Francesco Borosini (1695 – after 1747) was an

Italian opera Italian opera is both the art of opera in Italy and opera in the Italian language. Opera was in Italy around the year 1600 and Italian opera has continued to play a dominant role in the history of the form until the present day. Many famous ope ...

singer. Although usually described as a

tenor A tenor is a type of male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. Composers typically write music for this voice in the range from the second B below m ...

, he had an extraordinarily wide vocal range spanning

bass Bass or Basses may refer to: Fish * Bass (fish), various saltwater and freshwater species Wood * Bass or basswood, the wood of the tilia americana tree Music * Bass (sound), describing low-frequency sound or one of several instruments in th ...

to tenor. He was known not only for the quality of his singing but for his skill as an actor. Borosini created numerous leading roles in the operas of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti and

Johann Joseph Fux Johann Joseph Fux (; – 13 February 1741) was an Austrian composer, music theorist and pedagogue of the late Baroque era. His most enduring work is not a musical composition but his treatise on counterpoint, '' Gradus ad Parnassum'', which ha ...

at the imperial court in Vienna and was the first great Italian tenor to appear in London.Grout, Donald and Williams, Hermine Weigel (2003)
''A Short History of Opera''
4th edition, p. 234. Columbia University Press. Macy, Laura Williams (ed.) (2008)
''The Grove Book of Opera Singers''
p. 54. Oxford University Press. Borosini was born in

Modena Modena (, ; ; ; ; ) is a city and ''comune'' (municipality) on the south side of the Po Valley, in the Province of Modena, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. It has 184,739 inhabitants as of 2025. A town, and seat of an archbis ...

and was schooled in singing by his father, Antonio Borosini, a tenor and composer active in

Venice Venice ( ; ; , formerly ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 islands that are separated by expanses of open water and by canals; portions of the city are li ...

and Modena who later became a singer at the imperial court in Vienna. Francesco is thought to have made his debut in 1709 in Venice singing in

Antonio Lotti Antonio Lotti (5 January 1667 – 5 January 1740) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. Biography Lotti was born in Venice, although his father Matteo was ''Kapellmeister'' at Hanover at the time. Oral tradition says that in 1682, Lotti be ...

's ''Il vincitor generoso''. Like his father, he was appointed as a singer to the Viennese imperial court and performed there from 1711 until 1731 with intermittent sojourns to Italy and London where he worked closely with Handel. He created the role of Bajazet in Handel's ''

Tamerlano ''Tamerlano'' (Tamerlane, HWV 18) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The Italian libretto was by Nicola Francesco Haym, adapted from Agostino Piovene's ''Tamerlano'' together with another libretto entitled ''Bajazet'' a ...

'', one of several which the composer wrote or rewrote expressly for Borosini's voice. Borosini was married to the soprano Rosa Borosini who often appeared with him in operas and oratorios in Vienna. Rosa retired from singing in 1740 and died in Vienna in 1761. The exact date and place of Francesco's death are unknown.Boisits, Barbar
"Borosini, Familie"
''

Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon The ''Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon'Oesterreichisch'' with ''Oe'' is the spelling of the print and online output. (, ) is a five-volume music encyclopedia founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Commission for Music Research. It was offic ...

''. Online version retrieved 29 January 2017 .

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Borosini, Francesco 1690s births 1747 deaths Musicians from Modena Italian operatic tenors 18th-century Italian male opera singers