Johann Simon Mayr

 I will be focusing on a German Composer who has been credited with over 600 compositions (including more than 60 operas!), but it is very disheartening to know that his works are rarely performed nowadays and have been lost in the shadows. 

Johann(es) Simon Mayr was born on 14th June 1763, as the second son to Josef Mayr, the local organist of Mendorf, Bavaria. Mayr's father was his first tutor until 1769, when he enrolled in the Benedictine monastery of Weltenburg, located in the beautiful Danube gorge. (Interestingly, this is the world's oldest monastic brewery, working since 1040 AD!). In 1774, his parents transferred him to the Jesuit monastery of Ingolstadt to prepare him for teaching, but due to the abolishment of the Jesuit order in Bavaria, from 1777 onwards, he was prompted to study theology, law, philosophy and medicine in the University of Ingolstadt. (Interestingly, his professor was Adam Weishaupt - the founder of Illuminati!) It was here that he continued his musical lessons on the side and learned to play various instruments in addition to the piano, and his achievements won the support of the Swiss nobleman and music lover Baron Thomas Maria de Bessus. He became Mayr's patron and brought him as a music teacher to the Sandersdorf castle - the Illuminati nest - in 1786. After the Bavarian occupation of the castle, Mayr fled to Poschiavo in Switzerland and arrived in Bergamo in 1789.

Here, Mayr took lessons under Carlo Lenzi, the Kapellmeister at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, but since he had already achieved a certain sense of independence, his teacher was not able to satisfy him completely; hence, he was planning to return to his homeland. But his musical endeavours caught the eye of the art-loving Canon Count Presenti, who supported his travel to Venice and made him a student of Ferdinando Bertoni, the Kappellmeister of St. Mark's Basilica. As was the norm at that time, Mayr began his career by composing sacred music, but his Latin oratorio Jacob a Labano fugiens captured the public attention in 1791. The oratorio was performed in the presence of the King of Naples, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the Viceroy of Milan, and was met with such acclaim that he quickly produced three more oratorios, and would have kept on doing the same, had his patron, Presenti, not unexpectedly died. Following the advice of the composer Niccolo Piccini, Mayr tried his hand at Opera and produced his first work, Saffo, in 1794, which was premiered at the Carnival of Venice! 

This marked the start of his prolific career, riddled with more than 60 operas within the next 20 years. In 1798, Mayr worked along with the librettist Gaetano Rossi on a farsa called Che originali, which was an instant hit and was performed across Italy over the next 30 years. This was the first of many collaborations between the two, spanning more than two decades. My personal favourite amongst them is L'Accademia di musica, which has a fairly standard plot, but the unique aspect is the performance of a concert within the opera itself. (L'amor coniugale is another of their collaborations, which is coincidentally based on the 1798 French libretto for the opera Leonore ou L'amor conjugal - which was the inspiration for Beethoven's Fidelio!). In 1802, Mayr succeeded Lenzi as the Kappellmeister of Santa Maria Maggiore and stayed there, rejecting all proposals from abroad. In 1805, he inaugurated the Lezioni Caritatevoli di Musica, aka Bergamo Conservatory, where his earliest pupil went on to become the renowned Gaetano Donizetti. (Interestingly, the conservatory was renamed in 1897 to Istituto Musicale Gaetano Donizetti in his honour! But in 2023, the conservatory merged with the Academia Carrara to form the Politecnico delle Arti di Bergamo.) These twenty years of his career were interspersed with opera performances for Venetian theatres, and productions held well until the times of Verdi. His fame is partly owed to the farse and semiserias composed by him. Interestingly, a lot of his farse are barely disguised Italian versions of the then Parisian hits, which shows the strong French influence on the Italian opera. But alas after the three premieres in 1813: Tamerlano at La Scala in Milan, La rosa bianca e la rosa rossa in Genoa and Medea in Corinto at the Teatro San Carlo in Naple, Rossini became an upcoming artist with Tancredi - his first opera seria - which shot him to fame at an international level, with the productions of the same being organized in London and New York as well! This led to a quick decline in the fame of Mayr, and as it is in life, he successfully contributed well to the opera repertoire and now took a satisfactory seat till his retirement. 

From 1816 onwards, he solely wrote church music and supplemented the field with 17 masses, 25 psalms, and numerous organ accompaniments. His latter style was a mixture of Germanic orchestral richness and supple Italian melodic writing. Along with this, he worked as a music theorist and even wrote a commemorative biography for Joseph Haydn. In 1826, he developed an eye disease, which later led to his blindness. He didn't quite enjoy travelling, which explains his confinement to Bergamo, but still, at the age of 75, he travelled to Bavaria. He visited his parents' graves, and his sister in Mendorf, and then went to Sandersdorf Castle, where his musical career had begun. In Munich, on June 26, 1838, a grand reception was held in his honour at the Zum Schwarzer Adler – at the time Munich's first inn, where Goethe and Mozart also stayed. After returning to Bergamo, he stayed there and went on with his life until his death in 1845, which he bore with a characteristic cheerfulness. He is buried next to Donizetti in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

His work is now obscure, and Mayr is known mainly as Donizetti's teacher. His music is sometimes reminiscent of Mozart, and even Constanze wrote to Mayr, asking him to train her son after Mozart's untimely young demise. Even though he is overshadowed by the likes of Rossini and Verdi, they themselves referred to Mayr as the "Father of the Italian Opera"; hence, it would be a shame not to unearth his music and embrace his performances. 

References:

1. Arnold Niggli - Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 21 (1885), pp. 146-148
2. Constantin von Wurzbach - 18 Biographische Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (1868), pp. 169–175
3. Lühning, Helga, "Mayr, Simon" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 16 (1990), S. 568-570 [Online-Version]; URL: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118732374.html#ndbcontent
4. Edward J. Dent; The Origins of Romantic Opera. Bulletin of the American Musicological Society 1 September 1940; 4 2–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/829346
5. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Simon Mayr". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Nov. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simon-Mayr.
6. Ralph P. Locke - Classical CD Review: A Simon Mayr Comic Opera That’s Really Funny — and Performed with Flair, 2021 (The arts fuse magazine)
7. Gino Thanner - "Father of Italian Opera" BR-Klassik (2024)
8. Emma Clarke - "The Hidden Legacy of Johann Simon Mayr" The Piano Encyclopedia Chronicle Times