Trained in Naples, Cimarosa became one of the more important composers of Italian comic opera in the last quarter of the 18th century. Cimarosa spent some years from 1787 as Maestro di Cappella to Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg and at the court of the Emperor Leopold II in Vienna in 1791, the year of Mozart's death. Cimarosa's later association with republicans in Naples led to a brief period of imprisonment before his death in Venice in 1801.