Do you know Jommelli? Behind the name of this Neapolitan composer, to whom a number of discs have recently been devoted, hides the spirit of a fertile dramatic temperament, celebrated in his lifetime, whose visionary sensibility made possible a salutary reform of 18th-century opera seria.
A cosmopolitan spirit, a European composer working for Italian, German, and even Iberian courts (he delivered Il Trionfo di Clelia for Lisbon in 1774, the year of his death), Niccolò Jommelli, both virtuoso and synthesist, assimilated the most innovatory currents of Enlightenment Europe so as to propound—as Tommaso Traetta was also to do—a new musical drama that would inspire Gluck and Mozart.
Jommelli impressed imaginative writers. To this literary adulation he owed the immediate recognition of his genius, then a renewal of presence that assisted his present resurrection.
Niccolò Jommelli, who was admired by his peers, inspiring the most polemical writers—Diderot, as will be seen later—but since forgotten in historians’ memories, came to life again in 1830 under the pen of Honoré de Balzac. For the latter, merely the name of Jommelli, like a bewitching incantation, sufficed to evoke the magic and fascination of opera. In the Balzac novel which chose Enlightenment Rome as its frame, Jommelli ideally satisfied the demands of truth. |
|
|
|