Not a chance for Mozart

Luigi Gatti (1740-1817), a composer much revered by his contemporaries, spent the first half of his life in Mantua. There he was ordained priest before he dedicated himself to music. As a musician at the court chapel Santa Barbara in Mantua and, especially, as an opera composer he became famous not only in Mantua but far beyond. On the peak of his career in Italy he was hired to become court-chapel-master in Salzburg by Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, which office he held from 1782 on to his death in 1817. His extensive oeuvre of sacred music has been made accessible by a research project about music at the Salzburg cathedral by the RISM Salzburg Working Group since 2007.

In 2011 a symposium was organized by the RISM Salzburg Working Group which focussed on Gatti’s achievements as a composer and manager of the Salzburg court-chapel and dealt with the manyfold connections between musicians at the court of Colloredo as well as with the cultural and historic preconditions and results of his installation as court-chapel in Salzburg.

During the symposium, several concerts were dedicated to music by Luigi Gatti and his contemporaries. One of the concerts with chamber music by Gatti, Mozart, and Michael Haydn appeared on <media 729>CD</media> in 2012. With this symposium the RISM Salzburg Working Group followed an initiative of the Conservatorio di Musica “Lucio Campiani” in Mantua, where a first congress dedicated to Luigi Gatti took place in Oktober 2010. In december 2013 the <media 727 - - “TEXT, Gatti Leseprobe, Gatti_Leseprobe.pdf, 1.1 MB”>procedings</media> of the Salzburg symposium where published.