Die Brüder Ferdinand III. und Leopold Wilhelm, ihre Stellung zu ihrem Lehrer Giovanni Valentini, zur Dichtung und zur Musik

Abstract

The brothers Ferdinand III and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm shared their interests in poetry and music since their youth. Both of them wrote poems, but only Ferdinand composed music. He had his own musical establishment since 1630, but his younger brother, a cleric and military leader, did not care about one before 1640/41, when he sent the composer Giacinto Cornacchioli to Italy to hire musicians and a poet and to buy music. When he arrived at Brussels as governor in 1647, he enlarged this establishment and had the first opera performed there in 1650. The letters by Cornacchioli and the brothers are the main sources for the new informations we now possess. In two short digressions other findings are proposed: the reason for Giovanni Priuli's leave from the Imperial court in 1626 and the retrieval of the 17th-centuryscore of Ferdinand III's opera "Drama musicum" (1648), missed since 1893.

Keywords

• Emperor Ferdinand III
• Archduke Leopold Wilhelm
• poetry
• Hofkapelle
• Brussels
• Pietro Verdina