ABSTRACT
Giuseppe Sarti's great contribution to Russian music, his extravert nature, public displays of temperament and talent, all stimulated intense Russian interest in his activities. As a highly enlightened statesman, Prince Gregory Potemkin must have realized that one of the contradictions of eighteenth-century Russia was that of the drastic disproportion between its grand size and the small number of cultural institutions, which were, mostly concentrated in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Domenico Cimarosa had been invited to St. Petersburg to replace Sarti at the advice of the Duke of Serra-Capriola, the Ambassador to Russia of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Sarti must have enjoyed the limited patronage of Count Sheremetev, although in the well-preserved Sheremetev archives there is no direct evidence that Sarti ever served at his court as a kapellmeister. Sarti continued to teach the Imperial children. Sarti's choral texture was mostly based on chorale setting, without any noticeable leaning to polyphony or homophony.
