Author: METASTASIO, Pietro
Biography:
METASTASIO, Pietro (1698-1782: EB)
The son of Francesca and Felipe Trapassi, he was born in Rome on 13 Jan. 1698. The family was poor but had connections; his godfather was a cardinal. As a child he improvised songs and performed them in public. He was informally adopted in 1708 by Gian Vincenzo Gravina (d 1718), a lawyer with literary tastes, who renamed him Pietro Metastasio—a Greek translation of his birth name. Gravina had him well educated and made him his heir. Before Metastasio was twenty he had composed his first tragedy and published his first collection of poetry. His inheritance from Gravina did not last long, and for a time he worked in a law office at Naples, continuing to write poems and dramas. His next patron was a singer, “La Romanina,” who encouraged him to take music lessons and write “lyric dramas” or melodramas, and eventually bequeathed to him her fortune, which he renounced in favour of her husband. His first great success was with Didone abbandonata (1723). On the strength of his growing reputation he was invited to Vienna in 1730 by the Emperor Charles VI, and there he remained, unmarried, as court poet for the rest of his life. Among his many dramas later set to music as part of the opera repertoire is La Clemenza di Tito (1733). He died in Vienna on 12 Apr. 1782. Of the English translators listed here, James Glassford, Philip Bracebridge Homer, Thomas Le Mesurier, and John Hoole (qq.v.) have separate headnotes. Francis Oliveri, “Professor of modern languages and mathematics,” published his translation in Dublin with the support of some very respectable subscribers. His two prose works, issued by the same publisher in 1797 and 1798, are about the mechanics of ballooning. Oliveri’s name is unknown to the newspapers and public records of the period. It was almost certainly a pseudonym used by a very obscure figure, a man named Smith with the alias John Bird, who was an informer for the British government at the time of the Irish Rebellion. A note by an authority on the United Irishmen in the NLI copy of The Balloons of Citizen Campenas (1798) affirms that “Smith alias Bird” had avowed that the book was “one of his fabrications for the Dublin Journal.” (EB 20 Feb. 2025; NBG 35, cols 189-93; R. R. Madden, The United Irishmen [1916] Vol. 3 Appendix; ECCO) HJ
Other Names:
- Metastasio