Josef Mysliveček
Josef Mysliveček approached Wolfgang Mozart at a hospital in Munich. Mozart recorded the scene in a letter to his father Leopold, written on the 11th of October 1777. "When he came up to me," Mozart wrote, "I took him by his hand and he took mine, in friendship." Mysliveček then said: "Just look how unfortunate I am." Mozart could say nothing but, half crying: "My dear friend, I feel for you with all my heart."
In all the Mozart correspondence, no individual outside the family had ever drawn such an outpouring of emotion from Wolfgang as that letter did. The man gripping his hand had once dominated European opera. He had lost his nose. An incompetent surgeon had burned it off while treating a mysterious illness. Yet Mozart wrote that Mysliveček was otherwise "the same old Mysliveček, full of fire, spirit and life."
Three years after that hospital visit, Mysliveček died penniless in Rome. Between 1766 and 1780, no other composer on the continent had put more new opere serie into production. His set of symphonies published in Florence was the first anthology of that kind ever printed in Italy. He shaped Mozart's musical instincts in ways scholars can trace to specific compositions. Yet opera historians have passed over his contributions almost without comment. The question worth asking is not what he accomplished but why he was buried so thoroughly by history.
Josef Mysliveček was born in Prague on the 9th of March 1737, one of twin sons of a prosperous mill owner. He studied philosophy at Charles-Ferdinand University before following his father into the milling trade. By 1761 he had achieved the rank of master miller. He then gave up the family profession entirely to pursue musical studies.
In Prague, he worked with the composers Franz Johann Habermann and Josef Seger in the early 1760s. His ambitions next carried him to Venice in 1763 to study under Giovanni Battista Pescetti. Part of his travel costs came from family wealth; a further portion came from the Bohemian nobleman Vincenz von Waldstein.
In Italy, Mysliveček was given two nicknames. Il Boemo meant "the Bohemian"; Venatorino meant "the little hunter," a literal translation of his surname. A third label, Il divino Boemo, is often attached to his name but was never used during his lifetime. It came from a romanetto by the Czech author Jakub Arbes, first published in 1884, more than a century after his death.
Unlike almost every composer of his era, he never accepted employment from a noble, a prelate, or a ruler. He earned his living by teaching, performing, and composing. Wealthy admirers frequently offered him gratuities on top of his fees. In 1771 he was elected a member of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna.
After arriving in Italy in 1763, he left the country on only three occasions. He returned to Prague between 1767 and 1768 and made a short trip to Vienna in 1773. An extended stay in Munich ran from December 1776 to April 1778. His return to Prague in 1767 led to the staging of several of his operas there. In 1770, it was in Bologna that he first encountered the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Il Bellerofonte received its first performance at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples on the 20th of January 1767 and was immediately a great success. The production opened a stream of commissions from Italian opera houses. From that point forward, virtually every one of his productions featured first-rate singers in the principal roles.
Mysliveček and Gluck were the first Czech composers to gain international fame in opera. Their works, however, carry almost no distinctively Czech qualities. Mysliveček's operas were rooted in Italian opera seria, a style built above all on the virtuoso singing found in elaborate arias.
Across his career he completed twenty-six opere serie. More of his works were mounted at the Teatro San Carlo than those of any other composer of his era. The San Carlo was the most prestigious stage in Italy for serious opera. One honor that came to him in this period was a commission to compose music for the opening of a new opera theater in Pavia in 1773. For that occasion he set Metastasio's libretto Demetrio for the first time.
Armida opened at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan during the carnival season of 1780 to immediate disaster. Not all of the problems were of his making. The prima donna Caterina Gabrielli gave birth out of wedlock in the middle of the run, at the age of 49. The disruption ended any chance the production had of recovering.
A promise Mysliveček had made to a close friend would later drag the Teatro San Carlo into a very different kind of failure.
Both Wolfgang and Leopold Mozart considered Mysliveček an intimate friend from the time of their first meeting in Bologna in 1770. Their closeness shows in the family correspondence, where references to Mysliveček appear more frequently than to almost any other outsider.
Leopold Mozart wrote to his son on the 1st of October 1777, describing Mysliveček's illness as something shameful and cause for social ostracism. Mysliveček offered Wolfgang a different explanation for his condition: bone cancer caused by a carriage accident. Leopold's language of shame, the visible disfigurement, and Mysliveček's reputation for sexual promiscuity have led scholars to suspect a diagnosis of tertiary syphilis.
Mozart drew motifs from several of Mysliveček's compositions to shape his own opera arias, symphonic movements, keyboard sonatas, and concertos. Scholars have consistently noted similarities between Mysliveček's musical style and Mozart's earlier works.
The musicologist Paolo V. Montanari traced a particular aria through several decades of eighteenth-century performance. Luigi Marchesi, the celebrated castrato soprano, treated it as a baggage aria, inserting it into other composers' productions at will. Marchesi used it in Francesco Bianchi's Il trionfo della pace in Turin in 1782 and in Gaetano Andreozzi's Angelica e Medoro in Venice in 1791. The aria probably originated with Mysliveček, written for Marchesi and placed into a hasty revision of his opera Armida following the 1780 premiere's failure. The Milanese audience had found the original too experimental and too French in character. Mozart later made an arrangement for voice and pianoforte, cataloguing it as KV 152 (210a). He most likely wrote it after Marchesi's celebrated Vienna performances in 1785 in Giuseppe Sarti's Giulio Sabino.
