Opera
In 1752 he produced his first documented opera, Il re pastore (because the date of Pompeo in Armenia is not certain). In 1753 Sarti went to Copenhagen with Pietro Mingotti and in 1755 King Frederick V of Denmark appointed him Hofkapellmeister and director of the opera. Here he produced his Ciro riconosciuto.
In 1765 he travelled to Italy to engage some new singers; meanwhile the death of King Frederick put an end to his engagement for the time being. In 1766 he was appointed choir master at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a position he held until 1767. In 1769 he went to London, where he could only survive by giving music lessons. In 1779 he was elected maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Milan, where he remained until 1784. Here he exercised his true vocation of composer, in addition to at least twenty of his most successful operas, a vast amount of sacred music for the cathedral, and educating a number of clever pupils, the most distinguished of whom was Cherubini. In 1784 Sarti was invited by the empress Catherine II to St. Petersburg. On his way there he stopped in Vienna, where Emperor Joseph II received him with special favour, and where he made the acquaintance of Mozart. He reached St. Petersburg in 1785, and at once took the direction of the opera, for which he composed many new pieces, besides some very striking sacred music, including a Te Deum for the victory of Ochakov, in which he introduced the firing of real cannons. He remained in Russia until 1801, when his health was so broken that he solicited permission to return. The emperor Alexander dismissed him in 1802 with a liberal pension; letters of nobility had been granted to him by empress Catherine. His most successful operas in Russia were Armida e Rinaldo and The Early Reign of Oleg (Nachal'noye upravleniye Olega), for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto. Sarti died in Berlin.
Sarti's opera Fra i due litiganti il terzo gode has been immortalized by Mozart, who introduced an air from it into the supper scene in Don Giovanni. Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro owed a great deal to the influence of this opera, which was performed in Vienna in 1784. The admirable libretto by Da Ponte, author of the libretti of Figaro and Don Giovanni, shows similar situations, and the complicated finale of the first act served as a model to Mozart for the finale of the last act of Figaro.
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Famous quotes containing the word opera:
“A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings.”
—Anonymous.
A modern proverb along the lines of “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” This form of words has no precise origin, though both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (16th ed., 1992)
“I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)