Collection: Antonio Caldara

Antonio Caldara (Venice, 1670 – Vienna, December 28, 1736) was an Italian composer.

He was one of the best-known composers of his era, appreciated both as an opera composer and as a composer of oratorio and sacred music.

Perhaps a student of Giovanni Legrenzi in Venice, he was a singer and cellist at St. Mark's. In 1699, he moved to Mantua where he was appointed "Maestro di Cappella, da Chiesa e da Teatro" (Chapel Master for Church and Theater) by the extravagant Duke of Mantua, Ferdinando Carlo.

In 1708, the composer traveled to Spain with the Habsburgs: his chamber composition Il più bel nome, written for the marriage of Charles III of Spain, brother of Emperor Joseph I, to Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the first Italian opera performed in Barcelona. He subsequently traveled to Rome where he wrote works for Cardinal Ottoboni and where he probably met George Frideric Handel and the Scarlatti family. There, in 1709, he succeeded Handel as house composer and Chapel Master to Prince Francesco Maria Ruspoli until 1716.

In 1711, he married Caterina Petrolli, who worked for Prince Ruspoli as a contralto. Following the election of Charles III as Holy Roman Emperor in 1711, he finally settled permanently in Vienna, where, from 1717, he held the position of Vice-Kapellmeister at the imperial court, whose incumbent was Johann Joseph Fux, carrying out an activity whose scope is comparable only to that of composers like Antonio Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Handel. In 1736, he died in Vienna and was buried in St. Stephen's Cathedral.