Collection: Antonio Caldara
Antonio Caldara (Venice 1670 - Vienna, 28 December 1736) was an Italian composer.
He was one of the best known composers of his time, appreciated both as an opera player and as an author of oratorial and sacred music.
Perhaps a pupil of Giovanni Legrenzi in Venice, he was a singer and cellist of San Marco. In 1699 he moved to Mantua where he was assigned the post of "Maestro di Cappella, da Chiesa e da Teatro" by the extravagant Duke of Mantua, Ferdinando Carlo.
In 1708 the composer went to Spain to the Habsburgs: his chamber poem The most beautiful name, written for the marriage of Charles III of Spain, brother of Emperor Joseph I, with Elisabeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the first Italian opera performed in Barcelona. He later went to Rome where he wrote works for Cardinal Ottoboni and where he probably knew George Frideric Handel and the Scarlatti family. Here in 1709 he succeeded Handel as composer of the house and Kapellmeister of Prince Francis Maria Ruspoli until 1716.
In 1711 he married Caterina Petrolli, who worked for Prince Ruspoli as contralto. Following the election of Charles III as Holy Roman Emperor in 1711, he finally settled in Vienna, where he held, since 1717, the office of vice-kapellmeister at the imperial court of which Johann Joseph Fux was the holder carrying out an activity whose size is comparable only to that of composers such as Antonio Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Händel. In 1736 he died in Vienna and was buried in St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
