Niccola Piccinni (January 16, 1728 - May 7, 1800) was an Italian composer of classical music.

He was born at Bari, and educated under Leonardo Leo and Francesco Durante, at the Conservatorio di Sant' Onofrio in Naples. For this Piccinni had to thank the intervention of the Bishop of Bari, since his father, although himself a musician, was opposed to his son's following the same career. Piccinni's first opera, Le Donne dispettose, was produced in 1755, and in 1760 he composed, at Rome, the chef d'œuvre of his early life, La Cecchina ossia la buona Figliuola, an opera buffa which attained European success.

Six years after this Piccinni was invited by Queen Marie Antoinette to Paris. He had married in 1756 his pupil Vincenza Sibilla, a singer, whom he never allowed to appear on the stage after their marriage. All his later works were successful; but the directors of the Grand Opera conceived the idea of deliberately opposing him to Gluck, by persuading the two composers to treat the same subject--Iphigenie en Tauride--simultaneously. The Parisian public was divided into two rival parties, which, under the names of Gluckists and Piccinnists, carried on an unworthy and disgraceful war. Gluck's masterly Iphigenie was first produced on May 18 1779. Piccinni's Iphigenie followed on January 23 1781, and, though performed seventeen times, was afterwards consigned to oblivion. The antagonism of the rival parties continued, even after Gluck left Paris in 1780; and an attempt was afterwards made to inaugurate a new rivalry with Sacchini. Piccinni remained popular, and on the death of Gluck,in 1787, proposed that a public monument should be erected to his memory--a suggestion which the Gluckists refused to support.

In 1784 Piccinni became professor at the Royal School of Music, one of the institutions from which the Conservatoire was formed in 1794. On the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Piccinni returned to Naples, where he was at first well received by King Ferdinand IV; but the marriage of his daughter to a French democrat brought him disgrace. For the next nine years he maintained a precarious existence in Venice, Naples and Rome; but he returned in 1798 to Paris, where the public received him with enthusiasm, but he made no money. He died at Passy, near Paris. After his death a memorial tablet was set up in the house in which he was born at Bari.

The most complete list of his works was given in the Rivista musicale italiana, viii. 75. He produced over eighty operas, but although his later work shows the influence of the French and German stage, he belongs to the conventional Italian school of the 18th century.

See also Pierre-Louis Ginguené, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Niccolo Piccinni (Paris, 1801).

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.