Giovanni Pescetti

Giovanni Battista Pescetti (* around 1704 in Venice ; † March 20, 1766 in Venice) was an Italian composer . He was a grandson of Carlo Francesco Pollarolo .

Life

Giovanni Pescetti studied with the Venetian organist and composer Antonio Lotti and arranged and composed various operas , often in collaboration with his fellow student Baldassare Galuppi . From 1736 he worked in London , where he became director of the Opera of the Nobility . Thanks to the participation of the famous castrato Farinelli and despite a competitive situation with Handel , his opera Demetrio was able to achieve a certain degree of success and achieved fourteen performances.

The castrato Farinelli

The music historian and contemporary witness Charles Burney wrote about this opera: “This composer, [...] although he never had much fire or fruitful creativity, was a very elegant and clever composer for the singing voice. His melodies are extremely simple and graceful. ”Later he was forced to move, under worse conditions, to the New Theater in the Haymarket , where his opera Busiri, ovvero Il trionfo d'amore only had four performances. He then worked in London as arranger for operas by other composers, before returning to Venice around 1745, where he wrote and arranged operas for another 15 years. After the premiere of his Opera seria Zenobia , he was appointed second organist at St. Markus in 1762 , where his fellow student Galuppi had just taken over the post of Maestro di Coro . In Venice he also taught music and composition to Josef Mysliveček and the young Antonio Salieri .

Pescetti's reputation during his lifetime seemed to be based not so much on his compositional skills as on his rivalry with Handel and his association with Galuppi, but above all on the patronage of such famous singers as Farinelli and Manzuoli , who made his ability to tailor Appreciated composition.

Works

• 10 Sonata per Gravicembalo (London, 1739)
• 6 Sonata per il harpsichord (manuscript, between 1750 and 1766)

literature

• Alfred Baumgartner: Propylaea World of Music - The Composers - A lexicon in five volumes . tape 4 . Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-549-07830-7 , pp. 304-305 .

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Battista Pescetti  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• List of stage works by Giovanni Pescetti based on the MGG at Operone
• Search for operas by Giovanni Pescetti (search term in the Autore field : “Pescetti Giovanni”) in the Corago information system of the University of Bologna
• Sheet music and audio files by Giovani Battista Pescetti in the International Music Score Library Project