WINTER, PETER VON  BIOGRAPHY

Peter von Winter was born in Mannheim in 1754. A violinist and then a conductor, Winter was German by training, but had a special interest in Italian opera. In Vienna he had been a pupil of Salieri, then, from 1787 at the court in Munich, Deputy Kapellmeister and conductor of the Italian opera. From 1791 to 1794 he was in Italy, where he wrote operas for Venice and for Naples. He remained Kapellmeister at Munich from 1798 until his death there in 1825.

Winter wrote melodramas, Singspiel, tragédies-lyriques, and serious, tragicomic and comic Italian operas: Circe (Monaco 1788, not performed), Catone in Utica (Venice 1791), Antigona (Naples 1791), Il sacrificio di Creta (Venice 1792), I fratelli rivali (Venice 1793), Belisa (Venice 1794), Ogus (Prague, 1795), I due vedovi (Vienna  1796); Italian 'opere serie' in London, with libretti by Da Ponte: La grotta di Calipso (1803), Il trionfo dell’amor fraterno and Il ratto di Proserpina (1804), Voltaire’s Zaira (1805); and at La Scala, Milan, Maometto (1817) and I due Valdomiri (1818).