Giuseppe Maria Gioacchino Cambini (Livorno, 13 February? 1746Netherlands? 1810s? or Paris? 1825?) was an Italian composer and violinist. Life Unconfirmed information Information about his life is scarcely traceable. Louis-Gabriel Michaud, French scholar and François-Joseph Fétis, Belgian musicologist, drafted his biography, and Cambini himself speaks about his past in an article published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804. However, all of these documents are full of errors and, therefore, need to be verified. It is not possible to confirm his personal data (only Fétis indicates his date of birth), nor his first studies. It is possible he is connected in some way to father Giovanni Battista Martini, and, more possibly to Filippo Manfredi, who was almost certainly his violin teacher. Fétis wrote about his unfortunate operatic debut in Naples in 1766, after which, during his return to Livorno by the sea, Cambini was kidnapped by pirates, who treated him terribly until his liberation by a Venetian aristocrat. The narration by the Belgian holds much resemblance to a story in the poetic periodical Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, a fact that reduces its reliability. In the article found in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804, Cambini claims to have played the viola in a string quartet with Luigi Boccherini, Pietro Nardini and his teacher Manfredi for six months in 1767. If what he says is true, this quartet would represent the first formation of this emerging genre in Italy, if not in all of Europe. For many years, this information fostered a gigantic legend about the importance of the role of Cambini in defining the string quartet. Actually, he was one of the many (even if one of the most prolific) who, in the same period, contributed to the development of the genre. First years in Paris The first information that we have that is certain is his arrival in Paris at the beginning of the 1770s, where he remained for 20 years, and composed oratorios, concert compositions, as well as chamber, symphonic, and theatrical compositions (there are almost 14 operas, of which at least 12 were performed in Paris. In addition, there are some ballets that aroused the admiration of Christoph Willibald Gluck), and he performed his violin concertos (during the Concert Spirituel and the Concerts des Amateurs, managed by François-Joseph Gossec). More than 600 compositions were published with his name in the French capital until 1800 (above all by the Venier,