Tommaso Traetta

Tommaso Traetta

Genres: composer, italian, Galante, Classical, Italy

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About Tommaso Traetta

Tommaso Michele Francesco Saverio Traetta (March 30, 1727–April 6, 1779) was an Italian composer. Traetta was born in Bitonto, a town near Bari, right down near the top of the heel of the boot of Italy. He eventually became a pupil of the composer, singer and teacher Nicola Porpora in Naples, and scored a first success with his opera Il Farnace, in Naples, in 1751. Around this time he seems too have come into contact with Niccolò Jommelli. From here on in, Traetta seems to have had regular commissions from all around the country, running the gamut of the usual classical subjects. Through the following decade, the 1760s, Tommaso Traetta composed music unceasingly—not just opera seria, either. There was a clutch of comedies as well, to say nothing of sacred music composed to imperial order. But opera seria was the generally what her imperial majesty commanded. Traetta's first operas for Catherine the Great seem to have been largely revivals and revisions of his earlier works. But then in 1772 came Antigona —and for whatever reason, whether it was Traetta's own inclination or the promptings of his librettist Marco Coltellini or the availability of the soprano Caterina Gabrielli, the new opera reached areas of feeling and intensity he had never explored before, even in Parma. Traetta died two years later, in April 1779, in Venice, and by then, opera seria was for a variety of reasons, artistic and financial, a threatened species. It was to take a genius to prolong its active life, above all in a masterpiece from 1781 called Idomeneo, and then again one final time 10 years after that, using an old warhorse of a Metastasio text for a libretto: La clemenza di Tito. The composer of this final flash of opera seria glory to outshine them all, was no stranger to Naples and to Neapolitan opera—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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