Calle de Martín Soler
Honors Vicente Martín y Soler, an eighteenth-century Valencian composer nicknamed “the Valencian Mozart,” famed for his Viennese operas with librettos by Da Ponte.
The composer Vicente Martín y Soler was born in Valencia in 1754 and sang as a choirboy in the cathedral before moving to Madrid, where he wrote arias for Italian operas. Fame came to him in the theaters of Italy and, above all, in the Vienna of the late eighteenth century, where he worked with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte—the same who wrote for Mozart—on operas such as Una cosa rara and L’arbore di Diana.
The success of Una cosa rara, premiered in 1786, was overwhelming, and it left a mark that Mozart himself picked up. In the second finale of Don Giovanni, during the banquet, a melody sounds that is taken from Martín y Soler’s opera, a nod the Viennese audience recognized at once.
From there he moved to Saint Petersburg in 1788, invited to the court of Catherine II. His last years passed in Russia, between courtly commissions and money troubles, until his death in 1806. Posterity nicknamed him “the Valencian Mozart.” Calle de Martín Soler lies in the Palos de la Frontera district, in Arganzuela.