Giovanni Battista Pescetti

Giovanni Battista Pescetti (* around 1704 in Venice, † March 20 1766 in Venice) was an Italian composer. He was a grandson of Carlo Francesco Pollarolo.

Life

Giovanni Pescetti studied at the Venetian organist and composer Antonio Lotti and edited and composed several operas, often in collaboration with his fellow students Baldassare Galuppi. From 1736 he worked in London and was here Director of Opera of the Nobility. His opera Demetrio could, thanks to the contributions of the famous castrato Farinelli and despite a competitive situation with Handel, achieve some success, reaching fourteen performances.

The music historian and witness Charles Burney wrote about this opera: " This composer, [ ... ] even though he never had much fire or fertile creative power, was a very elegant and clever composer for the voice His melodies are very simple and graceful. . " Later he was forced to move under worse conditions in the New Theatre in the Haymarket, where his opera Busiri, ovvero Il trionfo d' amore only four performances learned. He then worked as an arranger for operas by other composers in London before he returned to Venice in 1745 and wrote there for another 15 years operas and arranged. After the premiere of his seria Zenobia, he was appointed in 1762 to the second organist at St. Mark's, where his classmate Galuppi had just taken over the post of Maestro di Coro. In Venice he also taught Josef Mysliveček and the young Antonio Salieri in music theory and composition.

Pescettis reputation during his lifetime seemed not so much to justify his compositional skills than on his rivalry with Handel and his connection to Galuppi, but also mainly due to the patronage of such famous singers such as Farinelli and Manzuoli that its ability to tailor composition much appreciated.