Louis Alexandre Piccinni

Last updated
Alexandre Piccinni Alexandre Piccinni 1830.jpg
Alexandre Piccinni

Louis Alexandre Piccinni (variously Louis Alexandre, Luigi Alessandro or Lodovice Alessandro) (10 September 1779 24 April 1850) was a prolific music composer born in Paris of Italian ancestry.

Alexandre Piccinni was born in Paris. The grandson of the Italian composer of symphonies, sacred music, chamber music, and opera, Niccolò Piccinni, and the son of Giuseppe Luigi Piccinni, Louis was already giving piano lessons at age 13. He studied piano, and later attended the Conservatoire where he studied composition from Jean-François Le Sueur.

He was accompanist at the Théâtre Feydeau, and from 1802 at the Opéra-Comique. From 1803 to 1816, he was conductor of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, and from 1804 to 1818 accompanist in the chapels of Louis XVIII at the court.

Piccinni taught singing and piano at Paris until 1836, when he moved to Boulogne to teach and direct at the National Conservatory in Toulouse. He later moved to Strasburg and directed the Baden-Baden concerts. He returned to Paris in 1849 and died there the following year.

Piccinni wrote over 200 works for the stage, including 25 comic operas. His genres also included melodrama; ballet; vaudeville airs; cantatas; romances; sonatas; piano-music; and opera.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carlo Goldoni</span> Italian playwright (1707–1793)

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was an Italian playwright and librettist from the Republic of Venice. His works include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade, which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pauline Viardot</span> Spanish-French mezzo-soprano and composer

Pauline Viardot was a French dramatic mezzo-soprano, composer and pedagogue of Spanish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, she came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niccolò Piccinni</span> Italian composer

Niccolò Piccinni was an Italian composer of symphonies, sacred music, chamber music, and opera. Although he is somewhat obscure today, Piccinni was one of the most popular composers of opera—particularly the Neapolitan opera buffa—of the Classical period.

This is a list of music-related events in 1805.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luigi Cherubini</span> Italian composer (1760–1842)

Maria Luigi Carlo Zenobio Salvatore Cherubini was an Italian Classical and Romantic composer. His most significant compositions are operas and sacred music. Beethoven regarded Cherubini as the greatest living composer of his era. Cherubini's operas were heavily praised and interpreted by Rossini.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conservatoire de Paris</span> Music and dance school in Paris, France

The Conservatoire de Paris, also known as the Paris Conservatory, is a college of music and dance founded in 1795. Officially known as the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), it is situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France. The Conservatoire offers instruction in music and dance, drawing on the traditions of the 'French School'.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ferdinand Hérold</span> French composer (1791–1833)

Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold, better known as Ferdinand Hérold, was a French composer. He was celebrated in his lifetime for his operas, of which he composed more than twenty, but he also wrote ballet music, works for piano and choral pieces. He is best known today for the ballet La Fille mal gardée and the overture to the opera Zampa.

Armide is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, set to a libretto by Philippe Quinault. Gluck's fifth production for the Parisian stage and the composer's own favourite among his works, it was first performed on 23 September 1777 by the Académie Royale de Musique in the second Salle du Palais-Royal in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antonio Sacchini</span> Italian composer (1730–1786)

Antonio Maria Gasparo Gioacchino Sacchini was an Italian classical era composer, best known for his operas.

<i>Didon</i> (Piccinni)

Didon (Dido) is a tragédie lyrique in three acts by the composer Niccolò Piccinni with a French-language libretto by Jean-François Marmontel. The opera is based on the story of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil's Aeneid as well as Metastasio's libretto Didone abbandonata. Didon was first performed at Fontainebleau on 16 October 1783 in the presence of the French sovereigns, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. After being remounted at court twice, the opera had its Paris public premiere on 1 December 1783. It proved to be the composer's greatest success and was billed almost every year till 1826, enjoying a total of 250 performances al the Paris Opera. Didon had some influence on Berlioz's opera on the same theme, Les Troyens.

<i>Roland</i> (Piccinni)

Roland is a tragédie lyrique in three acts by the composer Niccolò Piccinni. The opera was a new setting of a libretto written by Philippe Quinault for Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1685, specially adapted for Piccinni by Jean-François Marmontel and based on Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso. The opera was first performed on 27 January 1778 by the Académie Royale de Musique at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abbé Alexandre-Auguste Robineau</span>

Abbé Alexandre-Auguste Robineau was a French painter, composer, violinist, conductor, and Catholic priest. As a composer he wrote under the name Alexandre Robineau, and as a painter he painted under the name Auguste Robineau.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandre Montfort</span> French composer

Alexandre Montfort was a French classical composer. His works included instrumental music, art songs and six operas. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in composition in 1830.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luigi Capotorti</span> Italian composer

Luigi Capotorti was an Italian composer of both sacred and secular music. He was the maestro di cappella of several Neapolitan churches; the composer of ten operas, five of which premiered at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples; and a teacher of composition and singing whose students included Stefano Pavesi and Saverio Mercadante. Born in Molfetta, he studied violin and composition at the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio in Naples and spent his entire career in that city. In his later years, Capotorti retired to San Severo, where he died at the age of 75.

References