Giovanni Alberto Ristori

Giovanni Alberto Ristori (1692 – 7 February 1753) was an Italian opera composer and conductor. Born in Bologna (the son of another musician, Tommaso Ristori), he joined an opera troupe, led by his father, in Dresden. This troupe was responsible to August II the Strong, who was both King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. August II lent his opera troupe to the Russian Empress Anna for her coronation (1731). The younger Ristori remained in Dresden for two decades after August’s demise, and he himself died there. Calandro, his opera in three acts to a libretto by Stefano Benedetto Pallavicino, was the work which Empress Anna heard at her coronation. It is both the first opera buffa written in Germany and also the first Italian opera performed on Russian soil. Both the elder and the younger Ristori directed the staging, which involved thirteen actors and nine singers including Ludovica Seyfried, Margherita Ermini and Rosalia Fantasia. In 1916 the German musicologist Curt Rudolf Mengelberg published the first study on Ristori and his music: Curt Rudolf Mengelberg, Giovanni Alberto Ristori: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte italienischer Kunstherrschaft in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: