Francesco Florimo

Francesco Florimo (12 October 1800 – 18 December 1888) was an Italian librarian, musicologist, historian of music, and composer. Early life and friendship with Bellini Florimo was born in San Giorgio Morgeto in Calabria and enrolled at the age of 12 (or 15) at the Naples Conservatory (Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella). Career as a musician At the conservatory Florimo became a singing instructor and director of vocal concerts. His conservative Metodo di canto (Naples, 1840?; Milan, 1841–1843; enlarged 1861) was influential and widely praised. It claimed to be based on the teaching methods of the castrato Girolamo Crescentini, who was still head of the Naples Conservatory singing school at the time, and was meant to restore the ‘antico bello’, or true Italian style of singing from the time of Alessandro Scarlatti, Nicola Porpora, and Francesco Durante, which had been largely supplanted by the then fashionable ’la moda barocca’. Florimo died in Naples. His will donated to the Naples Conservatory thirty-seven volumes of correspondence, a rich source of material that has not yet been fully exploited; among these documents are some which reveal Florimo’s own published fabrications.