Pietro Agostini (c. 1635 – 1680) was like a lot of composers that I know. He had extra-musical interests that wound up causing him a lot of trouble. Giuseppe Pitoni says that Agostini “led a swash-buckling and notorious life and had a natural inclination to impropriety and baseness”. This also sounds like quite a few of the composers that I know.
Groves says that he got kicked out of his native city when we was young because of his involvement in a murder. So, he naturally turned to composition.
He showed up in Genoa and went to church. He complained about the music so much that someone said, “Can you do any better?” He wrote some music for them, and it was better. After silencing the critics, he got invited to write for the opera in Milan.
His stay in Genoa was cut short, however, because they kicked him out of that city too. This time, apparently, because he had taken up an intimate relationship with a nun. So, he went to Rome to finish his career where presumably his peccadilloes went relatively unnoticed.
The lesson here is apparently that if you want to be a swash-buckling composer, you should probably live in a big city.
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