Life
Trained at the height of Neoclassicism, his long career as an opera composer in Russia led him to reach full artistic maturity during the Romantic period.
Born in Venice in 1775, Catterino Cavos studied with Ferdinando Bertoni and soon established himself as a talented musician. In 1797 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he would spend the rest of his life, becoming one of the central figures of Russian musical theater.
He was chapel master at the Imperial Theater and an orchestral conductor for opera and ballet. He composed numerous operas on Italian and Russian libretti, sacred music, and ballets that marked the theatrical life of the Russian capital in the early decades of the nineteenth century. He introduced elements of the Italian tradition into Russian music, contributing to the formation of a national operatic language.
He died in St. Petersburg in 1840, leaving a legacy that also influenced Glinka's generation.
Aneddoto
An Italian for Russia
It was Cavos who conducted the world premiere of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar in 1836, symbolically inaugurating the Russian national school.Works
He composed numerous operas, including The Caucasian Prisoner, The Two Fiancés, and The Shipyards of St. Petersburg. He wrote ballets performed at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre and sacred works for the imperial court. His music, though rarely performed today, deeply marked Russian theatrical taste in the early nineteenth century.
Briciole di storia
Deportation of a Pope
After the killing of the French general Mathurin-Léonard Duphot in Rome, Louis-Alexandre Berthier's army occupied the city. On February 15, 1798, the Roman Republic was proclaimed. French authorities asked Pius VI, who was in his eighties and ill, to renounce temporal power. Upon his refusal, the pontiff was arrested on February 20 and sent into exile. Transferred first to Siena, then to Florence, and finally across the Alps, he ended up a prisoner in France, where he died in Valence on August 29, 1799. The deportation of the Pope had enormous resonance in Europe, signaling the radical nature of the revolutionary project.
Pubblico dominio (Commons)
