London and Venice during the 1791–2 period. After 1792 his output of new operas slowed down; by 1800 it had virtually ceased, and he subsequently wrote only two complete stage works.
The wars and unsettled political conditions in Italy at the end of the century had considerable effect on Paisiello’s later career. In January 1799 republican forces gained control of Naples and established there the so-called Parthenopaean Republic. The king and his court fled to Sicily, but Paisiello stayed behind. On 4 May he was made maestro di cappella nazionale to the republic, although he later claimed he had not wanted this appointment. After royalist forces recaptured Naples at the end of June 1799 his part in the affairs of the republic was officially investigated, and he was suspended from all court duties. Not until 7 July 1801 was he pardoned and reinstated in his former posts.
One of the greatest admirers of his music by this time was Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France. Towards the end of 1801 Napoleon negotiated with Ferdinand for Paisiello’s temporary release for a visit to Paris. These negotiations must have been completed by 19 January 1802, when Paisiello requested the Naples court to pay his monthly salary to his lawyer during his French visit. He arrived in Paris in April and was offered a monthly salary of 1000 francs, free housing and a free carriage, to direct the music of the consular chapel and to compose two operas a year and a military march each month. Paisiello took on the duty of maître de chapelle, but basically ignored the other tasks. During the two years in France he wrote only one opera, Proserpine; this failed when it was produced in March 1803. Newspaper reports early the following year stated that he was considering composing a new stage work on the subject of the Orestes by Euripides. But he was probably not serious about this project. In fact by this time he was determined to return to Naples once more, and obtained his release from his chapel post (though not immediately from Napoleon’s service altogether) around 10 April 1804. He left Paris for Naples on 29 August and had probably arrived by the end of September.
In 1806 Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, ousted Ferdinand IV and installed himself as King of Naples. Paisiello, already a favourite with the Bonaparte family, was now appointed director of all sacred and secular music at Joseph’s court. Joseph’s successor, Joachim Murat (king, 1808–15), confirmed these posts. It is not true, as Florimo maintained, that when Murat lost control of Naples and King Ferdinand returned to power in 1815 Paisiello lost all his royal appointments except the directorship of the court chapel. In fact, as a result of a general amnesty declared in Naples on 23 May 1815, the composer retained all his previous positions until the time of his death.
© Oxford University Press 2007
MICHAEL F. ROBINSON: 'Paisiello, Giovanni, §1', Grove Music Online (Accessed 09 October 2007), <http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=opera.006978.1>
Paisiello, Giovanni
2. Works.
The precise number of operas Paisiello wrote is unclear, but over 80 works can be safely attributed to him. During the earlier part of his creative life he was most in demand as a composer of comic operas, for which his naturally effervescent and graceful music was particularly suitable. During his first Neapolitan period (1766–76) he showed shrewdness in choosing to work with Giambattista Lorenzi, the finest Neapolitan librettist of the century. Lorenzi provided him with texts containing plenty of humour and well-coordinated plots. The first of their collaborations, L’idolo cinese (1767), was also Paisiello’s first great success in Naples. His music was marked by simple harmonies, constant use of traditional cadence formulae, a felicitous mixture of staccato and legato phrases and frequent repetition of short figures in the accompaniment. He was the first Neapolitan to discard the second and third movements of the opera overture.
During his Russian period (1776–84) Paisiello had to write in a more concentrated manner, as Catherine decided, probably in 1778, that operas at her court should not last longer than an hour and a half. Composing Italian operas for a court in which Italian was not the normal spoken language, he had to make his music good enough to compensate for any lack of understanding of the libretto. As a result, his powers of musical characterization sharpened, his orchestration became more colourful and his melodies acquired greater warmth. At this time there appeared in his melodic style turns of phrase reminiscent of Mozart; Mozart himself, after hearing Il re Teodoro in Venezia in Vienna in 1784 and perhaps also Il barbiere di Siviglia, first produced there in 1783, displayed discernible traces of Paisiello’s style in Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.
After Paisiello returned to Naples in 1784 his melodies tended to become simpler and more popular in their appeal. Some of his songs of this time became great favourites with the public, the most successful of all perhaps being ‘Nel cor più non mi sento’ from L’amor contrastato (1788; later better known as La molinara). Many composers, including Beethoven, used this song as basis for variations or free fantasias. The opera in which Paisiello’s tendency towards simple tunes is most apparent is Nina (1789), a work that is important because of the exceptional acclaim it received during his lifetime and because it is a locus classicus of 18th-century sentimental comedy in music.
Paisiello’s heroic or tragic operas have not been highly regarded in recent times, partly because his music has been considered too light and frivolous for the sober nature of the genre. Yet he took their composition seriously, and the fact that all but one of his full-length operas written after 1792 have heroic or tragic texts suggests that he retained an affection for this genre longer than for comic opera. He greatly admired Metastasio, whose librettos he extolled to his pupils, and he did not follow the example of Gluck in taking radical steps to cure the chief fault of heroic opera, which was that it permitted singers too many chances for virtuoso display at inappropriate moments in the drama. He did, however, do much to limit singers’ abuses. His attitude to the subject became defined during his Russian period. About his setting of Metastasio’s Alcide al bivio (1780, St Petersburg), he wrote: ‘I have worked very hard at it, since I wanted to get away from the inconveniences created in Italian theatres, and have completely excluded vocalizations, cadenzas and ritornellos, and set nearly all the recitatives with orchestral accompaniment’. After his return to Naples in 1784 he was no longer able to work towards a comprehensive reform of heroic opera because of the necessity of pleasing local taste, which was conservative. Nonetheless, several of his later operas lack vocalizations and pauses for cadenzas, and a few contain interesting experimental features. Pirro (1787) uses ensemble finales of a type till then reserved for comic opera, during which the dramatic action continues to progress. Elfrida (1792, the first of two operas with texts written for him by Calzabigi) is unusual in allocating all solo songs to the principal characters. Proserpine (1803), Paisiello’s only French opera, has orchestral accompaniment for all recitatives, as was usual in French grand opera of the period. This feature was so rare in contemporary Italian opera that it is worth noting that the Italian version, called Proserpina (adapted c1806–8 but never performed), also has orchestral accompaniment throughout.
Paisiello’s popularity was at its height during the last 20 years or so of the 18th century. At that time his works were as much in demand outside Italy as they were inside it. In Vienna, for example, the Italian opera company installed by Joseph II performed more works by Paisiello during the 1780s than by any other composer. London was another city where operagoers showed particular partiality for his music in the late years of the century. The decline in the demand for his music, which became noticeable everywhere after 1800, was a sign that taste had changed. The works that retained their popularity longest were his best comic operas, Il barbiere di Siviglia, L’amor contrastato and Nina, but even these went out of the repertory by around the 1820s. His compositions are therefore a gauge of what the public of the late 18th century regarded as excellent. Coincidentally, they also are a source of comparison with the operas of Mozart, who knew that the standards set by Paisiello were those he had to beat to win the heart of the operagoing public.
© Oxford University Press 2007
MICHAEL F. ROBINSON: 'Paisiello, Giovanni, §2', Grove Music Online (Accessed 09 October 2007), <http://www.grovemusic.com/shared/views/article.html?section=opera.006978.2>
Link to purchase this DVD:
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/Drilldown?comp_id=131803&bcorder=8&opera=Y&name_id=59627&name_role=3
