Vicente Martín y Soler

Vicente Martín y Soler (born May 2, 1754, Valencia, Spain—died Jan. 30/Feb. 10, 1806, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Spanish opera composer known primarily for his melodious Italian comic operas and his work with acclaimed librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte in the late 18th century.

Martín y Soler was initiated early into the music profession in his Spanish homeland, beginning as a singer in his native Valencia and working as an organist in Alicante before moving to Madrid, where he wrote various pieces to be inserted into the Italian operas performed there. In 1777 he transferred his activity to Italy, composing operas for the Teatro San Carlo and other theatres in Naples, for the Teatro Regio in Turin, and for various noble houses in Lucca, Parma, and Venice, where he settled in 1782. Three years later, however, Martín y Soler moved to Vienna, where he fulfilled three commissions that together represent the apex of his accomplishment. Three of the operas he wrote for Vienna were on librettos by the celebrated poet Lorenzo Da Ponte: Il burbero di buon cuore (1786; “The Good-Hearted Curmudgeon”), Una cosa rara, o sia bellezza ed onestà (1786; “A Rare Thing, or Beauty and Honesty”), and L’arbore di Diana (1787; “The Tree of Diana”). Although Da Ponte is best known for his later work with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in his memoirs he assigned a significant role to his work with Martín y Soler in the maturation of his style of libretto writing.

After three successful years in Vienna, Martín y Soler assumed duties in St. Petersburg as kapellmeister (music director) for the Russian court and also taught singing at the city’s Smolny Institute for the education of noblewomen. Though other Italian and Italianate composers—including Giovanni Paisiello, Domenico Cimarosa, and Giuseppe Sarti—worked for the Russian court in the last decades of the 18th century, Martín y Soler was unique in that he had no official connection with the Italian opera company in St. Petersburg. Moreover, he demonstrated an unusual degree of willingness to engage with Russian-language opera and contributed several comic works to the Russian company. Two of these were settings of librettos by Catherine II (the Great): Gorebogatir Kosometovich (1789; “The Sorrowful Hero Kosometovich”) and Fetul s det’mi (1791; “Fedul and his Children”). In addition to operatic works, Martín y Soler also composed music for several ballets during his years in St. Petersburg,

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When Sarti was named to succeed Cimarosa as the court’s chief composer of Italian opera, Martín y Soler decided to leave Russia. He spent the next several years (1794–96) in London, where he again collaborated with Da Ponte. During their work on the second of two operas, however, a quarrel erupted between them, marking the end of their professional relationship. In 1796 Martín y Soler returned to St. Petersburg, resuming his teaching duties and composing his final Italian comic opera, La festa del villaggio (1798; “The Village Feast”).

Nearly all of the operas of Martín y Soler following his move to Vienna were comic, a genre in which his gift for gracious, lyrical melodic writing was conspicuous. His Viennese operas were by far his most successful. The best known of these is undoubtedly Una cosa rara, owing above all to Mozart’s humorous citation of one of its melodies in the second finale of Don Giovanni (1787). It was L’arbore di Diana, however, that enjoyed the most performances; indeed, this Italian opera was staged with greater frequency at the court-supported Burgtheater in Vienna than any other during the decade 1783–92.