Sacrati, Francesco Paolo (EN)

Sacrati Francesco Paolo, baptized 17 September 1605 Parma, †20 May 1650 Modena (?), Italian composer. He may have studied with F. Manelli. In the early 1640s he was active in Venice as both an opera composer and impresario. Thanks to travelling theatrical companies: Febi Armonici and Accademici Discordati his operas were performed throughout much of Italy. On 14 December 1645, La finta pazza was staged in Paris at the Palais du Petit-Bourbon in the presence of Queen Anne and Cardinal Mazarin. In March 1648, Sacrati conducted an orchestra of Bolognese musicians during a performance of the same opera in Reggio nell’Emilia; that year he also stayed at Villa Malvasia in Panzano near Bologna. On 3 June 1649, he was appointed maestro di cappella at the d’Este court in Modena, a post he held until his death.

Alongside C. Monteverdi, F. Manelli, F. Cavalli, and B. Ferrari, Sacrati ranks among the pioneers of Venetian opera and was regarded by his contemporaries as a worthy successor to Monteverdi. His most outstanding work, La finta pazza, with stage designs by G. Torelli, continued to be performed in Italy until 1679. It was also one of the first Italian operas staged in France, however, at its Paris premiere some scenes were spoken without music, and ballet sequences choreographed by G. B. Balbi were added at the end of each act, adapting the work to French tastes. The surviving score from the Piacenza premiere (1644) shows that Sacrati preserved almost unchanged the structure of Strozzi’s libretto, modifying two arias, namely Achilles’s (“Felicissimo giorno”) and the Eunuch’s (“Serva, serva chi mole”), by repeating the opening line of the stanza, thereby creating ABA or rondo forms. In the part of Deidamia, the composer conveys shifting emotional states through variation in rhythm, melodic range, and tonal changes. According to recent research (A. Curtis, E. Rosand), Sacrati, together with B. Ferrari, contributed to the completion of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and was probably the composer of the famous duet Pur ti miro as well as the sinfonia.

Literature: C. Sartori Un fantomatico compositore per un’opera che forse non era un’opera, “Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana” V, 1971; L. Bianconi, T. Walker Dalla „Finta pazza” alla „Veremonda”. Storie di Febiarmonici, “Rivista Italiana di Musicologia” X, 1975; C. Sartori Ancora della „Finta pazza” di Strozzi e Sacrati, “Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana” XI, 1977; A. Curtis „La Poppea impasticciata” or Who Wrote the Music to „L’incoronazione” (1643)?, “Journal of the American Musicological Society” XLII, 1989; E. Rosand Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The Creation of a Genre, Berkeley 1991.