The perfection of craft training in the neapolitan Conservatories

In the course of the eighteenth century, the four conservatories in Naples trained hundreds of future composers. More importantly, they produced perhaps three-fourths of the composers then most famous across Europe. Toward the end of that line came Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851), who finished his training just before a decade of economic upheaval and political revolution led to the collapse of the old conservatories in the early nineteenth century.