Antonio Casimir Cartellieri

My 1980 edition of the New Groves doesn't even list this composer, so obscure had he become by then. Thus, the usual authoritative source is completely silent on him! We are thus reduced to hunting about the place for information about him and how to catalogue him. Wikipedia has him listed as 'Antonio Casimir Cartellieri' in full, but IMSLP lists the one score of his they have under the name 'Anton Casimir Cartellieri' -and the use of 'Anton' instead of 'Antonio' for a guy who is said to be a 'Polish-Austrian' composer would seem appropriate. So which is it? Anton or Antonio?

Funnily enough, the one score IMSLP makes available (for a flute concerto) lists him as “Antoine Cartellieri” on its front page, thereby throwing the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons by omitting his middle name and providing a third variant for his first!

In desperation, I did a search of the online version of New Groves and thus retrieved notice of an article (behind a paywall that I therefore cannot read) that lists an article on the subject of “Cartellieri, Antonio Casimir” by Dieter Klöcker, the renowned late-20th Century clarinettist. That certainly puts the imprimatur of New Groves on the three-name version and the use of 'Antonio' (which in turn is made more explicable by the fact that his father was Italian).

I also found an article on an aspect of Cartellieri's life by Olga Baird, in which she quotes Klöcker's various other articles on the man, again using the Antonio variant with all three names, probably because she's using Klöcker as her initial source. So, that's what he gets catalogued as here!

As Ms. Baird explains, “very little is known about Cartellieri’s life and personality” and much that we do 'know' (from a biography put together by his eldest son in 1826) is third-hand reportage and likely incorrect or at least factually dubious. To the point, indeed, where it begins by saying that “Casimir Anton Cartellieri was born in Danzig…”, thereby getting the order of the names wrong! Unfortunately, Klöcker appears to have basically copy-and-pasted the biography into the CD booklets of his recordings of his music, from whence it has taken on a life of its own, despite its suspect source!

All that can really be said about him is that he was born in Danzig, now Polish Gdansk, in 1772; that he had an opera produced in Berlin when he was 21; and that he moved from there to Vienna, where he studied music under Albrechtsberger and (possibly) Salieri. He was allegedly friends with Beethoven, and performed as violinist in the premiers of several Beethoven works (such as the Triple Concerto). He died after a period of prolonged over-work and persistent illness in 1807, aged just 34, leaving behind a widow and three infant sons. Being primarily a Classical composer, dying just as the Romantic age was beginning, his work fell swiftly into total oblivion, from which he was only rescued by the researches of the aforementioned Dieter Klöcker in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Wikipedia lists his output as including four symphonies, three string quartets, various concertos, multiple chamber works and five operas. Little of it has been recorded as of 2024. I cannot even vouch for the portrait of the man displayed here: it's essentially the one shown on his Wikipedia page, but that in turn is sourced from a website that doesn't provide any particular provenance for it. That website in turn seems to be a slightly dodgy Russian pirate music site, so confidence is low! On the other hand, it is used on other, more reputable websites in reference to Cartellieri and is not obviously of anyone else, so I'm sticking with it for now

Everything about this composer, in short, is obscure and vague, at best!

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