Domenico Cimarosa (17 December 1749 – 11 January 1801) was an Italian opera composer of the Neapolitan school. He wrote more than eighty operas during his lifetime, including his masterpiece, Il matrimonio segreto (1792).
Cimarosa was born in Aversa, near Naples.
His parents were poor, but, anxious to give their son a good education, they sent him to a free school connected with one of the monasteries in Naples after moving to that city. The orga...
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Domenico Cimarosa (17 December 1749 – 11 January 1801) was an Italian opera composer of the Neapolitan school. He wrote more than eighty operas during his lifetime, including his masterpiece, Il matrimonio segreto (1792).
Cimarosa was born in Aversa, near Naples.
His parents were poor, but, anxious to give their son a good education, they sent him to a free school connected with one of the monasteries in Naples after moving to that city. The organist of the monastery, Padre Polcano, was struck by the boy's intellect, and voluntarily instructed him in the elements of music and also in the ancient and modern literature of his country. Because of his influence, Cimarosa obtained a scholarship at the musical institute of Santa Maria di Loreto in Naples, where he remained for eleven years, chiefly studying the great masters of the old Italian school; Niccoló Piccinni, Antonio Maria Gaspare Sacchini, and other musicians of repute are mentioned among his teachers.
At the age of twenty-three,...
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