Francesco Maria Bazzani

Francesco Maria Bazzani or Bassani (c. 1650 – c. 1700) was an Italian baroque composer.

Francesco was a member of the musical Bassani family, of whom Giovanni Battista Bassani is the best remembered today. He is to be distinguished from another Francesco Maria Bassani two generations earlier (fl. 1621), nephew of the viola da gamba composer Oratio Bassani, who kept a pedagogic notebook Regole di contrapunto, which contains eight pieces, seven of which are probably by his uncle Oratio.

He was maestro di cappella of the Duomo di Piacenza from 1673^[1]

Upon the death of his sister and her husband, a musician named Keller from Germany, Francesco adopted his nephew Fortunato Chelleri and trained him as a musician.^[2]

Works

Operas

• Ottone il Grande (Parma 1670) is cited as an early example of an opera seria where a minor comic character, in this case the servant Lenno, returns at the end of Acts 1 and 2 of the opera to enable a comic ballet to be performed.^[3][4]
• L'inganno trionfato overo La disperata speranza ravvivata ne' successi di Giacopo Quinto di Scozia e Maddalena di Francia, Parma (1673) libretto: Oratio Francesco Roberti

References

1. Francesco Saver Quadrio Della storia e della ragione d'ogni poesia, + indice universale 1744, p. 513
2. Vassilis Vavoulis Keyboard music of Fortunato Chelleri 2000
3. Lorenzo Bianconi, Giorgio Pestelli, Kate Singleton Opera on stage, p. 185
4. Lorenzo Bianconi, Giorgio Pestelli Storia dell'opera italiana 1988, p. 185 "Per esempio, nell'allestimento dell 'Ottone in Italia del piacentino Francesco Maria Bazzani a Parma nel 1679 il servo Lenno, che nel corso del dramma compare in poche scene comiche di passaggio, ritorna alla fine dell'atto I e del II...