Francesco Morlacchi: Donna Aurora, o sia il romanzo all’improvviso, Opera [Highlights]

Composer(s)

Francesco (Giuseppe Baldassare) Morlacchi
(b Perugia, 14 June 1784; d Innsbruck, 28 Oct 1841). Italian composer. He studied with his uncle Giovanni Mazzetti, organist of Perugia Cathedral, and with Luigi Caruso, the choirmaster, and began writing church and instrumental music at an early age. In 1803–4 he studied at Loreto with Zingarelli, but this did not satisfy him and he moved to the school of Stanislao Mattei at Bologna. Here in 1805 he was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica as master-composer, and he came into contact with the young Rossini.

Morlacchi wrote his first operatic works, a farce and a comic opera, in 1807, but it was an opera seria, Corradino, first performed at Parma in 1808, that really marked the beginning of a brilliant theatrical career, and he was soon receiving commissions from the leading opera houses of Rome and Milan. His three works for Rome (1809–10) were a comic opera, a farce and an opera seria, Le danaidi. The success of this last work, whose subject was taken from Metastasio’s Ipermestra, attracted the attention of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1810 (v, 412–14), thus making the young composer known to the German public. The anonymous author of the article praised Morlacchi as a composer equally at home in both serious and comic works, and stressed the beauty of his expressive and pleasing melodies (only to be expected of an Italian composer), combined with lively and varied harmonic writing. For La Scala he wrote the comic opera Le avventure d’una giornata, performed without much success in 1809, but the cantata Saffo, performed in the spring of the same year by the famous contralto Marietta Marcolini, had a happier outcome. The singer, who was a relative of Count Camillo Marcolini, minister at the Saxon court, took Morlacchi to Dresden, where in September 1810 he became assistant to Joseph Schuster, Kapellmeister of the Italian Opera. In 1811 he was appointed Kapellmeister for life.