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Fernando Sor was born into a fairly well off and respected family, sometime in February of 1778. The exact date is not known, but it is known that he was baptized on February 14, 1778 in Barcelona, Spain as Jose Fernando Macarurio Sors. Although Sor wrote many other types of works for many mediums of performance including: piano, opera, and ballet, he is best remembered for his guitar studies, and other guitar works. They form an integral part in the study, and performance at concert level, of the guitar. - Malaspina BiographySheet music: Fernando Sor
In his hands, the guitar became gifted with a power of expression at once pure, thrilling, and exquisite. . . . In a word, he made the instrument sing. It may be easily supposed that with this singular faculty of giving expression to melody, Giuliani gave to the guitar a character which, it was thought before, was totally alien to its nature. . . . About twelve months ago, Giuliani paid the debt of nature. In him the little world of guitar players has lost their idol; but the compositions he has left behind will, we have no doubt, pay every homage of respect and admiration." - Part of eulogy to Giuliani (1829)Sheet music: Mauro Giuliani
English musical composer and pianist, was born at Dublin in 1782. He came of a musical family, his father being a violinist, and his grandfather the organist in one of the churches of Dublin. From the latter the boy received his first musical education. When a few years later the family settled in London, Field became the favourite pupil of the celebrated Clementi, whom he accompanied to Paris, and later, in 1802, on his great concert tour through France, Germany and Russia. Under the auspices of his master Field appeared in public in most of the great European capitals, especially in St Petersburg, and in that city he remained when Clementi returned to England. During his stay with the great pianist Field had to suffer many privations owing to Clementi's all but unexampled parsimony; but when the latter left Russia his splendid connexion amongst the highest circles of the capital became Field's inheritance. - Malaspina BiographySheet music: John Field
Italian musical composer, was born at Aversa, in. the kingdom of Naples, on the 17th of December 1749. His parents were poor, but anxious to give their son a good education; and after removing to Naples they sent him to a free school connected with one of the monasteries of that city. The organist of the monastery, Padre Polcano, was struck with the boy's intellect, and voluntarily instructed him in the elements of music, as also in the ancient and modern Literature of his country. To his influence Cimarosa owed a free scholarship at the musical institute of Santa Maria di Loreto, where he remained for eleven years, studying chiefly the great masters of the old Italian school. Piccini, Sacchini and other musicians of repute are mentioned amongst his teachers. At the age of twenty-three Cimarosa began his career as a composer with a comic opera called Le Strava gauze del Conte, first performed at the Teatro del Fiorentini at Naples in 1772. The work met with approval, and was followed in the same year by Le Pazzie di Siehlidanza e di Zoroastro, a farce full of humour and eccentricity. This work also was successful, and the fame of the young composer began to spread all over Italy. in 1774 he was invited to Rome to write an opera for the stagione of that year; and he there produced another comic opera called L'Itahiana in Londra. - Malaspina BiographySheet music: Domenico Cimarosa
French composer of comic opera born at Rouen on the I 5th of December 1775. He received his first musical education from M. Broche, the cathedral organist, who appears to have treated him very harshly. He began composing songs and chamber music at a very early age - his first opera, La Fille coupable (the libretto by his father), and his second opera, Rosalie et Myrza, being produced on the stage of Rouen in 1795. Not satisfied with his local success he went to Paris in 1795. His scores were submitted to Cherubini, Mehul and others, but met with little approbation. Grand opera was the order of the day. Boieldieu had to fall back on his talent as a pianoforte player for a livelihood. Success came at last from an unexpected source. P. J. Garat, a fashionable singer of the period, admired Boieldieu's touch on the piano, and made him his accompanist. - Malaspina BiographySheet music: Francois-Adrien Boieldieu
As an admirer of Haydn, and a voluminous writer of instrumental music, chiefly for the violoncello, Boccherini represents the effect of the rapid progress of a new art on a mind too refined to be led into crudeness, too inventive and receptive to neglect any of the new artistic resources within its cognizance, and too superficial to grasp their real meaning. His mastery of the violoncello, and his advanced sense of beauty in instrumental tone-colour, must have made even his earlier works seem to contemporaries at least as novel and mature as any of those experiments at which Haydn, with eight years more of age and experience, was labouring in the development of the true new forms. Most of Boccherini's technical resources proved useless to Haydn, and resemblances occur only in Haydn's earliest works (e.g. most of the slow movements of the quartets in op. 3 and in some as late as op. 17); whichever derived the characteristics of such movements from the other, the advantage is decidedly with Boccherini. But the progress of music did not lie in the production of novel beauties of instrumental tone in a style in which polyphonic organization was either deliberately abandoned or replaced by a pleasing illusion, while the form in its larger aspects was a mere inorganic amplification of the old suite-forms, which presupposed a genuine polyphonic organization as the vitalizing principle of their otherwise purely decorative nature. The true tendency of the new sonata forms was to make instrumental music dramatic in its variety and contrasts, instead of merely decorative. Haydn from the outset buried himself with the handling of new rhythmic proportions; and if it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the surprising beauty of colour in such a specimen of Boccherini's 125 string-quintets as that in E major (containing the popular minuet) is perhaps more modern and certainly safer in performance than any special effect Haydn ever achieved, it is nevertheless true that even this beauty fails to justify the length and monotony of the work. Where Haydn uses any fraction of the resources of such a style, the ultimate effect is in proportion to a purpose of which Boccherini, with all his genuine admiration of his elder brother in art, could form no conception. Boccherini's works are, however, still indispensable for violoncellists, both in their education and their concert repertories; and his position in musical history is assured as that of the most original and, next to Tartini, perhaps the greatest writer of music for stringed instruments in the late Italian amplifications of the older quasi-polyphonic sonata or suite-form that survived into the beginning of the 19th century in the works of Nardini. - Malaspina BiographySheet music: Luigi Boccherini
