Tommaso Traetta

Tommaso Michele Francesco Saverio Traetta (March 30, 1727–April 6, 1779) was an Italian composer.

Biography

Traetta was born in Bitonto, a town near Bari, right down near the top of the heel of the boot of Italy. He eventually became a pupil of the composer, singer and teacher Nicola Porpora in Naples, and scored a first success with his opera "Il Farnace", in Naples, in 1751. Around this time he seems too have come into contact with Niccolò Jommelli. From here on in, Traetta seems to have had regular commissions from all around the country, running the gamut of the usual classical subjects. Then in 1759, something untoward happened that was to trigger Traetta's first operatic re-think. He accepted a post as court composer at Parma.

Parma, it has to be said, was hardly an important place in the grand scheme of things: a minor dukedom, but a dukedom with a difference, because the incumbent was Spanish and his wife was French. Parma had regularly changed owners between Austrians and Spaniards and the current Duke was the Infante Felipe. And in one of those inter-dynastic marriages which so complicate the history of Europe, he had married the eldest daughter of Louis XV. With the result that there was currently in Parma a craze for all things French, and in particular a fixation with the splendour of Versailles. Which is where the influence of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau comes in. It was in Parma that Traetta's operas first began to move in new directions.And as a result there is no doubt that "Antigona", his 1772 opera for St. Petersburg, was amongst his most forward-looking, the closest he approached the famous reform ideals usually associated with Gluck, but in fact a current that was felt by several other composers of the time.

It was in Parma, at the court of the Bourbon Duke there, that Traetta ran unexpectedly headlong into some fresh air from France. In Parma in 1759, he found a number of significant collaborators, and he was fortunate in finding that the man in charge of opera there was a highly-cultivated Paris-trained Frenchman, Guillaume du Tillot, who had the complete cultural portfolio among all his other responsibilities as Don Felipe's First Minister. To judge from the general stylistic influence in terms of grand scenic effects, and from some specific musical borrowings, Traetta had access in Parma to copies and reports of Rameau's operas. To their influence, Traetta added some ingredients of his own, especially a feeling for dramatic colour, in the shape of his melodies and his use of the orchestra. The result was a combination of Italian, French and German elements, which even anticipate the Sturm und Drang movement that was to flourish a few years later, further North.

The first fruit of this francophilia was the opera Traetta wrote in 1759. "Ippolito ed Aricia" owes a lot to Rameau's great tragédie lyrique of 1733, "Hippolyte et Aricie". But Traetta's is no mere translation of Rameau. Frugoni, Traetta's librettist in Parma completely reworked the original French version by abbé Pellegrin, which itself had been based on Racine, in its turn stemming ultimately from ancient Greek roots - the "Hippolytus" of Euripides. Frugoni retained certain key French elements: the five-act structure as against the customary three; the occasional opportunities for French-style spectacle and effects and in particular the dances and divertissements that end each of those five acts; and a more elaborate use of the chorus than for instance in Hasse and Graun and Jommelli.

Through the following decade, the 1760s, Tommaso Traetta composed music unceasingly—not just opera seria, either. There was a clutch of comedies as well, to say nothing of sacred music composed to imperial order. But opera seria was the generally what her imperial majesty commanded. Traetta's first operas for Catherine the Great seem to have been largely revivals and revisions of his earlier works. But then in 1772 came "Antigona" —and for whatever reason, whether it was Traetta's own inclination or the promptings of his librettist Marco Coltellini or the availability of the soprano Caterina Gabrielli, the new opera reached areas of feeling and intensity he had never explored before, even in Parma.

The Court Opera of Catherine the Great performed in a theatre inside the Winter Palace itself, created by the architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli—another Italian—who was the architect of many buildings in St. Petersburg, including the Hermitage. The theatre was quite close to the Empress' own apartments. Too close, in fact, because in 1783, that is to say some time after Traetta's departure, she ordered it to be closed and a new one built. Some years before that she had already booted out Rastrelli, who had been the favourite architect of her predecessor. Traetta too was to depart, though possibly it was the harsh climate of Peter the Great's still relatively new and very damp capital, rather than the Empress' boot, that led him to leave St Petersburg in 1775, and resume the opera composer's peripatetic life, even writing two works for London: "Germondo" in 1776 and "Telemaco" the year after.

