Born in Maiolati,
Papal State (now
Maiolati Spontini,
Province of Ancona), he spent most of his career in Paris and Berlin, but returned to his place of birth at the end of his life. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French
opera. In his more than twenty operas, Spontini strove to adapt
Gluck's classical
tragédie lyrique to the contemporary taste for melodrama, for grander spectacle (in
Fernand Cortez for example), for enriched orchestral timbre, and for melodic invention allied to idiomatic expressiveness of words. As a youth, Spontini studied at the Conservatorio della Pietà de' Turchini, one of four active
music conservatories of Naples. Working his way from Italian city to city, he got his first break in Rome, with his successful comedy
Li Puntigli delle Donne (Carnival 1793). In 1803, he went to Paris, where, on 11 February 1804, debuted his comic opera
La Finta Filosofa, his Neapolitan success of 1799. In part on the recommendation of the
comte de Rémusat and
his literary countess, a
dame du palais, Spontini circulated in the Imperial court, was made a member of the
Académie Impériale de Musique and gained a court position as
compositeur particulier de la chambre of the Empress in 1805. Though Spontini's earlier successes were comedies, with the encouragement of
Empress Joséphine in 1807, Spontini wrote his greatest success, the
tragédie lyrique La Vestale, which has remained his best-known work. Its premiere at the
Opéra in Paris established Spontini as one of the greatest Italian composers of his age. His contemporaries
Cherubini,
Beethoven,
Weber,
Rossini,
Donizetti and
Meyerbeer all considered it a masterpiece, and later composers such as
Berlioz,
Verdi, and
Wagner admired it. During the
Peninsular War,
Napoleon promoted works such as Gasparo Spontini's
Fernand Cortez (1809), which concerned the
Spanish conquest of Mexico under the reign of
Charles V. In 1811, Spontini married Celeste Érard, the niece of the Parisian maker of pianos and harps
Sébastien Érard; it was a happy marriage, though childless. He was made a
chevalier of Napoleon's
Legion of Honor; its
Maltese cross hangs round his neck in the portrait by Nicolas-Eustache Maurin (
illustration). Under the changed political climate of the
Bourbon Restoration, Spontini, closely identified with the former Empire, saw his opera
Olimpie (1819, revised 1821, 1826) meet with indifference, leading him to leave Paris for
Berlin, where his operas had already achieved success. There he became Kapellmeister and chief conductor at the
Königliches Opernhaus, and in this period he composed the Prussian National Anthem "Borussia". There he also met the young
Mendelssohn, but deprecated the 17-year old's opera
Die Hochzeit des Camacho. In 1842, a disillusioned Spontini, chagrined at the success of
Giacomo Meyerbeer and others in Germany, returned to Italy, where he died in 1851. ==Compositions==