Biography
Josef Mysliveček was born on 9 March 1737 in Prague, the son of a miller, and initially trained as a master miller himself. After studying composition with Josef Seger, he left for Venice in 1763 and turned decisively to music. His opera Il Bellerofonte brought him a breakthrough in Naples in 1767; over the following one and a half decades he had more new opere serie staged at Italy's leading theatres than any other composer of his day, earning him the Italian nickname "il Boemo." In Bologna in 1770 he befriended the fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose work he demonstrably influenced in the years that followed. From the mid-1770s a progressive illness set in that led to disfiguring facial surgery and abruptly curtailed his career. He died impoverished and largely forgotten in Rome on 4 February 1781.
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