Traetta died two years later, in April 1779, in Venice, and by then, opera seria was for a variety of reasons, artistic and financial, a threatened species. It was to take a genius to prolong its active life, above all in a masterpiece from 1781 called "Idomeneo", and then again one final time 10 years after that, using an old warhorse of a Metastasio text for a libretto: "La clemenza di Tito". The composer of this final flash of opera seria glory to outshine them all, was no stranger to Naples and to Neapolitan opera—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Operas

* "Il Farnace" (libretto by Antonio Lucchini, opera seria, 1751, Naples)
* "La Costanza" (libretto by Antonio Palomba, opera buffa, 1752, Naples)
* "L'incredulo" (libretto by Pasquale Mililotti, opera buffa, 1755, Naples)
* "La Rosmonda" (libretto by Antonio Palomba, opera buffa, 1755, Naples)
* "I disturbi" (librettist unknown, opera buffa, 1756, Naples)
* "La fante furba" (libretto by Antonio Palomba, opera buffa, 1756, Naples)
* "La Nitteti" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1756, Naples)
* "La Didone abbandonata" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1757, Venice)
* "Ezio" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1757, Rome)
* "Demofoonte" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1758, Mantua)
* "Olimpiade" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1758, Verona)
* "Buovo d'Antona" (libretto by Carlo Goldoni, dramma giocoso per musica, 1759, Venice)
* "Ippolito ed Aricia" (libretto by Carlo Frugoni, tragédie lyrique, 1759, Parma)
* "Il Solimano" (libretto by Ambrogio Migliavacca, opera seria, 1759, Parma)
* "Enea nel Lazio" (libretto by Vittorio Amadeo Cigna-Santi), opera seria, 1760, Turin)
* "Le feste d'Imeneo" (libretto by Carlo Frugoni, 1760, Parma)
* "I Tindaridi" (libretto by Carlo Frugoni, opera seria, 1760, Parma)
* "Armida" (libretto by Giacomo Dubrazzo, azione teatrale per musica, 1761, Vienna; 1763 Naples; 1767 Venice)
* "Enea, e Lavinia" (libretto by Giacobbe Antonio Sanvitale, opera seria, 1761, Parma)
* "Alessandro nell'Indie" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1762, Reggio Emilia)
* "Sofonisba" (libretto by Mattia Verazi, opera seria, 1762, Mannheim)
* "Zenobia" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1762, Rome)
* "Ifigenia in Tauride" (libretto by Marco Coltellini, opera seria, 1763, Vienna)
* "Antigono" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1764, Padua)
* "La Francese a Malghera" (libretto by Pietro Chiari, dramma giocoso per musica, 1764, Venice)
* "L'isola disabitata" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, azione drammatica per musica, 1765, Mantua)
* "Semiramide" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1765, Venice)
* "Il tributo campestre" (libretto by Giovanni Battista Buganza, componimento pastorale drammatico, 1765, Mantua)
* "Le serve rivali" (libretto by Pietro Chiari, dramma giocoso per musica, 1766, Venice)
* "Il Siroe" (libretto by Pietro Metastasio, opera seria, 1767, Münich)
* "Amore in trappola" (libretto by Pietro Chiari, dramma giocoso per musica, 1768, Venice)
* "Antigona" (libretto by Marco Coltellini, tragédie lyrique, 1772, St. Petersburg)
* "Amore e Psiche" (libretto by Marco Coltellini, opera seria, 1773, St. Petersburg)
* "Lucio Vero" (libretto by Apostolo Zeno, opera seria, 1774, St. Petersburg)
* "La Merope" (libretto by Felice Stagnoli and Alessandro Minunzio, opera seria, 1776, Milan)
* "Telemaco" (libretto by Zaccaria Conte de Seri, opera seria, 1777, London)
* "Germondo" (libretto by Carlo Goldoni, opera seria, 1777, London)
* "Il cavaliere errante" (libretto by Giovanni Bertati, dramma eroicomico per musica, 1778, Venice)
* "La disfatta di Dario" (librettist unknown, opera seria, 1778, Venice)

References

* Marco Russo, "Tommaso Traetta: i Libretti della Riforma - Parma 1759-61", Facoltà di Lettere di Trento, Trento 2005;
* Marco Russo, "Tommaso Traetta: Maestro di cappella napoletano", Edizioni S. Marco dei Giustiniani, Genova 2006.

External links

* [http://www.traetta.com Traetta.com website]
* [http://www.operone.de/komponist/traetta.html Operone list of Traetta operas]