Trento, Vittorio

Vittorio Trento (c.1761-?1833) was an Italian composer, principally for the stage. He began his career specialising in ballet music for various theatres in his native Venice. From 1789 he began to compose operas, mostly comic, and from 1794, he started taking commissions from abroad, beginning with the dance pantomime La muerte de Estenón for Madrid (Los Caños del Peral, 1795) as well as the ballet Il trionfo dell’amore for London (Drury Lane, 1797). In later years, Trento was active outside of Italy, working in Amsterdam (1806-1808) and in London (1811) where his heroic comic opera Climene was premiered, and in Lisbon in 1814 where his dramma giocoso, Tutto per inganno, was performed. He became a composer of the S. Carlos theatre in Lisbon in 1816, but had returned to Italy by the summer of the following year (Brito and Cranmer 1990, p. 43). Trento’s output of duos, string quartets, a fragmentary violin concerto and other instrumental pieces has been dated mostly to the earlier part of his career (Sirch and Zanotelli 1997), though one, possibly four mandolin sonatas, all surviving in copies made by António Felizardo Porto (1793-1863), were presumably composed while he was in Lisbon (Van Tichelen 2021).

The identification here of the autograph score for Trento’s revival of his 1793 setting of La finta ammalata (Lisbon, 1814) in P-Ln, F.C.R. 217/2 is based on the presence of compositional corrections in the manuscript, some of which were made while the ink was still wet on the page (ink was smudged out). Furthermore, the same hand is found in the score of the composer’s Climene (GB-Lbl, Add. MSS, 16132-16133), a manuscript inscribed ‘Originale del Sig^r V: Trento’.

Andrea Lanza, ‘Trento, Vittorio’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, 4 vols., ed. Stanley Sadie and Christina Bashford (London: Macmillan, 1992), iv, 805-806.

Andrea Lanza, ‘Trento, Vittorio’,Oxford Music Online: Grove Music Online (2001), [https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.28325].

Lorenzo Mattei, 'Trento, Vittorio', in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 96 (Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2019) [https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/vittorio-trento/].

Licia Sirch and Alberto Zanotelli, ‘La musica strumentale da camera di Vittorio Trento’, in La musica strumentale nel Veneto fra '700 e '800. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Padova, 4–6 novembre 1996, ed. Lucia Boscolo e Sergio Durante, Rassegna Veneta di Studi Musicali, 13-14 (Padua: Cleup, 2000), 253-298.  

Pieter Van Tichelen, ‘The Mandolin in Portugal (ca. 1770-1830)’, Vantichelen.Name. Musicological & plucked strings gibberish (2021) [https://www.vantichelen.name/2021/05/02/the-mandolin-in-portugal-ca-1770-1830/].