Giovanni Sebenico

Giovanni Sebenico, also known by his Croatian name Ivan Šibenčanin, was a composer, organist and tenor of Dalmatian origin who spent most of his career in seventeenth-century Italy. His birthplace, probably Šibenik, and his approximate dates, around 1640 for his birth and 19 September 1705 for his death, are only roughly known. His place of death is given as Cividale del Friuli or, apparently, Corbola in the Veneto. He is considered probably to have been a pupil of Legrenzi.

His career began in Cividale del Friuli, where he served as vicemaestro di cappella between 1660 and 1663. He then was a tenor at St Mark's in Venice from July 1663 until 1666. Between April 1666 and the summer of 1673 he was at the court of Charles II in London, where in 1668 he received the title of 'Master of Italian Music'. Samuel Pepys mentions him as a singer, and Roger North heard him play the organ alongside Locke. In 1673 he returned to Italy to take up the post of maestro di cappella at the Savoy court in Turin, a position he held until 1690. After a brief period in Venice, he returned to Cividale del Friuli in 1692 as maestro di cappella. Towards the end of his life, illness kept him from working, and he lived for a time in Corbola.

In his own day he was remembered above all as a performer and as the author of operas. Of the three operas he is known to have composed, all were premiered in Turin: L'Atalanta (1673), Gli Amori delusi da amore (1688) and Leonida in Sparta (1689), the last of which was reworked as L'oppresso sollevato for Venice in 1692. The music of these operas has not survived, although the printed librettos of the last two have. His surviving sacred works include the Messa chiamata 'L'imitazione zoccolantissima', a Responsorio di S Antonio di Padova and the motet Lauda, Jerusalem, Dominum, which were discovered in 1971 in the chapter archive of Cividale del Friuli. His legacy today is chiefly documentary and sacred, and offers a testimony to Italian and courtly musical life of his era.