Giuseppe Gazzaniga
Giuseppe Gazzaniga was an Italian composer, born on 5 October 1743 in Verona and died on 1 February 1818 in Crema. A Venetian musician of Neapolitan training, he belonged to the Neapolitan school of opera composers and wrote some 50–60 operas, principally opera buffa. Prolific and widely admired by his contemporaries, he built an international career whose works reached leading European theatres as well as provincial stages.
Born to devout parents who intended him for the priesthood, he was sent to a seminary but secretly pursued music. Only after his father’s death in 1760 could he undertake formal study without restriction. He went first to Venice to study with Nicola Porpora, who brought him to Naples and secured him a free place at the Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio a Porta Capuana. There he studied counterpoint and composition with Porpora, Carlo Cotumacci and Giuseppe Doll, and from 1767 to 1770 with Niccolò Piccinni. After returning to Venice in 1770, he also benefited from the encouragement and advice of Antonio Sacchini.
Gazzaniga made his operatic debut at Naples’s Teatro Nuovo sopra Toledo during the 1768 Carnival season with the comic intermezzo Il barone di Trocchia, to a libretto by Niccolò Cerlone. He gained major success in Venice with the 1771 dramma giocoso La locanda, on a libretto by Giovanni Bertati; after triumphing in Verona, it was successfully staged in Lisbon, Vienna, Regensburg, Berlin and at the Esterházy court. His career may also have included brief stays at the courts of Munich and Dresden. He served as maestro di cappella at Urbino Cathedral from 1775 to 1776.
In the 1770s, Ezio, first given in Venice in 1772, was well received, whereas Armida failed conspicuously in Rome the following year. He recovered with works including L’isola di Calipso (1775), Perseo e Andromeda, Zon-zon, principe di Kibin-kin-ka, and La donna soldato, which was also performed as La dama soldato in Madrid and Corfu. His 1778 comedy La vendemmia was a particular triumph and was staged in such cities as Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, London and Lisbon.
During the 1780s he continued to produce successful operas, including La moglie capricciosa and La contessa di Novaluna. In 1786 he was commissioned for Vienna’s court theatre to set Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto Il finto cieco; although the work was coolly received at its Burgtheater premiere, it led to further commissions in Italy, Germany and England. His best-known opera is Don Giovanni Tenorio, or The Stone Guest, a dramma giocoso on a libretto by Bertati, first staged at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè in February 1787 as the second act of Il capriccio drammatico. It preceded Mozart’s Don Giovanni by eight months, enjoyed considerable success in Italy and abroad, and its libretto was an important predecessor for Da Ponte’s treatment of the subject.
His theatrical activity continued without interruption until 1807, ending with I due gemelli, a work previously presented at La Scala in Milan in 1801 under the title Il marito migliore. From 1791 until his death, Gazzaniga was maestro di cappella of Crema Cathedral. In 1802 he taught the young Stefano Pavesi, who later became a notable composer, and in his final years he increasingly devoted himself to sacred and instrumental music.
Beyond opera, Gazzaniga wrote symphonies, overtures, three piano-and-orchestra concertos, a string concerto, cantatas and oratorios. His sacred output includes masses, a Requiem, psalms and hymns for soloists, chorus and orchestra, as well as such works as Susanna, Samson, The Death of Saint Maurus the Abbot, The Triumph of Saint Margaret of Cortona, The Triumph of Judith, and For the Three Hours of Our Lord’s Agony. Much of this music survives in manuscript in the chapter library of San Giorgio in Braida in Verona and the Biblioteca del Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale G. B. Martini in Bologna. His music combines fluent, attractive vocal melody—especially effective in comic situations—with attempts at more varied orchestral writing; its melodic ease has sometimes been viewed as anticipating Rossini. His life and music, particularly his Don Giovanni, were later examined in depth by the German critic Friedrich Chrysander.