Caterino Mazzolà

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Caterino Tommaso Mazzolà (born January 18, 1745 in Longarone , † July 16, 1806 in Venice ) was an Italian librettist and poet.

Life

Caterino was the third of eight children from Domenico and Francesca Mazzolà, who originally came from Murano . They moved to Longarone to do the timber trade. In 1747 they moved into a newly built palazzo in the center of the village, which today serves as the town hall.

Little is known about Mazzolà's training. He was probably initially taught in his home parish, later at a Jesuit school in Venice; finally he was trained in Treviso with the Somas people and received the minor orders there .

Back in Venice he began to deal with literature and the theater. A first literary work was created in 1765 - a sonnet for a wedding. In 1771 he made a translation of Voltaire's Œdipe . Increasingly, however, he turned to the theater. He wrote the drama Ruggiero , set to music by Pietro Guglielmi and premiered in 1769. The dedications of those first works refer to the environment in which Mazzolà moved: the salons of the great families of Venice, the Memmo , Zaguri or Pisani. In the Zaguri house he met Giacomo Casanova towards the end of 1774 and in the Bernardo Memmo house he met Lorenzo Da Ponte , with whom he then became a warm friend.

Word of his work for the theater got around. Antonio Salieri commissioned him in 1778 to write a libretto for an opera buffa , which was published in Venice the following year under the title La scuola de 'gelosi and which was a great success here as in other Italian cities. His reputation also made people sit up and take notice: Joseph Schuster , court composer of the Elector of Saxony, asked for permission to set the drama Bradamante to music. In 1780 he celebrated the election of Marco Giorgio Pisani as procurator of San Marco with the sonnet Il Patriottismo . A short time later, however, Pisani was arrested by conservative circles and Mazollà therefore decided to leave Venice as a supporter of Pisani to be on the safe side. On the recommendation of Schuster and Antonio Salieri, he went to Dresden in 1780 , where he was employed as court poet to Friedrich August I of Saxony . The Saxon court was at that time a center of the music world and especially of music theater, where top executives from this area gathered.

Shortly before he left for Dresden, on June 10th, 1780, he married the widow Teresa Tomasini, who brought a daughter into the marriage. In 1781 Mazzolà introduced his friend da Ponte, who had been banished from Venice, to Antonio Salieri, who recommended him to the Viennese court as court poet. When the Austrian Emperor Joseph II died in 1790 , his successor, Leopold II , dismissed the court poet da Ponte. Until the appointment of his successor Giovanni Bertati , Mazzolà provided this position as a kind of "loan" from the Saxon court. During this time, Mazzolà edited the libretto La clemenza di Tito by Pietro Metastasio for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , which he set to opera for Leopold's coronation as King of Bohemia.

Back in Dresden he was appointed court advisor, but in 1796 he returned to Venice - whether it was homesick or because of the climate he could not tolerate well - while retaining his title and promising to continue delivering one work per year and took up residence at the Madonna dell'Orto church . There he continued his work, albeit less intensively, since the public's taste had changed due to the political upheavals - the Republic of Venice had collapsed in 1797. He wrote his last work, the cantata Il giuramento , for the wedding of a niece, the daughter of his brother Antonio, on March 6, 1806. A few months later he died, almost forgotten, at the age of 61.

plant

Mazzolà's main work was the writing of librettos, most of which were written for the Dresden Court Opera. Over the years, however, his work for the Mozart opera La clemenza di Tito has been remembered above all .

Libretti

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mazzolà, Caterino
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mazzolà, Caterino Tommaso
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian librettist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1745
PLACE OF BIRTH Longarone
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1806
Place of death Venice