Nicola Porpora

Nicola Antonio Porpora (Naples, 1686 – Naples, 1768) was, in his lifetime, one of the most celebrated musicians in Europe, both for his operas and vocal music and for his work as a singing teacher. His name is linked to a pedagogical tradition that trained some of the most renowned singers of his time and left its mark for generations, so his importance is not limited to his compositional output.

Porpora entered the Conservatorio dei Poveri di Gesù Cristo in Naples in 1696, where he probably received composition lessons from Greco. His first opera, L'Agrippina, was premiered successfully in 1708, although several years passed before he received new commissions. During the 1710s he served as maestro di cappella to various patrons, among them Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt and the Portuguese ambassador in Rome, and in 1715 he was appointed master at the Conservatorio di Sant'Onofrio. The deaths of his father and elder brother in 1717 made him the head of the family, at a time when his operatic career had not yet fully taken off.

Alessandro Scarlatti's move to Rome in 1719 opened up new opportunities. In the Roman theatres, Porpora consolidated his reputation with works such as Eumene, while in his teaching he trained Farinelli and, some years later, Caffarelli. Around 1722 he left his post at Sant'Onofrio and set out on a journey through Germany and Austria with modest results, as his music was considered too florid and ornate in Vienna. From 1725 he settled in Venice, where his operas to texts by Metastasio held a prominent place, and he maintained a rivalry with Leonardo Vinci that came to a head in Rome around 1730.

In 1733 he moved to London, invited by a group of noblemen who wished to rival Handel's company. There he composed Arianna in Naxos, which enjoyed great success, but none of his later works achieved the same reception, and the venture ultimately failed to overcome its rival. After returning to Venice, he held posts at several of its conservatories and hospices, and in 1738 he went back to Naples. His operatic output declined from 1741 onwards, and his following years were spent between Venice, Dresden, where he was singing master to the electoral princess, and Vienna, where he had the young Haydn as a pupil, who referred to him as his great master in the fundamentals of composition.

The Seven Years' War left Porpora without his Saxon pension, and his final years in Naples were marked by financial hardship, as his contemporaries recount. His legacy endures in two respects: on the one hand, his vocal music, in which he exploited as no one else the possibilities of flexibility and breath control in the singer; on the other, his solfeggio exercises, which formed the basis of a singing school that was passed down for decades.