Giovanni Agostino Perotti

Giovanni Agostino Perotti, also known as Giannagostino, was an Italian composer, teacher and essayist whose career spans the late Classical and early Romantic periods in Venice in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was born in Vercelli around 1769 or 1770 and died in Venice in 1855. His importance lies chiefly in his role as director of music at St Mark's Basilica and in his theoretical work, which engaged with the neoclassical currents of the city.

His early training began with his elder brother, Giovanni Domenico Perotti. Around 1790 he moved to Bologna to study with Mattei. There, in 1794, his oratorio Abele, to a text by Metastasio, was performed, and in 1795 the one-act comic opera La contadina nobile, now lost, premiered in Pisa. That same year he left for Vienna as a keyboard player in the service of the court and, from 1798, lived in London. Around 1801 he returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he frequented the city's neoclassical academies, among them the Ateneo Veneto, founded in 1812 during the Napoleonic era.

In 1811 he won a prize in Livorno with his Dissertazione sullo stato attuale della musica in Italia, a treatise on musical aesthetics that combined the tradition of Padre Martini and the Bolognese school with a rationalist critique of eighteenth-century opera and Venetian neoclassical ideals. The work was translated into French and, in part, into German and English. In 1811 he was appointed maestro primo at St Mark's, although he did not take up the post effectively until 1817, after the death of Bonaventura Furlanetto. As maestro di cappella he promoted the reorganisation of the musical archive, the use of female voices in performing early sacred music, a singing school for the young choirboys, and the refounding of the Società di Santa Cecilia in 1832.

As a composer, Perotti cultivated mainly sacred music: masses, psalms, vespers and requiems, as well as some 125 works for soloists, choir and orchestra. His style marks a transitional stage between the Venetian practice of the eighteenth century and the more modern style of his successor, Antonio Buzzolla. In some works he deliberately imitates Marcello and Lotti. His later writings became increasingly traditionalist and dogmatic, as his critique of Rossini's Stabat mater (1842) shows. His legacy endures through his influence on the cultural and musical life of nineteenth-century Venice, and through his correspondence with figures such as Simon Mayr, Saverio Mercadante and Donizetti, who dedicated his opera Belisario to him.