Franz von Suppé

Franz von Suppé composed Boccaccio, Fatinitza and Die schöne Galathée, as well as the overtures Poet and Peasant, Light Cavalry and Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. He was born in Split, then Austrian territory, grew up on the Dalmatian coast, and completed his training in Vienna. He worked as a house conductor at the Josefstadt and the Carltheater and wrote farces, incidental scores and operettas. The family had moved to Zadar, where a bandmaster and the cathedral choirmaster gave him his first encouragement; a mass of his was heard at a Franciscan church there in 1835, and that mass was later revised as the Missa dalmatica. In Vienna he studied with Ignaz von Seyfried and from 1840 worked for the theatre director Franz Pokorny, whose houses reached to Pressburg, Oedenburg and Baden; he mounted Les Huguenots with Jenny Lind in 1846, the year of Dichter und Bauer, and Leichte Kavallerie followed twenty years later.