Composer Pietro Antonio Cesti: He was a star, bring him out!

2023-08-04 16:20:35

Culture Composer Pietro Antonio Cesti

He was a star, bring him out!

As of: 4:20 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes

Premiere 1668: Cestis Spektakel „The Golden Apple“

Quelle: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/picture alliance

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He loved the human voice and in his sometimes hearty operas “Amore” meant real sex: 400 years ago the Italian composer Pietro Antonio Cesti was born. Long underestimated, his path will soon even lead him to La Scala in Milan.

On August 5th the time has come. Pietro Antonio Cesti – born in Arezzo in 1623, died in Florence in 1669 at the age of 46 – celebrates his 400th birthday. But on this occasion there are no fanfares and hardly any operatic curtains are raised for the composer. Except at the Stadttheater Aachen, where the baroque repertoire is moderately cultivated, but no real emphasis is placed on early music, this composer, who also made a name for himself as a tenor and organist, was already remembered in his anniversary year – and in the second half was also a real star outside of Italy in the 17th century.

Finally, Cesti, who trained with the Franciscans, entered the order at the age of 14 but was very attached to the secular, asserted himself as the most important Italian opera composer of his time – after Monteverdi and alongside Francesco Cavalli. The latter is now also part of the standard repertoire of baroque operas performed today, primarily thanks to his nymph grotesque “La Calisto”; the triad of traditional Monteverdi operas – who would have thought that 30 years ago? – you come across it almost too often these days. Antonio Vivaldi, who was actually popular, is also slowly gaining a foothold as a creator of music theater to be taken seriously.

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But Pietro Antonio Cesti, who pioneered the transition from the recitative style of early opera to the general separation of recitative and aria, the establishment of the da capo aria, and the intensification of bel canto, is still all too much of a musicologist’s name in and of itself many conductors’ eyes light up when they talk about him. And at least one Cesti piece has become a popular listening pleasure: the aria “Tu mancavi a tormentarmi” in the bombastic, pompous instrumental arrangement for strings and harp by Leopold Stokowski. It is at least on a par with Albinoni’s Adagio.

Kapellmeister in Vienna

In 1647 Cesti began his operatic career as a singer in Siena. He made his debut as a composer in Venice in 1651 with Alessandro Vincitor di se stesso. A year later he moved to Innsbruck as Maestro di Cappella di Camera for Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Tyrol. His hearty and comical Orontea, which premiered there in 1656, quickly turned out to be one of the most popular operas of its time. Amore is always very physical sex in it. Apparently, neither Venice nor Tyrol was prudish at the time.

In 1665 Cesti became Kapellmeister at the court of the music-loving, self-composing Emperor Leopold I in Vienna, who is still an underestimated figure in European history. It was there that Cesti wrote his most famous, even legendary work in 1668: the courtly representational spectacle “Il Pomo d’Oro”, given over two days and four hours each in a theater he built himself.

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As a highlight of baroque festival culture, this “golden apple” framed the pompously celebrated marriage of the emperor to Margarita Teresa of Spain, his first wife, with choirs, apparitions of the gods, storms and sea battles. She was both his niece and cousin; her portraits of children, specially painted by Velázquez for the much older bridegroom, still adorn the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna today.

The successors of Alan Curtis’ orchestra Il complesso barocco named their world-famous ensemble Il pomo d’oro after this opera. To this day, René Jacobs dreams of celebrating the “golden apple” at least in concert and for a recording, after all, as head of the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, he performed “Orontea” there in 1990, and it was last in Frankfurt in 2015 – and that’s it in Aachen in February.

honor follows

After all, in Innsbruck the former local hero has been remembered again and again in recent years: In 1996 Jacobs re-released the festival opera “L’Argia” in honor of Queen Christine of Sweden, who converted to Catholicism. In 2016 they played “Le nozze in sogno”, in 2019 – on the 350th anniversary of his death – there was “La Dori”. But strangely enough, there is no Cesti pitch in Innsbruck this summer; although the International Singing Competition for Baroque Opera Pietro Antonio Cesti has been held there since 2010.

It is always difficult to form a vivid biographical picture of such old composers. Too little has been handed down. From woodcuts, they all look at us more or less the same. So you have to stick to the works. In the case of Cesti, these are 16 operas, most of which seem intimate to us today, and a few chamber cantatas. He loved the human voice very much. At least various CD recordings documented this in detail. Beguilingly sweet, caressing, often rhythmically animated, this music is a fast alternation of short arias, recitatives and dances.

And at least one vocal temple remembers him next year. As the first Cesti opera there, the Milan Scala will be showing “Orontea” in autumn 2024: a key work of Baroque music theater with the best possible cast.