SARTI, Giuseppe (1729-1802), musical theorist and composer, was born at Faenza, Italy, December 1, 1729, educated—according to the best accounts—by Padre Martini, and appointed organist of the cathedral of Faenza before the completion of his nineteenth year. Resigning his appointment in 1750, Sarti devoted himself with ardour to the study of dramatic music, and in 1751 produced his first opera, Pompeo, with great success. His next works, Il Rè Pastore, Medonte, Demofoonte, and L’Olimpiade, assured him so brilliant a reputation that in 1753 King Frederick V. of Denmark invited him to Copenhagen, with the appointments of hofkapellmeister and director of the opera. In 1765 he travelled to Italy for the purpose of engaging some new singers; and meanwhile the death of King Frederick put an end for the time to his engagement. He was recalled to Copenhagen in 1768, and for some years enjoyed an extraordinary amount of court favour; but, though he carefully abstained from politics, the disasters from which both court and country so cruelly suffered at this critical period gradually undermined his position, and in 1775 he was banished from Denmark in disgrace. During his residence in Copenhagen Sarti composed a great number of operas, most of which were fairly successful, though few survived the epoch of their production. On his return to Italy in 1775 he was appointed director of the Ospedaletto—the most important music school in Venice; this post, however, he relinquished in 1779, when, after severe competition, he was elected maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Milan. Here he exercised his true vocation,—composing, in addition to at least twenty of his most successful operas, a vast quantity of sacred music for the cathedral, and educating a number of clever ...pupils, the most distinguished of whom was Cherubini, who was never weary of singing his praises as the most accomplished musician and first teacher of the age.
In 1784 Sarti was invited by the empress Catherine II. to St Petersburg. On his way thither he stopped at Vienna, where the emperor Joseph II. received him with marked favour, and where he made the acquaintance of Mozart. He reached St Petersburg in 1785, and at once took the direction of the opera, for which he composed many new pieces, besides some very striking sacred music, including a Te Deum for the victory at Otchakoff, in which he introduced the firing of real cannon. He remained in Russia seventeen years; but by the end of that time his health was so broken by the climate that he solicited permission to return. The empress and her successor Paul I. had then been some time dead; but the emperor Alexander dismissed Sarti with all possible honour, and he quitted the country in 1802 with a liberal pension and letters of nobility granted to him by the empress Catherine. His most successful operas in Russia were Armida and Olega, for the latter of which the empress herself wrote the libretto. Sarti did not live to reach Italy, but died at Berlin, July 28, 1802.
There can be no doubt that Cherubini owed much of bis stupendous learning to tho judicious teaching of Sarti, who was an accomplished mathematician and physicist as well as a musician, and whose works, if they lack the impress of true genius, show extraordinary talent, and are marked throughout by faultless taste, combined with technical skill of the highest order.
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