Giusto Fernando Tenducci, sometimes called "il Senesino" (c.1735 – 25 January 1790), was a male soprano (castrato)

opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...

singer and

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

, who passed his career partly in Italy but chiefly in the United Kingdom.

Biography

Born in

Siena Siena ( , ; traditionally spelled Sienna in English; ) is a city in Tuscany, in central Italy, and the capital of the province of Siena. It is the twelfth most populated city in the region by number of inhabitants, with a population of 52,991 ...

in about 1735, Tenducci became a castrato and he was trained at the Naples Conservatory. Castration was illegal in both church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses. In 1753, when he was about seventeen, Tenducci made his professional opera appearance in Venice, as Gasparo in Ferdinando Bertoni's ''Ginevra''. In 1757 and 1758, he was active at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. From 1758 he was in London, where he was first heard at the King's Theatre. He sang an aria by the castrato Caffarelli in Baldassare Galuppi's ''Attalo'', and the following year he was singing in Gioacchino Cocchi's ''Ciro riconosciuto''. He was still singing as "second man" but Charles Burney thought he was the best. He spent eight months in a debtors prison, but by 1764 he was back at the King's Theatre where he befriended Johann Christian Bach, singing the title role in the latter's new opera ''Adriano in Siria'', opposite Giovanni Manzuoli as the "primo uomo" (leading male singer). He then moved to Ireland, singing and also arranging operas for the Smock Alley Theatre. In 1765, in Dublin he met Dorothea Maunsell whom he married in 1766. In 1768, he returned to London from Edinburgh where he remained for almost the rest of his life. He taught singing to

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...

in Paris in 1777–8. Impressed with his teacher's singing abilities, Mozart wrote a concert aria for him which is now lost (K. 315b). He returned to Italy just months before his death in January 1790 in Genoa.

Marriage: 1766–1772

Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a licence granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. In 1772, those marriages were later annulled on the grounds of non-consummation or impotence, which was one of the few grounds that women could use to sue for divorce. However, Giacomo Casanova claimed in his autobiography that Dorothea gave birth to two children. His subsequent biographer Helen Berry was unable to corroborate this claim and suggested that they may have been the children of Dorothea's second husband, Robert Long Kingsman. Two portraits of Tenducci were painted by

Thomas Gainsborough Thomas Gainsborough (; 14 May 1727 (baptised) – 2 August 1788) was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists o ...

. One is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, the other was sold from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent.

Appearance in literature

In 1766, Tenducci sang the part of Arbaces in Arne's opera '' Artaxerxes'' in Dublin, delighting the public by "his exquisite singing of the air 'Water parted from the Sea'". A group known as the "frolicsome Dublin boys" sang a song about him: "Tenducci was a piper's son/ and he was in love when he was young,/ and all the tunes that he could play/ was Water parted from the say."

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...

quoted and parodied that song in ''

Finnegans Wake ''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish literature, Irish writer James Joyce. It was published in instalments starting in 1924, under the title "fragments from ''Work in Progress''". The final title was only revealed when the book was publishe ...

'', II.3. Tenducci is mentioned in Robert Fergusson's poem "The Canongate Playhouse in Ruins"; while in Edinburgh, Tenducci sang three songs with lyrics by Fergusson.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Tenducci, Giusto Fernando 1730s births 1790 deaths Year of birth uncertain 18th-century Italian male musicians 18th-century Italian composers Castrati Italian male composers Italian opera singers Musicians from Siena

Biography

Marriage: 1766–1772

Appearance in literature

Further reading

References

External links