Domenico Cimarosa

Early years Cimarosa was born in Aversa, a town near Naples. His family name was Cimmarosa, which is how he is recorded on his baptismal record. He appears to have been an only child. His father, Gennaro, was a stonemason, and within days of Domenico's birth the family moved to Naples where Gennaro found employment on the construction of the Palace of Capodimonte. His teachers were Gennaro Manna and Fedele Fenaroli for composition and Saverio Carcais, the maestro de violino. He was a capable keyboard player, violinist and singer, but composition was his primary concern as a student; in 1770 he, Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli and Giuseppe Giordani were senior students in the composition class. They were performed in Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Prague and Stockholm, as well as Saint Petersburg, Vienna and all the main Italian cities. Between 1783 and 1790 Haydn conducted performances of thirteen Cimarosa operas for his employers at Schloss Esterházy and many of the pieces were given several times. Three weeks after the premiere of Il matrimonio segreto the emperor Leopold died suddenly. His successor, Francis II, was less interested in music than Leopold had been, and in 1793, Cimarosa returned to Naples. In 1796 he was appointed principal organist of the royal chapel, and he continued to produce new operas and revise older ones. He reworked ''L'italiana in Londra and I due baroni, adapting them for local taste by adding sections in Neapolitan dialect. The most important new works from this last phase of his career were Le astuzie femminili (1794) and two serious operas, Penelope (1794) and Gli Orazi e i Curiazi'' (1796); the first two of these were composed for Naples, and the last for La Fenice in Venice. ==Works==

Although Cimarosa wrote a considerable quantity of instrumental and church music, he was, and remains, best known for his operas. Cimarosa avoided the rigidity of the traditional da capo aria, and wrote solo numbers consisting of more flexible divisions, with changes of tempo, metre and key to reflect the words of his librettists. Johnson and Lazarevich comment that this freedom of form conveys spontaneity and flexibility. Cimarosa's arias often speed up for the closing section, in the style of cabalettas. Providing contrast to the vocal display pieces, he often wrote quite simple arias in the manner of cavatinas. A feature of his scores is the sustained writing for concerted voices. In the words of the Grove article: Harmonically, Cimarosa was not innovative, remaining content with traditional diatonic conventions. In the view of Johnson and Lazarevich his musical strengths are to be found in "the richness of his melodic invention, the brilliance and energy of his rhythmic and melodic motifs and his constantly lively accompaniments". ==Reputation==

Johnson and Lazarevich write that Cimarosa's reputation during his lifetime reached a height unsurpassed until Rossini's heyday, and he continued to be highly regarded into the 19th century. Eugène Delacroix preferred Cimarosa's music to Mozart's. He wrote of Il matrimonio segreto, "It is perfection itself. No other musician has this symmetry, this expressiveness and sense of the appropriate, this gaiety and tenderness, and above all … incomparable elegance". Stendhal wrote that Cimarosa, Mozart and Shakespeare were the only passions of his life. To Stendhal, Cimarosa was "the Molière of composers", and he claimed to have seen Il matrimonio segreto more than 100 times. Hector Berlioz, who hated Italian opera, was not an admirer: "I should throw to the devil the unique and interminable Matrimonio Segreto, which is nearly as tiresome as The Marriage of Figaro without being anything like so musical." Robert Schumann was impressed by Cimarosa's "absolutely masterful" orchestration, but by little else. Eduard Hanslick praised Cimarosa's wonderful facility, masterly compositional strokes and good taste. "Full of sunshine – that is the right expression for Cimarosa's music". ==Notes, references and sources==

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