The friendship with the Mozarts ended in 1778. Mysliveček had promised to arrange an opera commission for Wolfgang at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and did not deliver. Contact between the two families ended. Outside the opera house, his output extended much further than most listeners today realize, including what scholars consider his finest single composition.
In the 1770s, Mysliveček was regarded as the finest symphonist resident in Italy. Nearly all of his symphonies are cast in three movements without a minuet, following an Italian tradition rooted in opera overtures. His opera overtures were themselves regularly extracted and performed as independent concert pieces. Musicologists in western Europe and North America have overlooked his symphonic contributions almost as thoroughly as opera historians have overlooked his operas.
His violin concertos have been judged the finest composed in the period between the generation of Vivaldi and Mozart's own concertos of 1775.
Three wind octets stand as the outstanding examples of his pioneering work in music for wind ensemble. Each is scored for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons. The manuscripts survive in the Fürstlich Fürstenburgische Hofbibliothek in Donaueschingen and were probably composed in Munich in 1777 or 1778.
The Op. 2 string quintets were published in Paris and Lyon around 1767. They are almost certainly the earliest string quintets with two violas ever brought into print.
His oratorio Isacco figura del Redentore, first performed in Florence in 1776, is regarded as perhaps his greatest single work. He revised it for a Munich performance in March 1777, where Mozart encountered it under the title Abramo ed Isacco.
Among his keyboard publications was a set of six easy divertimentos for harpsichord or pianoforte, issued in London by Longman and Broderip in 1777. Across all these genres, his best works share a gracious, diatonic style typical of Italian classicism: melodic inventiveness, logical continuity, and an emotional intensity that reflects his dynamic temperament. When the money finally ran out, a wealthy English student named James Hugh Smith Barry was left to settle the bill for his burial.
James Hugh Smith Barry, a wealthy English student of Mysliveček, paid for his funeral expenses in Rome in 1781. Mysliveček was buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina. Czech admirers later placed a memorial there. No trace has ever been found of a marble memorial that Barry reportedly erected shortly after the composer's death.
Mysliveček was financially irresponsible throughout his adult life. He never married. The only trace of his love life in the primary sources is a reputation for sexual promiscuity noted in the Mozart correspondence, and no names of lovers appear anywhere in the historical record.
Reports of romantic liaisons with the singers Caterina Gabrielli and Lucrezia Aguiari have circulated for decades. None of these claims has any documentary support. No mention of such affairs predates the fifth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1954.
A Czech opera titled Il Divino Boemo was composed in 1912 by a blind Czech composer. In 2015, the Czech director Petr Václav released a documentary, Zpoved zapomenutého (Confession of the Vanished), which followed the creation of a 2013 Prague staging of Mysliveček's opera L'Olimpiade. Produced by Mimesis Film, it won the Trilobit Beroun award in 2016.
Petr Václav returned to Mysliveček's life with a full-length biopic, Il Boemo, released in 2022. The Czech Republic selected it as its entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.
Recordings of his music have been appearing since the early 1980s. A recording of Il Bellerofonte conducted by Zoltán Peskó with the Prague Chamber Orchestra appeared on Supraphon in 1990. Marius Bartoccini's recording of the complete keyboard works appeared on Brilliant Classics in 2024, the most recent entry in a discography that continues to grow.
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Common questions
Who was Josef Mysliveček?
Josef Mysliveček was a Czech composer born in Prague on the 9th of March 1737. Between 1766 and 1780, he put more new opere serie into production than any other composer in Europe. He died in Rome on the 4th of February 1781.
What was Josef Mysliveček's relationship with Mozart?
Mysliveček and the Mozart family were intimate friends from their first meeting in Bologna in 1770 until the friendship broke in 1778. Mozart drew musical motifs from several of Mysliveček's compositions for use in his own opera arias, symphonies, keyboard sonatas, and concertos. Scholars have long noted stylistic similarities between Mysliveček's music and Mozart's earlier works.
Why did Josef Mysliveček's friendship with the Mozart family end?
The friendship ended in 1778 after Mysliveček failed to fulfill a promise to arrange an opera commission for Wolfgang at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Contact between the two families ended following that breach.
What is Josef Mysliveček's greatest composition?
Scholars regard the oratorio Isacco figura del Redentore, first performed in Florence in 1776, as perhaps Mysliveček's greatest single work. His violin concertos have been called the finest written between the generation of Vivaldi and Mozart's own concertos of 1775.
How did Josef Mysliveček die and where is he buried?
Mysliveček died destitute in Rome on the 4th of February 1781. His funeral expenses were paid by a wealthy English student, James Hugh Smith Barry. He is buried in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome.
What films have been made about Josef Mysliveček's life?
Two films by Czech director Petr Václav have drawn on Mysliveček's life. A documentary, Zpoved zapomenutého (Confession of the Vanished), was released in 2015 and won the Trilobit Beroun award in 2016. A biopic, Il Boemo, was released in 2022 and selected by the Czech Republic as its entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.