Nicola Antonio Porpora

Nicola (Antonio) Porpora (August 17, 1686 – March 3, 1768) was an Italian composer of baroque operas and opera seria. He was also a teacher of voice, whose most famous student was the castrato Farinelli. Nicola Popora's fame as a vocal instructor and composer of sonatas, cantatas, lieds, and art songs demonstrated his recognition of the beauty and versatility of the human voice. He felt that, through music, man would be able to create the important connection with God and become a co-creator with him for an ideal world.

Biography

Porpora was born in Naples. He graduated from the music conservatory Poveri di Gesù Cristo of his native city, where the civic opera scene was dominated by Alessandro Scarlatti.

Porpora's first opera, Agrippina, was successfully performed at the Neapolitan court in 1708. His second, Berenice, was performed at Rome. In a long career, he followed these with many further operas, supported as maestro di cappella in the households of aristocratic patrons such as the commander of military forces at Naples, the prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, or of the Portuguese ambassador at Rome, for composing operas alone did not yet make a viable career. However, his enduring fame rests chiefly upon his unequaled talent of teaching singing. At the Neapolitan Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio and with the Poveri di Gesù Cristo he trained Farinelli, Caffarelli, Salimbeni, and other celebrated vocalists, during the period 1715–1721. In 1720 and 1721 he wrote two serenades to librettos by a gifted young poet, Metastasio, the beginning of a long, though interrupted, collaboration. In 1722 his operatic successes encouraged him to put aside his conservatory commitments.

After a rebuff from the court of Charles VI at Vienna in 1725, Porpora settled mostly in Venice, composing and teaching regularly in the schools of La Pietà and the Incurabili. In 1729 the anti-Handel clique invited him to London to set up an opera company as a rival to Handel's, without success, and in the 1733–1734 season, even the presence of his pupil, the great Farinelli, failed to save the dramatic company in Lincoln's Inn Fields (the "Opera of the Nobility") from bankruptcy.

An interval as Kapellmeister at the Dresden court of the Elector of Saxony from 1748 ended in strained relations with his rival in Venice and Rome, the hugely successful opera composer Johann Adolph Hasse and his wife, the prima donna Faustina, and resulted in Porpora's departure in 1752. From Dresden he went to Vienna, where he gave music lessons to the young Joseph Haydn, who lived with Porpora as accompanist and in the character of a valet. Haydn allowed later that he had learned from the maestro "the true fundamentals of composition." Then Porpora returned in 1759 to Naples.

From this time Porpora's career was a series of misfortunes: His florid style was becoming old-fashioned, his last opera, Camilla, failed, his pension from Dresden stopped, and he became so poor that the expenses of his funeral were paid by a subscription concert. Yet at the moment of his death Farinelli and Caffarelli were living in splendid retirement on fortunes largely based on the excellence of the old maestro's teaching.

Legacy

A good linguist, who was admired for the idiomatic fluency of his recitatives, and a man of considerable literary culture, Porpora was celebrated for his conversational wit. Besides some four dozen operas, he composed solo cantatas with keyboard accompaniment, motets, and vocal serenades. Only a handful of arias from his operas and a few scattered chamber works are available in recordings.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Jourmelli, Nocolo; Invernizzi, Roberta; Florio, Antonio; and Porpora, Nicola et al. 1999. Veni Creator Spiritus. Paris: Opus 111. OCLC 43247150
• Owen, Barbara. 1994. Four Centuries of Italian Organ Music. Miami: CPP/Belwin. OCLC 31749825
• Porpora, Nicola and Ballola, Giovanni Carli. 1982. Sinfonia da camera a tre istromenti, opera seconda. Venizia: Edizioni Fondazione Levi. OCLC 10523337

External links

All links retrieved November 14, 2022.

• Porpora biography and discography
• The Porpora Project
• Free scores by Nicola Porpora in the Werner Icking Music Archive