(b Naples, 17 Aug 1686; d there, 3 March 1768). Italian composer and singing teacher. He was maestro di cappella to the Prince of Hessen-Darmstadt and the Portuguese ambassador in Naples. In 1708 he presented his first opera there; later he wrote operas for Rome, Vienna (1714, 1718) and elsewhere. He moved to Venice in 1726 as maestro of the Incurabili orphanage but spent 1733-6 in London composing for the Opera of the Nobility (which rivalled Handel's company). He then held conservatory posts in Naples (maestro di cappella at S Maria di Loreto, 1739-42) and Venice. In 1747-51 he taught singing at the Dresden court, where from 1748 he was also Kapellmeister. In 1752-3 he became a music teacher at the imperial court in Vienna; he taught the young Haydn, who became his valet and accompanist. He returned to Naples in 1760.
Reflecting his understanding of the art of singing, Porpora's music often features intricate, embellished vocal writing. His main works are his c 50 operas, of which the five for London are the most dramatic. Among his other works are serenatas, cantatas, oratorios and sacred operas and over 100 other sacred works. He also wrote didactic pieces (solfèges etc) and several instrumental works.
Nicola Porpora is a mostly forgotten figure in composition today; however, he exerted considerable influence as a teacher in his day, and much of his own compositional output is of exceptional quality. He made his chief contribution in the vocal realm, having written many worthwhile secular and sacred operas, oratorios, serenatas, and cantatas. Porpora helped to enrich the melodic qualties of vocal music by drawing on greater technical resources -- which he understood as well as any contemporary. His embellishing of the vocal melodic line, while not strictly his own development, helped shape the course of vocal music in opera and various other forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among his important works are his operas Arianna e Teseo and Faramondo, and his serenata Gli orti esperidi. Porpora may be better known as a teacher of Franz Joseph Haydn, and of the singers Uberti, Farinelli, and Caffarelli, as well as of the poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio.
Porpora was born on August 17, 1686, in Naples. He showed talent early in his childhood, and at the age of ten was placed in the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesu Cristo. Not much is known about his teachers there, but upon his departure he was well-grounded in voice and composition. His first opera, Agrippina, came in 1708, though he took three years to produce his next significant work in any genre.
By 1711, Porpora had become maestro di cappella under the Prince of Hessen-Darmstadt at Naples, and two years later, following the departure of the Prince for Austria, the maestro di cappella for the Portuguese ambassador. Porpora was well connected then, even receiving a Viennese Court commission for his opera Arianna e Teseo (1714). Four years later he provided another opera, Temistocle, for that same court. Around this time, the composer was also coming to be regarded as one of the finest teachers of singing in Italy, his pupils including the castrato Caffarelli.
By the early 1720s, Porpora's reputation throughout Italy as a composer was growing as well, owing in great part to a string of successes in Rome. He settled in Venice in 1726 to teach at the Ospedale degli Incurabili. Perhaps sensing a decline in his art, he departed for London in 1733 at the invitation of some English patrons. He would write five operas in London, including Arianna in Nasso (1733), and other vocal works, like the serenata La festa d'Imeneo. He left England in 1736, having achieved many successes there.
The composer returned to Italy and held a series of posts over the next decade, perhaps divulging a certain restlessness, and perhaps insecurity. In Naples, he accepted the position as maestro di cappella at the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto in 1739; in Venice he was appointed similar posts in 1742 and 1743, none served concurrently. After unsuccessfully seeking yet another maestro appointment in Naples, he traveled to Dresden to serve as court kapellmeister and teacher to Maria Antonia, the Electoral Princess. He departed around the beginning of 1753 and traveled to Vienna, mainly as it turned out, to teach. His most prominent student there was the young Haydn. Owing to dwindling finances, Porpora returned to Naples in 1760 to serve as maestro di cappella again at the Conservatorio di Santa Maria, and later at the Conservatorio di Santo Onofrio. He resigned all posts the following year and lived in poverty until his death in 1768. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide
Nicola (Antonio) Porpora (or Niccolò Porpora) (17 August 1686 – 3 March 1768) was an Italian composer of Baroque operas (see opera seria) and teacher of singing, whose most famous singing student was the castratoFarinelli.
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 up by 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 unequalled power 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 lay down 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, but 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.
A good linguist, who was admired for the idiomatic fluency of his recitatives, and a man of considerable literary culture, Porpora was also celebrated for his conversational wit. Besides some four dozen operas, there are oratorios, solo cantatas with keyboard accompaniment, motets and vocal serenades. Among his larger works, his 1720 opera Orlando[1], one mass[2], his Venetian Vespers[3], and the opera Arianna in Nasso (1733 according to HOASM)[4] have been recorded .
Criticisms
Porpora was deprived of dramaticgenius, his operatic style shows a complete absence of variety. He only wrote arias for his operas, and all of them have been composed in the same fashion. In the scores for Meride e Selinunte there are 29 arias and only one (final) choir that is 21-measures long. Of these arias, 8 are written in F Major, of which seven are in common time marked allegro and one contains three measures with basso continuo and violaobbligata.
He was well-renowned as vocalcomposer, yet his work Semiramide riconosciuta shows his great skill as orchestrator: its instrumentation is unusually ample, often in ten parts, with flutes, oboes, bassoons, French horns and trumpets that are listed and usually always very present. Porpora shows that not only does he know all the innovations in the technique of instrumentation, he also proposes color and impasti in continuous mutation. The work is filled with brief phrases, that pass from tutti to soli and vice-versa gently with much difference from the famous technique a terazze (which juxtaposes sections with fixed timbre and intensity). Vocal parts are extremely difficult, and if Mirteo indulges himself in moderate and amorous arias (maybe to showcase Farinelli's expressive ability), great virtuosity is focused on Ircano's aria (one is often stupefied with continuous jumps, even in an interval of twelfth in Talor che il veno freme (I, 14), an aria with vibrant semiquaver figurations in the strings section. Impressive is the virtuosity of Il ciel mi vuole oppresso (III,3), always accompanied by amazing and continuous replies from the brass). Semiramide, whose vocality is broken, filled with doubt, introspective, has a great pathetic-pastoral moment (in an unusual 12/8 measure of Il pastor se torna aprile (II,5), grand aria with transverse flutesobbligati), which in the ample chant of the queen achievs tumults of changeable, unexpected, intense harmony.
In his youth Porpora had much gaiety, spirit and a ready answer, but with ageing he had outbursts of bad mood that was excusable because of his extreme poverty. He was well-read in Latin and Italian literature, wrote poetry and spoke French, German and English.
