Pietro Raimondi

Pietro Raimondi ( born December 20 1786 in Rome, † October 30, 1853 ) was an Italian composer and music educator.

Raimondi, a child from a poor family, was handed over by his widowed mother to the care of a wealthy aunt, who sent him to the conservatory in Naples, where he was an avid student of counterpoint Giacomo Tritto. After six years he withdrew his aunt their support, and Raimondi returned to his mother back to Genoa, where he wrote some operas. In 1811 he returned to Naples, where almost all of the 40 operas he wrote in the next 30 years, their first and often only performance experienced. In 1824 he was appointed music director of the Royal Theatre in Naples (Teatro San Carlo ). A year later, after the death of Tritto, he was together with Francesco Ruggi his successor as teacher of counterpoint at the Conservatory of Naples. In 1833 he was a lecturer in counterpoint and director of the Conservatory of Palermo. 1834 Giovanni Pacini called him " the most famous contrapuntist our time." Nevertheless, he was not happy in Sicily and applied unsuccessfully for positions in major music centers (Paris, Milan, Dresden). His operas were written in the style of the Neapolitan school and therefore were regarded as old-fashioned, because the development had taken other paths since Rossini.

Since the 1820s Raimondi specialized as joint composer. He wrote to six joints, which could be performed both independently and simultaneously. 1836 a mass was performed in Palermo, which consisted of two eight-voice fairs, also independently as well as simultaneously performable. A further step, the three oratorios Putifar, Giuseppe and Giacobbe, composed 1847-48. On August 7, 1852 were performed at the Teatro Argentina in Rome with 430 participants in a concert that lasted six hours. The sequential performance of the individual oratorio was under the direction of various conductors, Raimondi took over the final simultaneous performance of all three oratorios. From the sound impression he was so overwhelmed that he fainted at the end of the performance. As a celebrity, he has now been received by the Pope, was awarded a gold medal and in December 1852 a position as choir master of the Cappella Giulia at St Peter's, but he could only exercise a few months before he was terminally ill. The orchestration of his opera seria Adelasia and his comic opera I quattro rustici remained unfinished. It was intended to place these two works on a shared stage simultaneously. The orchestration was completed by his favorite pupil Pietro Platania, but never performed.

• Italian composer
• Artist ( Rome)
• Born in 1786
• Died in 1853
• Man