Teodoro Cottrau

Naples in 1827 gave Teodoro Cottrau a city full of songs and a publishing house to inherit: his father, Guillaume Louis Cottrau, French by birth, had spent a career collecting and printing the local repertoire. Santa Lucia is the son's monument. The melody was already circulating in Neapolitan tradition when he notated and arranged it in 1850 and made an Italian text from the dialect words; the version he printed is the one that went round the world. He published and distributed a great deal else besides, and worked as a journalist. His career is a useful reminder that a Neapolitan song of that century was seldom one person's work — singers, collectors, arrangers, poets and publishers each left a hand on it. He died in 1879. He studied piano and composition in Naples and qualified in law besides, and in 1847 took over the direction of the Girard house, which he came to own and to rename. Addio mia bella Napoli and La sorrentina are his as well, he took part in the Piedigrotta festivities, and his editions ran to vocal scores of operas, Verdi's Simon Boccanegra among them, and to translations of librettos. He died in Naples.