Nicola Porpora

A consummate cosmopolitan who worked in his native Naples as well as Rome, Venice, London, Dresden and Vienna, Nicola Porpora was a towering figure in 18th-century vocal music. Born in 1686 (the year after J.S. Bach and Handel), he grew up in a Neapolitan milieu where opera was all the rage. And with Agrippina (1708), the young Porpora made his debut as an operatic composer. More than 50 operas would follow—among them is Arianna in Nasso, composed in 1733 when Porpora moved to London, invited to establish a rival opera company to Handel’s. A renowned singing teacher, whose pupils included the celebrated castrato Farinelli, Porpora’s innate understanding of the human voice inevitably nourished a sizeable body of cantatas (sacred and secular), as well as church music. Joseph Haydn, who briefly served as Porpora’s valet and accompanist, later confided that he owed much of his compositional knowledge to his sometime employer. Porpora returned to Naples in 1758 where he died 10 years later, his reputation eclipsed by changing musical tastes.