Giuseppe Saverio Raffaele Mercadante was born on September 17, 1795, and died on December 17, 1870. He was an Italian composer who wrote many operas. Although Mercadante was not as famous as composers like Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, or Gioachino Rossini during his lifetime, he wrote as many operas as they did. His work helped develop the structure, melodies, and orchestration in operas. These contributions were important for Giuseppe Verdi’s dramatic techniques.
Biography
Mercadante was born not to married parents in Altamura, near Bari in Apulia. His exact birth date is unknown, but he was baptized on September 17, 1795. He studied flute, violin, and composition at the Conservatory in Naples and organized concerts for people from his homeland. The opera composer Gioachino Rossini told the Conservatory director, Niccolo Zingarelli, "My compliments, Maestro – your young pupil Mercadante begins where we finish." In 1817, he became the conductor of the college orchestra and composed many symphonies and concertos for different instruments, including six for flute between 1818 and 1819. His original scores are kept at the Naples Conservatory, where they were likely first performed with him as the soloist.
Rossini’s encouragement led Mercadante to write operas. His second opera, Violenza e Constanza, was very successful in 1820. His next three operas are mostly forgotten, but a shortened version of Maria Stuarda, Regina di Scozia was released by Opera Rara in 2006. His opera Elisa e Claudio was very popular and had occasional performances in the twentieth century, including one in 1988 by the Wexford Festival Opera.
Mercadante worked in Vienna, Madrid, Cádiz, and Lisbon before returning to Italy in 1831. In 1836, Rossini invited him to Paris, where he composed I Briganti for four famous singers: Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache. All of these singers had worked closely with Bellini. While in Paris, Mercadante heard operas by Meyerbeer and Halévy, which influenced his music, especially Halévy’s La Juive. This influence made his music more focused on dramatic storytelling.
After returning to Italy from Spain and Portugal, Donizetti’s music was very popular in Naples. This changed when censorship issues with Donizetti’s Poliuto caused a final break. However, Mercadante’s style began to change with his opera I Normanni a Parigi, performed at the Teatro Regio in Turin in 1832. This work marked the start of a new direction in his music, which later influenced the style of Verdi’s operas from the 1830s onward.
The "reform movement" in music, which Mercadante supported, began with a document written by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1836 called Filosofia della musica.
After 1831, Mercadante created some of his most important works, including Il giuramento, which had its first performance at La Scala on March 11, 1837. One notable feature of this opera was its innovative structure.
In the following year, while writing Elena da Feltre (premiered in January 1839), Mercadante wrote to Francesco Florimo about how he believed opera should be structured, following the changes he had made in his earlier work.
A critic praised Elena da Feltre highly. These successes temporarily made Mercadante one of the most important composers in Italy, though he was later surpassed by Giovanni Pacini’s Saffo and Giuseppe Verdi’s operas, especially Ernani.
Some of Mercadante’s later works, such as Orazi e Curiazi, were also successful. His operas were performed many times throughout the nineteenth century, with some receiving more attention than Verdi’s early works during the same period.
Mercadante created more instrumental music than most of his contemporaries because he was deeply interested in orchestration. From 1840 until his death in 1870, he was the director of the Naples Conservatory for thirty years. He became almost completely blind in 1863 and dictated all his compositions from that time on.
After his death in Naples in 1870, his works were largely forgotten. However, some of his music was revived and recorded after World War II, though it is not as popular today as the works of his slightly younger contemporaries, such as Donizetti and Bellini.
The French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal recorded several of Mercadante’s flute concertos, including the grand and romantic E minor concerto, which has gained some popularity among flutists.