Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani

Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani
(b Florence, 15 July 1638; d ?Pistoia, after 1692). Italian composer and violinist.

He was a violinist at the court at Innsbruck at least between 1656 and 1660. From 1672 to 1676 he was director of the court music at Innsbruck, which, after the extinction of the Tyrolean Habsburgs, had come under the control of the emperor. In publications of 1678 he still described himself as holding this position. But during the opera season in Venice from 1677 to 1678 his arrangement of Cavalli’s Scipione affricano and his own opera Astiage were performed, which suggests that he must have been there, and in 1678 at the Oratorio di S Marcello in Rome he directed an oratorio in which Corelli and Pasquini participated. He was probably elevated to the nobility in the same year, since he subsequently designated himself ‘Nobile del Sacro Romano Imperio’. Between 1678 and 1679 and 1681 and 1682 he was in Naples as director of a troupe of opera singers, and while he was there he performed some of his own operas and oratorios. In 1686 he was maestro di cappella to the Prince of Bisignano. From January 1687 to December 1692 he was maestro di cappella of Pistoia Cathedral.