Gaspare Spontini

Gaspare Spontini (14 November, 1774 – 24 January, 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor. Born in Maiolati in the province of Ancona, now Maiolati Spontini, 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 seria. 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. His single great masterpiece and success was La Vestale.

Spontini's operas

• Li puntigli delle donne (Rome, 1796)
• Adelina Senese o sia l'Amore secreto (1797)
• Il finto pittore (Rome, 1797)
• L?eroismo ridicolo (Naples, 1798)
• Il Teseo riconosciuto (1798)
• La finta filosofa (1799)
• La fuga in maschera (1800)
• I quadri parlanti (Palermo, 1800)
• Gli Elisi delusi (Palermo, 1800)
• Gli amanti in cimento (3 November, 1801, Rome, Teatro Valle)
• Le metamorfosi di Pasquale (1802, Venice)
• La petite maison (1804)
• Milton (27 Noevember, 1804, Paris)
• Julie, ou le Pot de fleurs (12 July, 1805, Paris)
• La vestale (15 December, 1807, Paris)
• Fernand Cortez (28 November, 1809, Paris)
• Pélage, ou le Roi et la paix (23 August, 1814, Paris)
• Olimpie (22 December, 1819, Paris)
• Nurmahal, oder das Rosenfest von Caschmir (27 May, 1822, Berlin, Opera)
• Alcidor (1825)
• Agnes von Hohenstaufen (12 June, 1829 Royal Opera Berlin)