Giovanni Battista Sammartini (c. 1700 - January 15, 1775) was an Italian composer, organist, choirmaster and teacher. He counted Gluck among his students, and was highly regarded by younger composers including Johann Christian Bach. It has also been noted that many stylizations in Joseph Haydn's compositions are similar to those of Sammartini, although Haydn denied any such influence.
Sammartini is especially associated with the formation of the concert symphony through both the shift from a brief opera-overture style and the introduction of a new seriousness and use of thematic development that prefigure Haydn and Mozart. Some of his works are described as galant, a style associated with Enlightenment ideals, while "the prevailing impression left by Sammartini's work... [is that] he contributed greatly to the development of a Classical style that achieved its moment of greatest clarity precisely when his long, active life was approaching its end."
He is often confused with his brother, Giuseppe, a composer with a similarly prolific output (and the same first initial).
Piero Weiss and Richard TaruskinMusic in the Western World: A History in Documents
Samuel Sharp (b. c. 1700)
Letters from Italy (1767) (Pages 231-234)
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Farinelli (24 January 1705 – 16 September 1782[1]), was the stage name of Carlo Maria Broschi, one of the most famous Italian contralto and soprano castrato singers of the 1700's.
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Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni (February 25, 1707 - February 6, 1793) was a celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, whom critics today rank among the European theatre's greatest authors. His works, along with those of the modernist Luigi Pirandello, include some of Italy's most famous and best-loved plays. Audiences have admired the plays of Goldoni for their ingenious mix of wit and honesty. His plays offered his contemporaries images of themselves, often dramatizing the lives, values, and conflicts of the emerging middle classes. Though he wrote in French and Italian, his plays make rich use of the Venetian language, regional vernacular, and colloquialisms. Goldoni also wrote under the pen name and title Polisseno Fegeio, Pastor Arcade, which he claimed in his memoirs the "Arcadians of Rome" bestowed on him.
Related Reading:
Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin
Music in the Western World: A History in Documents
Carlo Goldoni
Tutte le opere (Pages 229-231)
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Johann Adolf (also Adolph) Scheibe ("Disk") (May 15, 1708 - April 22, 1776, Copenhagen) was a German-Danish composer and editor and author of the journal Der critische Musicus.
Related Reading:
Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin
Music in the Western World: A History in Documents
Johann Adolph Scheibe
Der critische Musicus (Pages 236-237)
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