Napoleon and Cimarosa

I was wondering whether anyone actually reads these occasional blogs, but surprisingly my "Monthly Traffic Report" from Google says they have been looked at over 40 times. Well, since the last one, one thing that has come out is a piece marking Napoleon's bicentenary. Napoleon died on St Helena (a place I've always wanted to go!) on 5 May 1821. Amazingly, it then took two months for the news to reach England! Napoleon was a great lover of Italian comic opera, so I wrote about him from that point of view for Opera, and my "Opening the opera drawer" is in the May issue. One of the Italian composers Napoleon really admired was Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), who is a favourite of mine, too. And as luck would have it, the Opera Studio at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, put on a wonderful production of Cimarosa's L'impresario in angustie in March -- the first ever production of this opera in Japan. It's a delightful little one-act piece about an impresario running out of money and then deserting an opera production -- a very relevant story in a time of Covid. My long and highly appreciative review of this production also appears in the May Opera, so altogether Cimarosa gets mentioned a lot more than usual, though no more than he deserves. In the late eighteenth century, he was considered the greatest opera composer of the age. Mozart was one of his many rivals.