Giovanni Pacini

Giovanni Pacini (born Feb. 17, 1796, Catania, Sicily [Italy]—died Dec. 6, 1867, Pescia, Tuscany) was an Italian opera composer who enjoyed considerable renown in the early to mid-19th century for his melodically rich works, which were finely tailored to the great singers of the period.

Pacini began his formal music studies at age 12, when he was sent by his father, the successful opera singer Luigi Pacini, to study voice in Bologna with the well-known castrato singer and composer Luigi Marchesi. Soon after commencing his studies, however, the young Pacini switched his musical focus to composition. His opera La sposa fedele (“The Faithful Bride”) premiered in Venice in 1919, and for its revival the following year Pacini provided a new aria to be sung specifically by the renowned soprano Giuditta Pasta. By the mid-1820s Pacini had cemented his reputation as a leading composer of his day with a series of both serious and comic works. He attracted particular notice with Alessandro nelle Indie (1824; “Alexander in the Indies”), an opera seria (“serious opera”) based on Andrea Leone Tottola’s updating of a text by 18th-century librettist Pietro Metastasio, and L’ultimo giorno di Pompei (1825; “The Last Day of Pompei”), also an opera seria.

Pacini withdrew from operatic activity in his mid-30s when he found his operas eclipsed by those of the enormously popular Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini. During his hiatus from opera composition, Pacini settled in his father’s native region of Tuscany and busied himself musically in other ways. He founded and directed a music school in Viareggio, operated a theatre in the same city for musical performances by his students, and filled the post of maestro di cappella (“chapel master”) in Lucca, for which he composed a notable quantity of liturgical music. Meanwhile, he began a second career as a writer on musical topics, starting with Cenni storici sulla musica e trattato di contrappunto (1834; “Historical Remarks on Music and Treatise on Counterpoint”) and subsequently producing a steady stream of articles, treatises, and music criticism until the end of his life.

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A second phase of Pacini’s compositional career was initiated with the opera Saffo (1840), which differed stylistically from his earlier operas in its dramatic integrity and relative absence of melodic formula; this work marked Pacini’s definitive return to the genre, and it is generally hailed as his masterpiece. It was first performed in Naples, with a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano (the librettist of Donizetti’s well-known Lucia di Lammermoor [1835]), and quickly made the rounds of more than 40 theatres in Italy as well as in France, England, Austria, Russia, and other countries, including various parts of the New World. After the mid-1840s, however, Pacini and his work were overshadowed once again, this time by Giuseppe Verdi, whose operas often directly addressed political issues. In such a politically charged musical climate, Pacini’s works came to be heard as old-fashioned, owing particularly to their use of the cabaletta, the concluding fast section of an operatic number that was increasingly viewed as lacking in genuine dramatic motivation—and that was indeed eschewed by Verdi.

Although Pacini continued to receive prestigious operatic commissions from theatres in Rome, Venice, Florence, and Bologna in the 1850s and ’60s, he never regained the prominence he had enjoyed at earlier points of his career. Toward the end of his life, he embarked on a series of instrumental works, including several string quartets and the programmatic Sinfonia Dante (1864?). The first three movements of the latter work supposedly depicted the three main sections of Dante’s Divine Comedy, while the fourth and final movement—as indicated by its title—evoked Il trionfo di Dante (“The Triumph of Dante”). Pacini’s instrumental works, though generally respected, did not win widespread popular approval. Consequently, although they were an early manifestation of the renaissance of Italian instrumental music of the second half of the 19th century, the pieces left no lasting impression on the movement.

Pacini was the only significant Italian composer of his time to write an autobiography, Le mie memorie artistiche (1865; “My Artistic Memoirs”), and much of the attention that he has received from scholars since the late 20th century has focused on the lively and fascinating account that he gives of his professional career. Since the 1980s he has also enjoyed renewed attention through revivals and recordings of several of his works.