1795–1870 · Classical
Saverio Mercadante was a nineteenth-century Italian composer from Altamura. He wrote about sixty operas, church music, concertos and chamber pieces; his operas were staged in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria and France. For thirty years, until his death, he directed the conservatory in Naples. Our sheet music catalogue includes a choral number from his opera Andronico.
Saverio Mercadante was born in 1795 in Altamura, not far from Bari in Apulia. He received his musical education at the Royal Conservatory in Naples, where his teachers were Fedele Fenaroli, Giovanni Furno, Giacomo Tritto and Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli. There he studied the flute and the violin and worked on composition.
While still a student he organised concerts among his fellow countrymen. In 1817 he was appointed conductor of the college orchestra; he wrote several symphonies, along with concertos for a range of instruments. Around 1818–1819 he produced six concertos for flute; their manuscripts are kept at the Naples conservatory, where they were apparently first played with the composer as soloist.
Rossini told Zingarelli, the director of the conservatory, that his young pupil Mercadante was starting out from the point where they themselves left off.
Rossini encouraged the young composer, and this pushed him towards opera. In 1818 Mercadante wrote his first opera, Apoteosi d’Ercole (“The Apotheosis of Hercules”). His second opera, Violenza e Constanza, brought him notable success in 1820. His next three operas have been all but forgotten.
The following opera, Elisa e Claudio, met with enormous success. Its latest twentieth-century revival came at Wexford in 1988. Mercadante’s operas were staged in the theatres of Italy, among them La Scala in Milan, the San Carlo in Naples and La Fenice in Venice, and also in Spain, Portugal, Austria and France. In 2006 the company Opera Rara released a shortened recording of his opera Maria Stuarda, Regina di Scozia.
Mercadante worked in Vienna, Madrid, Cádiz and Lisbon, lived for a time in Spain and Portugal, and in 1831 settled in Italy again. On his return he found Donizetti’s music reigning supreme in Naples, until censorship problems around Donizetti’s Poliuto brought a final break. In 1832 his opera I Normanni a Parigi was presented at the Teatro Regio in Turin; it is regarded as the start of a turning point in his musical dramaturgy.
In 1832 he married Sofia Gambaro, a young widow from Genoa with three children. Three more were born to them: Serafina, Osvino and Saverio. From 1833 to 1840 Mercadante was chapelmaster of the cathedral in Novara.
In 1836 Rossini invited Mercadante to Paris. There his opera I briganti was staged at the Théâtre Italien; he had written it for four celebrated singers of that period: Giulia Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini and Lablache. In Paris he had a chance to hear works by Meyerbeer and Halévy, above all La Juive, and they left a strong mark on him: drama came to weigh more in his operas.
In that same year, 1836, Giuseppe Mazzini wrote his manifesto Filosofia della musica; its publication gave rise to the so-called reform movement, and Mercadante was part of it. Some of his most significant works date from after 1831, among them Il giuramento: it was first given at La Scala in Milan on 11 March 1837, also shown in Rome, and in 1858 at the Italian Opera in Paris. The years from 1837 brought the period of his mature masterpieces, which are known as the reform operas. A novelty of Il giuramento was also noted: no earlier Italian opera first staged in Italy had successfully stripped the prima donna or another star of her customary right to hold the stage alone at the finale.
In 1838, while working on the opera Elena da Feltre (first performed in January 1839), Mercadante wrote to Francesco Florimo about how he thought an opera should be built. He wanted varied forms, no cabalettas, simpler vocal lines, fewer repeats, and an orchestra rich enough that it did not drown the voices. For a time these operas placed him among the leading composers in Italy, although he was soon overtaken by Giovanni Pacini with Saffo and by Giuseppe Verdi with several operas, above all Ernani.
Mercadante perhaps did not attain, after his own era, the international celebrity of Bellini, Donizetti or Rossini, but he wrote no less prolifically than they did. His development of operatic structures, melody and orchestration made a significant contribution to the foundation on which Verdi built his dramatic technique. Operas by Mercadante were performed throughout the nineteenth century, and some of them were given far more often than Verdi’s early operas. One review called Elena da Feltre a work of harmonic daring and subtlety, originally orchestrated, and found in its overall coherence what one looks for in middle and late Verdi. The opera dates from 1838, a year before Verdi’s first.
From 1840 until his death, that is for thirty years, Mercadante headed the conservatory in Naples. He taught singing and harmony, and his pupils included Antonio Brancaleone Gandolfo, Felicita von Vestvali and Jaime Nunó. This post, together with his long-standing interest in orchestration, explains why he wrote more instrumental music than most opera composers of his time.
Mercadante began to lose his sight and by the end of his life was almost blind, so he dictated his compositions. Orazi e Curiazi and certain other late works also did well. He died in Naples on 17 December 1870 and is buried in the Poggioreale cemetery. In 1876 a marble monument to him was set up in Naples.
Over the decades after the composer’s death his music was largely forgotten. Occasional revivals and recordings have appeared after the Second World War, but it has not yet matched the present-day fame of the most famous pieces by Donizetti and Bellini, who were slightly younger. The French flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal recorded several of Mercadante’s flute concertos, and one of them, the concerto in E minor, has become fairly well liked by flautists on the concert platform.
Mercadante is above all an opera composer, the author of about sixty operas. His operas were staged in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria and France, and it has been noted that in the nineteenth century some of them were given noticeably more often than Verdi’s early operas. In a letter to Francesco Florimo he described how he was carrying on what he had begun in Il giuramento (1837): varied forms, no cabalettas, simpler vocal lines, fewer repeats, attention to the drama, and an orchestra rich but not drowning the voices. His development of operatic structures, melody and orchestration made a significant contribution to the foundation on which Verdi built his dramatic technique.
Instrumental music held a notable place in Mercadante’s output: he wrote more of it than most opera composers of his time, owing to his long-standing interest in orchestration and, from 1840, his post as director of the conservatory. He wrote for instruments from his student years onwards. His legacy includes a concerto for clarinet and orchestra in B-flat major, Op. 101, a concerto for two flutes and orchestra in D major, a Fantasia Concertante for flute d’amore, flute and string orchestra, the Garibaldi Symphony, dedicated to Italy, and three symphonies concertantes for flute, two clarinets and string orchestra. He also wrote six flute concertos around 1818–1819.
There are also vocal works with piano: the cantata Virginia for soprano and piano, Il Sogno (“The Dream”) for soprano, flute and piano, and six chamber arias for soprano, flute and piano. His chamber pieces are written for different groups: four flute quartets with strings (in A minor, C major, E minor and A major), a nocturne for two clarinets, horn and bassoon, a trio for violin, clarinet and cello, and the Serenata del marinaio (“Sailor’s Serenade”) for chamber ensemble.
Our catalogue currently has one work by Mercadante, “Nel seggio placido” from the opera Andronico (1821), written for choir. It is marked as advanced level, so it is best to take it up once you already have some experience of playing and singing from the score. You can carry on getting to know Mercadante through recordings: Jean-Pierre Rampal recorded his flute concertos, and his operas Elisa e Claudio and Il giuramento are described above.