Biography
Gassmann was born in Brux, Bohemia, and appears to have been trained by Johann Woborschil, the local chorus master. His father was a goldsmith who appears to have opposed his son's choice of a musical career.
From 1757 until 1762, he wrote an opera every year for the carnival season in Venice, and was also made choirmaster in the girls’ conservatory in Venice in 1757. Many of the librettos he set were by the great Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni.
In 1763 he was called to be court ballet composer in Vienna, where he was held in great affection by Emperor Joseph II. In 1764, Gassmann became chamber composer to the Emperor, and in 1772 court conductor.
In 1766, Gassmann met the young Antonio Salieri in Venice, who he invited to return to Vienna with him, and who, based on Johann Joseph Fux’s textbook Gradus ad Passarnum, he taught composition. Salieri remained in Vienna, and succeeded Gassman as chamber composer to the Emperor upon the latter's death in 1774. Another Italian composer, Giuseppe Bono, succeeded him as court conductor.
In 1771, Gassman founded the Tonkünstlersozietät (Society of Musical Artists), which organised the first musical events for the general public in Vienna. This social institution was particularly concerned with widows and orphans of its deceased members. He composed his oratorio La Betulia liberata because of the founding of this society.
In 1774 Gassman died in Vienna of the long-term consequences of a carriage accident he had suffered while on his final visit to Italy.
Gassmann's two daughters, Anna Fux and Therese Rosenbaum, were both famous singers trained by Salieri; the younger, Therese, made a particular name for herself as a Mozart interpreter.
Charles Burney, in one of his published tours, mentions traveling to Joseph II, meeting Gassmann and finding him very obliging; Gassmann showed Burney his manuscripts, of which Burney found the chamber works distinctive and most worthy of his praise (but Burney was either not exposed to, or said nothing about, Gassmann's orchestral music.)
Johann Baptist Vanhal is described by author Daniel Heartz as Gassmann's "protégé".
Read more about this topic: Florian Leopold Gassmann
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)