Born in a small town near Taranto, Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) received his musical education at the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio in Naples, where according to his autobiographical sketch he composed his first opera, a short comic intermezzo, while still a student. Subsequently Paisiello went on to become one of the most famous and influential opera composers in Europe, his prestige leading to an invitation from the Empress Catherine II to become her maestro di cappella in St. Petersburg (in 1776) with the substantial salary of 3,000 rubles (it was later increased to 4,000). At the end of 1783 Paisiello returned to Italy, ostensibly on leave from the Russian court. However, an offer in Naples (always his first choice of home) resulted in him leaving the service of Catherine to spend the remainder of his life there.

Although Paisiello composed a number of orchestral and chamber works, and a substantial body of sacred music in the florid Neapolitan style of the day, his fame rests almost entirely on his operas, which number around 80. His particular strength was comic opera (opera buffa), to which his easy melodic style was especially suited. Many of his graceful arias became exceptionally popular. No small part of his success in Naples was due to his collaboration with the librettist Giambattista Lorenzi, whose well-crafted, witty books provided Paisiello with ideal vehicles with which to express a rich vein of comedy in music of wit and elegant charm that is sometimes touched by the gently melancholic sentimental streak that was such an essential ingredient of comic operas of the period. The operas of his Russian period display the composer writing in a more concentrated style, with more emphasis on orchestration, traits that he tended to turn his back on once back in Italy. Paisiello's comic operas reached their height of success with his Il barbiere di Siviglia, first performed in St. Petersburg in 1782, and subsequently throughout Europe, and Nina, o sia La pazza per amore (Nina, or the love-distressed maid) of 1789, possibly the most popular of all his operas. The first was based on the first of the famous trilogy of plays by the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, a cycle that four years later became the inspiration for Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and in 1816 Rossini's version of Il barbiere, which finally eclipsed the setting by Paisiello. Nina also has a French source: the story of a much-loved heroine who loses her mind when she believes her lover to have been killed in a duel is typical of sentimental comic opera, its melodies suffused with a memorable, gentle warmth. Paisiello's serious operas have tended to be dismissed as lacking in depth, but he was a great admirer of Pietro Metastasio, the great librettist of opera seria and later in his career set a number of his books, including such oft-set texts as Olimpiade (Naples, 1786), and Didone abbandonata (Naples, 1794).

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