Baldassare Galuppi ‘Il Buranello’
Baldassare Galuppi is a composer practically unknown today, despite the fact that in his time he enjoyed significant prestige thanks to his operas, his religious music and his piano compositions. Known for ‘Il Buranello’ for having been born on the Venetian island of Burano in 1706, he died in Venice in 1785. His operas were known, in addition to Venice, in London, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, Barcelona and Madrid, where he was in the service of Felipe V, thanks to the influences of Farinelli, offering his creations in the Buen Retiro Coliseum.
The book, the first in Spanish, deals with his childhood and training in Venice, where he contributed to laying the foundations of Italian opera buffa. He wrote a large number of operas, many of them with a libretto by the playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793). He also composed religious music thanks to his employment as a music teacher in the hospitals of the Mendicanti (from 1740 to 1750) and of the Incurabili (1762 to 1766). He also wrote a hundred piano sonatas and eight concertos for keyboard and orchestra. His scores even traveled to Latin America, as pages of his have been found in Bolivia and Guatemala.
Despite so much activity, there is very little information we know about Galuppi. With them, Pascual i Triay has built an interesting and attractive volume, easy to read that, without a doubt, will contribute to making known the character and the environment in which he lived. We assume that this book will be an incentive for future researchers who, little by little, complete the biography of a unique composer.
The volume analyzes the playful dramaThe she-devil (1755), the oratory Jahel and the Sonata in D minor for piano. The book, with an extensive and erudite prologue by musicographer Albert Ferrer Flamarich, is well illustrated, although we miss a catalog of the Italian’s production.
Baldassare Galuppi ‘Il Buranello’. Josep Pascual i Triay. Arpegio Publishing House. San Cugat (Barcelona), 2023. 150 pages.
By José Prieto Marugán
2023-09-22 15:36:25
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