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Gaspare Luigi Pacifico Spontini (14 November 177424 January 1851) was an Italian opera composer and conductor. ==Biography== Born in Maiolati in the province of Ancona, now Maiolati Spontini, he spent most of his career in Paris and Berlin, but returned to his place of birth at the end of his life. During the first two decades of the 19th century, Spontini was an important figure in French ''opera''. In his more than twenty operas, Spontini strove to adapt Gluck's classical ''tragédie lyrique'' to the contemporary taste for melodrama, for grander spectacle (in ''Fernand Cortez'' for example), for enriched orchestral timbre, and for melodic invention allied to idiomatic expressiveness of words. As a youth, Spontini studied at the Conservatorio della Pietà de' Turchini, one of four active music conservatories of Naples. Working his way from Italian city to city, he got his first break in Rome, with his successful comedy ''Li puntigli delle donne'' (Carnival 1793). In 1803, he went to Paris, where; on February 11, 1804, debuted his comic opera ''La finta filosofa'', his Neapolitan success of 1799. In part on the recommendation of the comte de Rémusat and his literary countess, a ''dame du palais'', Spontini circulated in the Imperial court, was made a member of the Académie Impériale de Musique and gained a court position as ''compositeur particulier de la chambre'' of the Empress in 1805. Though Spontini's earlier successes were comedies, with the encouragement of Empress Joséphine in 1807, Spontini wrote his greatest success, the ''tragédie lyrique'' ''La vestale'', which has remained his best known work.〔Gerhard (n. d) §2〕 Its premiere at the Opéra in Paris established Spontini as one of the greatest Italian composers of his age. His contemporaries Cherubini and Meyerbeer considered it a masterpiece, and later composers such as Berlioz and Wagner admired it. During the Peninsular War, "Napoleon promoted works such as Gasparo Spontini's ''Fernand Cortez'' (1809)," which concerned the Spanish conquest of Mexico under the reign of Charles V.〔Silke, p. 22.〕 In 1811 he married Celeste Erard, the niece of the Parisian maker of pianos and harps Sebastien Erard; it was a happy marriage, though childless.〔(Fondazione Pergolesi Spontini: Gaspare Spontini )〕 He was made a ''chevalier'' of Napoleon's Legion of Honor; its Maltese cross hangs round his neck in the portrait by Nicolas-Eustache Maurin (''illustration''). Under the changed political climate of the Bourbon Restoration, Spontini, closely identified with the former Empire, found his opera ''Olimpie'' (1819, revised 1820, 1826) met with indifference, leading him to leave Paris for Prussia, where his operas had already achieved success. There he became Kapellmeister and chief conductor at the Berlin Hofoper, and in this period he composed the Prussian National Anthem "Borussia". There he also met the young Mendelssohn, and deprecated the 17 -year old's opera ''Die Hochzeit des Camacho''.〔Todd (2003), pp. 167-168.〕 In 1842 the disillusioned Spontini, chagrined at the success of Giacomo Meyerbeer and others in Germany, returned to Italy, where he died in 1851.〔Gerhard (n. d) §4〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gaspare Spontini」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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