"Cesti," wrote the Neapolitan landscape painter Salvator Rosa, "is the glory and splendor of the secular scene."
The scene was 17th century Italy, and Composer Pietro Cesti (1623-69), otherwise known as Father Antonio, contributed to its splendor in flamboyant fashion. Renowned for his unfriarly frolics (a partiality toward wine and the wives of his benefactors), he was unfrocked* and dismissed from the court of the Medici in Florence for "reprehensible conduct." In more sober moods he reputedly wrote 100 operas, many of them tradition-breaking efforts that helped determine the shape of opera to come. Last week the first, and one of the...
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