Biography
Giuseppe Cervellini was an Italian cleric, organist, violinist and composer born at Noventa di Piave sometime between about 1740 and 1745 and active across Cividale, Bologna, Salzburg, Warsaw, Venice and Trieste. An organist and mansionario at Cividale, he became a correspondent and protégé of Padre Martini and was admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna in 1775. A Salzburg journey in 1776 brought him into Archbishop Colloredo’s musical circle, and by 1792 he was working at the court of Stanisław August Poniatowski in Warsaw, where he composed six keyboard-and-violin sonatas later published by Artaria.
His surviving music includes sacred works, organ sonatas, chamber divertimenti and a contribution to the 1795 opera Ines de Castro. In Trieste he composed a Requiem in memory of Haydn in 1809. Cervellini died at Cividale on 30 September 1824. A Bologna portrait survives, and modern recordings include Lumen Harmonicum’s double-CD revival of his chamber divertimenti.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.