Franz Anton von Sporck, Count (German : Franz Anton Reichsgraf von Sporck, Czech : František Antonín hrabě Špork) (9 March 1662 in Lysá nad Labem or Heřmanův Městec – 30 March 1738 in Lysá nad Labem) was a German-speaking literatus and patron of the arts who lived in the province of Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic. He was one of the most notable cultural and intellectual figures in central Europe in the early 18th century.
Count Sporck was born the eldest of four children of Count Johann von Sporck (1595–1679) by his second wife, Eleonore Katharine von Fineke (d. 1677). His father had been born in rather humble circumstances in Westphalia, but was rewarded handsomely for distinguished military leadership in the service of the Habsburg dynasty during the Thirty Years' War. It was a habit of the Habsburg emperors to reward favorites with lands confiscated from dispossessed Protestant Bohemian nobles who refused to convert to Catholicism after the defeat of the Estates of Bohemia at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. Count Sporck's father was an archetypal example of this sort of favorite, first ennobled with the rank of baron in 1647, then imperial count in 1664. He was given vast amounts of land in Bohemia that Count Sporck would later inherit. Typical of the Germanized Catholic nobility in Bohemia of his day, Count Sporck considered himself ethnically German and exhibited scant interest in Czech culture. He attended school first in Heřmanův Městec, then at the Jesuit Latin School in Kutná Hora. In 1675 he began to attend lectures in philosophy and law at Charles-Ferdinand University in the Prague Clementinum. He graduated in 1678 at the age of sixteen. In 1680 he embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe that brought him to Rome, Turin, southern France, Spain, Paris, England, The Hague, and Brussels. He traveled for a second time to Paris in 1682 after returning to Bohemia in 1681. He acquired a lifelong appreciation of French literature from his travels in France. As he was still a minor at the time of his father's death, he was able to assume control of his inheritance only in 1684. This included the estates of Lysá, Konojedy, Choustníkovo Hradiště, and Malešov. It was on the estate of Choustníkovo Hradiště in northern Bohemia that he later built his own residence of Kuks. He also inherited the family palace in Prague and a considerable sum of money.
In 1686 he married the Franziska Apollonia, née von Swéerts zu Reist (1667–1726), a member of a Silesian family originally from Brussels. The marriage was a happy one. Together the couple had two daughters, Elenora Franziska (1687–1717) and Anna Katherina (1689–1754), and a son, Johann Franz Anton Joseph Adam (born 1699), who did not survive infancy. In 1718 Count Sporck adopted the husband of his daughter Anna Katherina, Franz Karl Rudolph von Swéerts zu Reist, and it was he who inherited the Sporck estates, taking the name Swéerts-Sporck.
Much of Count Sporck's early adulthood was spent improving and expanding his estates and participating in public affairs. In the early 1690s he was awarded a number of prestigious imperial offices, including steward (Kämmerer) and Statthalter in 1690 and privy counselor (Wirklicher Geheimer Rat) in 1692. His title of Statthalter, which indicates merely that he held a seat on the Statthalterei, a committee of nobles that served as the highest local civil authority in the province of Bohemia at the time, has led to confusion in the English-language literature. Sometimes Count Sporck is referred to as the "Viceroy of Bohemia," a title that did not exist. In 1695 he founded a noted hunting society known as the Order of St. Hubertus.
In 1694 the Prague physician J. F. Love confirmed the healing properties of the spring that originated on the left side of the river in the southern portion of the estate of Choustníkovo Hradiště. Here was built the Kuks spa, later famous for its curative powers and the charity hospital attached to it. For the overall concept, design and execution of the building of the spa and castle of Kuks, Count Sporck commissioned the architect Giovanni Battista Alliprandi and the master mason Giovanni Pietro della Torre. The complex included the Church of the Holy Trinity, built for the benefit of war veterans and retired retainers as part of a foundation that he founded. The sculptor Matthias Bernard Braun beautified the grounds of Kuks with some of his finest works.
Count Sporck's intellectual interests led him to found a branch of Freemasonry in Bohemia, but they also had the effect of arousing the suspicion of the Habsburg ecclesiastical authorities for his flirtations with Jansenist philosophy and anti-Jesuitical polemicism. In 1729, his entire collection of books was carted away for investigation on the orders of the emperor Charles VI and he himself was temporarily arrested. He was cleared of all wrongdoing in 1734 after a great deal of political maneuvering and substantial expenditure of money, but he never recovered emotionally. The last four years of his life were spent in quiet retirement.
There are three aspects of musical patronage that make Count Sporck notable to music lovers both inside and outside the Czech Republic: his introduction of the French horn into Bohemia, his foundation of the first permanent opera theater in the Bohemian lands, and a certain connection with the composer Johann Sebastian Bach that still lacks clarification.
Traditions of French horn playing were introduced in Bohemia after Count Sporck brought the instrument back with him from a visit to the court of Versailles in the spring of 1681. Its cultivation spread in Bohemia until the Bohemian horn players were generally acknowledged to be the best in Europe by the 18th century.
