SPONTINI, GASPARE, LUIGI, PACIFICO. - Musician, b. 14 Nov. 1774 at Majolati (Jesi) and d. there 24 Jan. 1851.
In Rome he made his debut as a composer of stage works; in 1803 in Paris he obtained great successes with La Vestale (1807) and with Fernando Cortez (1809); in 1810-12 he was conductor of the Théâtre-Italien. In 1820 director of the Berlin Opera, where he had other works of his performed with success and from which in 1841 he departed embittered by opposition and envy. After some years' stay in Paris, in 1850 he retired to his native Majolati.
Besides his career as a theatrical composer, his activity in favor of the reform of sacred music is notable, of which an important testimony is the «Rapporto intorno alla riforma della musica da Chiesa» written in Jan. 1839 to the Primicerius of the Congregation of St. Cecilia. In it S. shows himself indignant and scandalized at having found, after a long absence from Italy, theatrical music introduced there into the churches, with all that it contains of the lascivious and the impure; he proposes first of all to have musicians of bad faith corrected by binding them with an oath of fidelity to rectitude and to the holiness of composing music expressly for the temple, without copying and plagiarizing scores of melodramas; he then advocates the erection in Rome of a Library or Institute of ecclesiastical music, capable of supplying engraving-plate copies of the music approved by the appropriate Commission; he declares finally, necessary and urgent, the institution everywhere of singing schools for young boys, similar to those devised by St. Gregory the Great.
S.'s merit was of exceptional scope, since he, a composer of stage works only, was the first who felt and advocated the urgency of a reform of sacred music, and his concrete proposals, presented to Gregory XVI, who for them honored him with the title of count of S. Andrea, will be among the most important historical precedents of the motu proprio of Bl. Pius X (1903).
Bibliography5 works
Luisa Cervelli