JOMMELLI, Niccolò. – Composer and maestro. Born in Aversa on 10 Sept. 1714, died in Naples on 25 Aug. 1774. He first studied with Canon Muzzillo, maestro di coro of Aversa cathedral, and then, in 1730, in Naples, where his teachers included Durante, Feo and Leo. In 1736 he was appointed maestro di cappella to the Marchese Del Vasto Avalos, and in 1740 he went to Rome, where he found a new patron in Heinrich Benedict, Duke of York. He later studied in Bologna with Padre Martini.
In 1743 he was called to Venice, where he spent four years directing the Conservatorio degli Incurabili, producing much sacred music, including the oratorio La Betulia liberata to a text by Metastasio, a four-voice Mass, a Laudate pueri, and others. In 1747 he returned to Rome, and in 1749 composed the oratorio La Passione di N. S. Gesù Cristo, dedicating it to his former patron, the Duke of York, who had meanwhile become a cardinal. Through the benevolence of another influential patron, Cardinal Alessandro Albani (nephew of Clement XI), Jommelli was appointed coadjutor maestro of the Cappella Giulia in St Peter’s (1749) and shortly afterwards was summoned to the court of Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna, where he met Metastasio. In 1750 he returned to Rome and resumed his post at St Peter’s, composing sacred music and operas. He then carried on intense artistic activity as Kapellmeister at the court of Stuttgart (1753–68); in 1769 he resigned and returned to Italy, retiring to Naples.
Without speaking of his extensive operatic output (about forty operas, of which twenty were for the Stuttgart court and five for Vienna), we shall confine ourselves to a brief account of his sacred compositions, many of which remain unpublished and scattered in numerous European libraries. Besides those already mentioned, we may note the oratorios Isacco figura del Redentore, ossia il sacrificio di Abramo (1750) and Giuseppe riconosciuto, both to texts by Metastasio; four cantatas for the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin and others; a Hymn for the Sagra, a Hymn for the feast of SS Peter and Paul, the psalm Confitebor (1750), the offertory Confirma hoc Deus, six antiphons for the Sagra, the psalm Laudate pueri for four sopranos, soloists and choirs (1752), the psalm In convertendo (1753), the Magnificat, the psalm Beatus vir, the Easter Sequence for six concerted voices, more than two Masses, and his last celebrated work, the Miserere for two sopranos with instruments (1773). The dramatic power that lent his compositions a particularly expressive tragic crisis in the recitatives also vibrates through his religious works, above all in the oratorios—for example, in the Passion, where Metastasio’s text, already set by various composers, takes on a wholly new efficacy and a declamatory expressiveness of the highest dramatic pathos.