Count Sporck had long sponsored theatrical performances at Kuks and his palace in Prague, but in 1724 permitted an Italian opera company to perform in his Prague palace free of charge. The impetus for this move was the coronation of Charles VI in Prague in 1723, an event accompanied by lavish operatic productions on the grounds of Prague Castle. There was a recognition that Prague should have a permanent theater capable of presenting the "aristocratic" entertainment of opera, and Count Sporck saw fit to encourage the efforts of the Italian impresario Antonio Maria Peruzzi in founding the Prague theater, then Antonio Denzio, who soon supplanted Peruzzi, in continuing productions. There were also operatic productions for a few years at Kuks during the summer months. The Denzio company succeeded in attracting some of the most prominent singers in Italy to Prague, and used Antonio Vivaldi as a source of repertory and singers. Vivaldi himself visited Prague in the early 1730s as a result of his connections with the Sporck theater. Many creative operatic works were first performed in the Sporck theater, including the first opera to use the original settings and character names from the tradition of Don Juan dramatizations: the opera La pravità castigata (1730) with words by Antonio Denzio and music mainly by Antonio Caldara. Count Sporck did not provide financial support for the opera company beyond permitting the impresario to use the theater in his Prague palace free of charge, however, nor did he attend performances after the confiscation of his library in 1729. The Prague nobility gradually lost the interest in the Denzio productions, his company suffered serious financial reversals, and finally it collapsed in bankruptcy in 1735 with appeals to Count Sporck for assistance contemptuously dismissed.
Count Sporck is known to have maintained connections with the poet Picander in Leipzig, an individual well known to J. S. Bach, who set many of his texts to music. It is possible that this connection led Bach to try to cultivate Count Sporck, who was passionately interested in German poetry and even employed the poet Gottfried Benjamin Hancke permanently as a member of his household. The autograph score of the "Sanctus" of the Bach's Mass in B minor contains an annotation that a copy was sent to Count Sporck in Bohemia. There is no record in the voluminous surviving correspondence of Count Sporck that this gesture was ever acknowledged or rewarded with a payment to Bach. It is also not certain that the two ever met.
Matthias Bernard Braun was a sculptor and carver active in the Kingdom of Bohemia, one of the most prominent late baroque style sculptors in the area.
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Antonio Denzio was an Italian impresario, tenor, and librettist. Born in Venice to a family of musicians and operatic personnel, he pursued a career mainly as a singer until 1724, when he traveled to Bohemia as a member of the opera company of Antonio Maria Peruzzi, probably his uncle. Peruzzi had the idea of bringing an Italian opera company to Central Europe to perform first in Prague, then Dresden and Leipzig. The company was first brought to Bohemia under the patronage of Count Franz Anton von Sporck, who had it play at his palace at Kuks in northwest Bohemia in the summer of 1724. The performances were so successful that he permitted the company to perform free of charge in his palace in Prague. After disagreements with Peruzzi, Denzio was able to supplant him as impresario before the end of the year 1724 and continued productions in the Sporck palace until 1735. Peruzzi left with some of the Peruzzi-Denzio players to found the Breslau Opera. Denzio's opera theater at Sporck's palace was the first standing opera theater in the city. His productions were popular with the Bohemian nobility until about 1729, after which Denzio's finances deteriorated. Count Sporck provided no financial assistance to the company except the free use of his theater, and he allowed it to fail. The company went bankrupt and Denzio was forced to spend time in debtors' prison. During its heyday, Denzio was able to attract at least one of the principal singing stars in Italy to Prague each season. The most prominent of all was Margherita Gualandi, who was forced to come to Prague after being blackballed in Italy for bad behavior. Denzio sought the assistance of Antonio Vivaldi in engaging singers for his company, and the composer sent music. In the early 1730s, Vivaldi came himself to Prague. Some of the music for one of his operas composed for Prague, Argippo, has only recently been re-discovered.
La pravità castigata is a 1730 pastiche with music by multiple composers and an Italian language libretto by Antonio Denzio. It is the first 18th-century opera based on the Don Juan legend. It was also the first opera ever produced that retains the original setting and at least some of the original character names derived from early 17th-century dramatic prototypes of the Don Juan legend, the most important of which is Tirso de Molina's play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. La pravità castigata was originally performed during Lent of 1730 in the opera theater of Franz Anton von Sporck in Prague, then revived with new music by Eustachio Bambini in Brno in 1734. The Brno performance was regarded as the original production for decades, and a published transcription of the libretto identifies it incorrectly as an anonymous text first performed in Brno.
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Johann von Sporck was a German nobleman and Generalfeldmarschall. Sporck was born in 1595 and he began his military career at the start of the Thirty Years' War as a private. His personal bravery and mastery of cavalry tactics led to his steady advancement through the ranks as well as his ennoblement. He later fought in the Second Northern War, the Austro-Turkish War (1663–64) and the Franco-Dutch War. He retired in 1676, having received the rank of Generalfeldmarschall and accumulating great riches. He died three years later. His son Franz Anton von Sporck became a publisher and a patron of arts.
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