Life
His entire creative trajectory, from training to full maturity, took place consistently within the great stream of Italian Romanticism, reaching the threshold of post-unification Realism.
Born in Castrogiovanni, today Enna, Pietro Antonio Coppola approached music under the guidance of his father Giuseppe, a chapel master. Around 1815 he moved to Naples to perfect his studies at the Conservatory of Santa Maria di Loreto, where he was presumably a pupil of Nicola Zingarelli. In this environment, he was able to develop his skills as a theatrical composer, debuting at only twenty-three with Il figlio del bandito, performed at the Teatro del Fondo in 1816.
His career was marked by successes in the major Italian and European theaters. The opera that gave him maximum popularity was Nina pazza per amore, first performed at the Teatro Valle in Rome in 1835. The story moved and conquered the audience to the point that the opera was repeated throughout Italy and rapidly exported to Vienna, Berlin, Paris (at the Théâtre Italien in 1854, but already known since 1839 in the French version titled Eva), Lisbon, and even Mexico.
Coppola linked much of his professional life to Portugal: from 1839 to 1842 and then permanently from 1850 to 1871 he was the music director at the Teatro São Carlos in Lisbon and at the theater of Count Farrobo, for which he also wrote operas in Portuguese and French. Returning to Italy, he settled in Catania, where from 1873 he assumed the direction of the city's musical institutes, contributing to the training of the new generation of Sicilian musicians. He died in the Etnean city in 1876.
Aneddoto
The triumph of “Nina pazza per amore”
The success of Nina pazza per amore was such that the score was requested by impresarios across Europe and repeated everywhere with enthusiasm, so much so that even overseas theaters wanted to include it in their repertoire.Works
Coppola's first opera, Il figlio del bandito, debuted in 1816 in Naples. Among his prominent titles are Achille in Sciro (1830), Artale d’Aragona (1834), Nina pazza per amore (1835), Gl’Illinesi (1836, Turin, with Giuditta Grisi and Domenico Donzelli on a libretto by Felice Romani, conducted by Giovanni Battista Polledro), La Festa della Rosa (1836), Enrichetla di Baienfeld (1836), and La Bella Celeste degli Spadari (1837).
In 1838 he brought Il Postiglione di Longjumeau, a comic melodrama to a libretto by Callisto Bassi, to Milan's La Scala, where it was favorably received. This was followed by Giovanna I di Napoli (1840), Ines de Castro (1842), Folletto (1844), L’Orfana guelfa (1846), and Fingal (1847). Many of these works had revivals abroad, particularly in Lisbon and Paris, helping to spread his music far beyond Italy.