Great Italian and French Composers

by George T. Ferris

VI.

A still higher place must be assigned to another disciple and follower of the school perfected by Piccini, Dominic Cimarosa, born in Naples in 1754. His life down to his latter years was an uninterrupted flow of prosperity. His mother, an humble washerwomen, could do little for her fatherless child, but an observant priest saw the promise of the lad, and taught him till he was old enough to enter the Conservatory of St. Maria di Loretto. His early works showed brilliant invention and imagination, and the young Cimarosa, before he left the Conservatory, had made himself a good violinist and singer. He worked hard, during a musical apprenticeship of many years, to lay a solid foundation for the fame which his teachers prophesied for him from the onset. Like Paisiello, he was for several years attached to the court of Catherine II. of Russia. He had already produced a number of pleasing works, both serious and comic, for the Italian theatres, and his faculty of production was equaled by the richness and variety of his scores. During a period of four years spent at the imperial court of the North, Cimarosa produced nearly five hundred works, great and small, and only left the service of his magnificent patroness, who was no less passionately fond of art than she was great as a ruler and dissolute as a woman, because the severe climate affected his health, for he was a typical Italian in his temperament.

He was arrested in his southward journey by the urgent persuasions of the Emperor Leopold, who made him chapel-master, with a salary of twelve thousand florins. The taste for the Italian school was still paramount at the musical capital of Austria. Though such composers as Haydn, Salieri, and young Mozart, who had commenced to be welcomed as an unexampled prodigy, were in Vienna, the court preferred the suave and shallow beauties of Italian music to their own serious German school, which was commencing to send down such deep roots into the popular heart.

Cimarosa produced "Il Matrimonio Segreto" (The Secret Marriage), his finest opera, for his new patron. The libretto was founded on a forgotten French operetta, which again was adapted from Garrick and Colman's "Clandestine Marriage." The emperor could not attend the first representation, but a brilliant audience hailed it with delight. Leopold made amends, though, on the second night, for he stood in his box, and said, aloud:

"Bravo, Cimarosa, bravissimo! The whole opera is admirable, delightful, enchanting! I did not applaud, that I might not lose a single note of this masterpiece. You have heard it twice, and I must have the same pleasure before I go to bed. Singers and musicians pass into the next room. Cimarosa will come, too, and preside at the banquet prepared for you. When you have had sufficient rest, we will begin again. I encore the whole opera, and in the mean while let us applaud it as it deserves."

The emperor gave the signal, and, midst a thunderstorm of plaudits, the musicians passed into their midnight feast. There is no record of any other such compliment, except that to the Latin dramatist, Plautus, whose "Eunuchus" was performed twice on the same day.

Yet the same Viennese public, six years before, had actually hissed Mozart's "Nozze di Figaro," which shares with Rossini's "Il Barbiere" the greatest rank in comic opera, and has retained, to this day, its perennial freshness and interest. Cimarosa himself did not share the opinion of his admirers in respect to Mozart. A certain Viennese painter attempted to flatter him, by decrying Mozart's music in comparison with his own. The following retort shows the nobility of genius: "I, sir? What would you call the man who would seek to assure you that you were superior to Raphael?" Another acute rejoinder, on the respective merits of Mozart and Cimarosa, was made by the French composer, Grétry, in answer to a criticism by Napoleon, when first consul, that great man affecting to be a dilettante in music:

"Sire, Cimarosa puts the statue on the theatre and the pedestal in the orchestra, instead of which Mozart puts the statue in the orchestra and the pedestal on the theatre."

The composer's hitherto brilliant career was doomed to a gloomy close. On returning to Naples, at the Emperor Leopold's death, Cimarosa produced several of his finest works, among which musical students place first: "Il Matrimonio per Susurro," "La Penelope," "L'Olimpiade," "II Sacrificio d'Abramo," "Gli Amanti Comici," and "Gli Orazi." These were performed almost simultaneously in the theatres of Paris, Naples, and Vienna. Cimarosa attached himself warmly to the French cause in Italy, and when the Bourbons finally triumphed the musician suffered their bitterest resentment. He narrowly escaped with his life, and languished for a long time in a dungeon, so closely immured that it was for a long time believed by his friends that his head had fallen on the block.

At length released, he quitted the Neapolitan territory, only to die at Venice, in a few months, "in consequence," Stendhal says, in his "Life of Rossini," "of the barbarous treatment he had met with in the prison into which he had been thrown by Queen Caroline." He died January 11, 1801.