Loreto Vittori

Loreto Vittori (baptized on January 16, 1604 in Spoleto, † April 23, 1670 in Rome) was an Italian castrato and composer. From 1622 until his death he was as a soprano singer in the papal chapel in Rome.

Life

Loreto Vittori was educated in Rome and was a pupil of Giovanni Bernardino Nanino, Francesco Soriano and the Spanish singer Francisco Soto de Langa. He then worked as a singer in Loreto and Spoleto. In 1618 Loreto was placed under the protection of the Medici family. He moved to Rome in 1621, first at the service of Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, and in 1632 the service of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of the future Urban VIII.

He sang at the premiere of La catena d'Adone by Domenico Mazzocchi in 1626; and in 1628 in La Flora, o vero Il natal de' fiori (Flora, or The Birth of Flowers) an opera composed by Marco da Gagliano and Jacopo Peri to a libretto by Andrea Salvadori. In 1642 he sang the role of Angelica in Il Palazzo di Atlante incantato by Luigi Rossi with libretto by Cardinal Rospigliosi, the future Clement IX.

Bernardo Pasquini was his pupil.

Works

• In 1639 he wrote a spectacular opera entitled La Galatea, rediscovered and revived in 2005. La Galatea is peopled with multi-dimensional characters and contains moments of great dramatic intensity, the reason, perhaps, for the unusually warm praise it received from music historians in the early part of the twentieth century.^[1]
• He composed the oratorio Ignatius of Loyola, which is lost, two melodramas entitled Sant' Irene (1644) and La Pellegrina (1647); ^[2]
• the play La fiera di Palestrina, a comedy "Le zittelle Cantarini", a collection of monodies and "Dialoghi sacri e morali".
• A mock-heroic poem, La Troja rapita, (1662). an autobiographical poem that contains important information on the the environment of the Roman Barberini in the days of Pope Eugenius IV.

References