While the most prominent facet of Filippo Finazzi's (1705-1776) artistic personality, his successful work as a singer (soprano castrato), can only be traced today in terms of reception history, but can no longer be experienced by the senses, an assessment of his compositional significance on the basis of the surviving compositions seems entirely possible. After his Europe-wide career as a celebrated singer, Finazzi settled in Hamburg from 1745. Finazzi made a living here by teaching music and languages. In addition to the not inconsiderable esteem in which he was held by the poet Friedrich von Hagedorn, it was above all the royal Danish privy councillor and former Hamburg opera patron Bendix von Ahlefeldt (1678-1757), who patronized him and made use of his services at celebrations on his estate in Jersbek (not far from Hamburg in the Duchy of Holstein). Some of Finazzi's festive music can be attributed to this constellation.
However, the six symphonies presented here, which Finazzi had printed in 1754, were dedicated to Duke Friedrich Carl of Schleswig-Holstein-Sønderborg-Plön (1706-1761), who also granted Finazzi patronage. The composer's efforts to present different stylistic aspects of the Italian sinfonia in an entertaining way in the 18 movements are evident in these works. Stylistically, Finazzi's symphonies, although he came from the opera as a musician, are not to be classified as Italian opera sinfonia (the D major symphony, with its powerful chordal strokes, fast runs and figurative chord breaks, is most reminiscent of the noisy effects of the opera sinfonia, whose function was to announce the subsequent main work). Rather, as the dedication preface indirectly attests, they are a contribution to the type of concert symphony intended for performance in the chamber or hall, which spread throughout Europe in the 1740s and early 1750s, primarily through the work of Giovanni Battista Sammartini from Milan. They are closer to the symphonies written by the Berlin court musicians Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Franz Benda and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach or northern European composers (Johan Helmich Roman, Johann Adolph Scheibe) up to the 1750s than to the Italian examples of the genre or their further developments in Vienna and Mannheim.
