His real name was Pier Francesco Caletti, who from the city of Crema (where he was born 14 February 1602) moved to Venice to join the retinue of the nobleman Federico Cavalli, whose surname he assumed. He immediately entered the capella of S Marco as a singer and under the guidance of its director, Claudio Monteverdi was quickly able to demonstrate his musical gifts, setting out on a successful career as an organist. On the death of Monteverdi in 1643 his place as maestro went not to Cavalli, but the more senior Rovetta and it was not until the death of the latter in 1668 that Cavalli was able finally to be promoted to director of the capella of S Marco. While his master was producing his last masterpieces for the Venetian theatre, Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria and L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Cavalli had no fewer than five operas produced at S Cassiano and one at the Teatro San Moisé, two of the many opera houses active in Venice at that time. The first contract between Cavalli and S Cassiano saw him employed not just as instrumentalist and composer, but also as investor and manager, together with the singer Felicita Uga, the librettist Orazio Persiani and the ballerino-designer Giovan Battista Balbi, who was to become his collaborator for many years to come.

Although his debut opera, Le Nozze di Teti e Peleo, was not a success, and in fact his company was dissolved, the theatrical career of Cavalli proceeded apace, always combining the task of organizer with that of composer. From the very beginning, in fact, Cavalli had the good fortune to collaborate with personalities of exceptional artistic qualities. The first outstanding librettist was Giovan Battista Busenello, who had written the book for Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and who wrote, in all, five melodrammi for Cavalli, among them Didone and Statira. Busenello was a member of the Accademia degli Incogniti, one of the most influential Venetian clubs, that introduced an unmistakeably libertine and erotic note into Venetian opera of the 1640s. Another decisive meeting was that with Giovanni Faustini, who until his death in 1651 was the author of numerous titles set to music by Cavalli. This scholar persuaded Cavalli to work, from 1650, for the Teatro S Apollinare whilst still writing operas for the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo. The following decade saw the composer achieving his greatest success in Europe. In Venice he continued to produce on commission three or four operas a year (from 1658 he went back to work at the S Cassiano, now directed by Giovanni’s brother, Marco Faustini), while a broad dissemination of his operas throughout Italy, and in quite a few European cities now began, on the routes travelled by such touring opera companies as the Febi Armonici.

All the Venetian operas were adapted to the Neapolitan taste, by musicians native to Naples who were in the service of the Armonici, and were staged in a sumptuous manner under the direction of the most important choreographer of the time, the Venetian, Balbi.

After Faustini’s Egisto (1643) it was above all Giasone, after a text by Cicognini, that was to triumph in many theatres after its 1649 première at S Cassiano: Milan (1649), Lucca and Florence (1650), Bologna (1651), Milan (1652), Piacenza and Palermo (1655), Leghorn (1656), Vicenza (1658), Ferrara (1659), Genoa (1661), Ancona (1665), and so forth. In Naples Giasone was even performed four times, in 1651, 1652, 1661 and 1672. Public opera only reached southern Italy in 1650, but amongst the first examples of melodrammi performed in Naples up until 1670, almost all of them taken from Venetian operas, a third show the paternity of Francesco Cavalli, who thus had a fundamental role in the creation of an operatic circuit in southern Italy. Given that all three operas that inaugurated the operatic era in Naples were composed by Cavalli, Didone, Giasone and L’Egisto, and were performed prior to Monterverdi’s L’Incoronazione 1651 (which in turn also shows evidence of intervention by Cavalli), it is possible to believe that the various troupes of the Febi Armonici, or rather the actors specialized in opera production responsible for the first twenty Neapolitan seasons, had a preferential relationship with the composer.