It will be completed shortly. Paisiello was one of the most successful and influential opera composers of his day, the most important composer of opera buffa after Mozart. He attended the conservatory in Naples and wrote his first short opera while there. He contracted to marry, tried to back out, and was put into prison until he was willing to wed.

Commissions took him to Bologna, Naples and other Italian cities and, in 1766, he returned to Naples as a free lance composer; among other things, he composed three operas. In 1776, Catherine the Great of Russia gave him a three-year contract to compose all the theatrical pieces used by the court at St. Petersburg and to direct the orchestra and the opera company. He stayed in Russia seven yeas. The first Beaumarchais play had had great success in the Russian Court and inspired Paisiello to make it into an opera, using a libretto by Petroselli. In his opera, The Barber of Seville or the useless precaution, Bartolo is more important than in Rossini's; Figaro is merely a comic sidekick.

Paisiello always considered himself a Neapolitan and, on his return from Russia, he tried for some time to get a position at the court of Naples. Soon after the first performance, in the king's presence, of his Barber, his quest was successful. He was put in charge of all of the secular music at court and became the foremost musician in the city of Naples. After a breakdown of some sort in 1790, he asked to be excused from his court duties, and wrote operas for other cities. However, before 1800, he had practically stopped composing. When the Parthenopean Republic was founded in Naples in 1799 and King Ferdinand fled, he became attached to the new government. However, when the royalists returned he was relieved of all his duties.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who was one of his admirers, arranged for him to go to Paris and, when his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, became King of Naples in 1806, Paisiello again became director of all secular and sacred music there. His works were in as much demand outside Italy as they were inside it, and Mozart knew that the standards set by Paisiello were the ones to beat. In this the Austrian was so successful that, although Paisiello's works fell out of favor in the nineteenth century, Mozart's have never been eclipsed. Mozart and Paisiello became very good friends, and Mozart may have gotten the idea for his Figaro from seeing Paisiello's work which was playing in Vienna at the time.

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Revised June 2010
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