Domenico Barbaia

Domenico Barbaia, who was born in Milan, began his career by running a coffee shop, and made his first fortune by creating (or at least taking the credit for creating) a special kind of coffee with frothing milk, the "Barbajada", probably the first "cappuccino."

This drink, and a variation with hot chocolate like Bicerin, had become so popular in Milan that the erstwhile waiter had benable to open a string of coffee houses in the city that all featured his novel concoction.

Barbaia has made his second fortune by buying and selling munitions during the Napoleonic wars.

Also, after the French re-allowed gambling as they advanced southwards in Italy, he had become involved in the operations as a card dealer at the La Scala opera house, but had quickly achieved the position of sub-contractor to run the entire gaming operation of the house in 1805.

With his eyes on controlling gambling opportunities further south in Italy as the French armies advanced, taking over the concession in Naples had quickly beome his preoccupation.

Arriving in the city, in 1806, he is successful enough by 1809 to take over the royal Teatro San Carlo, the major opera house, as well as the second royal theater, the Nuovo.

Giaoachino Rossini, having established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public by the age of twenty-one, had continued to write operas for Venice and Milan during the next few years, but their reception had been tame and in some cases unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi.

In 1815 he retires to his home in Bologna, where Domenico Barbaia, the impresario of the Naples theater, contracts an agreement that makes him musical director of the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo at Naples.

He is to compose one opera a year for each.

His payment is to be two hundred ducats per month; he is also to receive a share from the gambling tables set in the theater's "ridotto", amounting to about one thousand ducats per annum.

This is an extraordinarily lucrative arrangement for any professional musician at this time.

The contract will last seven seasons, and the composer will obliged with ten operas, including Otello, Armida, Mosè in Egitto, Ermione, La donna del lago and Maometto II.

Vincenzo Bellini, commissioned by Domenico Barbaia to write for Milan’s La Scala, produces Il Cirata, which causes a sensation and earns Bellini international fame.

Composed for the great singers of the day, and marked by a new lyricism and simplicity, Bellini’s style challenges the style of vocal brilliance associated with Gioachino Rossini’s operas.