Senesino - operatic castrato

Sienese singer who worked with composer Handel

The castrato singer Senesino was one of the
highest paid performers in 18th century London

The acclaimed contralto castrato singer Senesino, who enjoyed a long professional relationship with the composer George Frideric Handel, died on this day in 1758 in Siena.

During the 18th century, when opera’s popularity was at its height, the castrati singers - male singers castrated as boys to preserve their prepubescent vocal range - were the highest paid members of the cast and the likes of Carlo Broschi, who sang under the stage name Farinelli, Giovanni Carestini (“Cusanino”), Gaetano Majorano ("Caffarelli") and Gaspare Pacchierotti were the genre’s first superstars.

Senesino could be added to that list.  When he made his first appearance for Handel in his three-act opera Radamisto in 1720 his salary was reported as between 2000 and 3000 guineas, which today would be worth around £250,000 to £365,000 (€280,000-€400,000).

Born Francesco Bernardi in 1686, Senesino took his name from his home town, Siena. His father was a barber in the Tuscan city.

He joined the choir of Siena’s Duomo - the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta - in 1695 and was castrated at the comparatively late age of 13. He made his stage debut in Venice in 1707, and over the next decade his reputation and salary grew exponentially.

A magazine illustration of Senesino on stage with the
sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni

Although his acting skills were sometimes mocked by the critics, acclaim for his voice was universal.  One composer with whom he worked described it as “a powerful, clear, equal and sweet contralto voice, with a perfect intonation and an excellent shake. His manner of singing was masterly and his elocution unrivalled.”

Senesino was engaged by Handel as primo uomo (lead male singer) in his company, the Royal Academy of Music, in London in 1720.

He would stay in England for much of the next 16 years, along the way becoming a prominent figure in London society, numbering the Duke of Chandos, Lord Burlington and the landscape designer William Kent among his friends. He embraced English culture, amassing a collection of paintings, rare books, scientific instruments and other treasures.

At his peak, Senesino was so popular he would sometimes upstage the great rival Italian sopranos of the era, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, who were also employed by Handel’s company.

Handel created 17 leading roles for Senesino, among them Giulio Cesare, Andronico in Tamerlano, Bertarido in Rodelinda, Floridante and Ottone.

Senesino had a reputation for being touchy
and full of professional vanity

Yet their relationship was often stormy.  Senesino was touchy, vain and insolent, full of professional vanity and with a love of intrigue.  He would frequently test Handel’s patience.

They split for the first time in 1728 following the break-up of the Royal Academy, although after singing for a while in Paris and Venice, Senesino rejoined Handel in 1730, singing in four more new operas and several oratorios.

Yet their relationship was little better and when the Neapolitan Nicola Porpora arrived in London in 1733 to be chief composer at the rival company, Opera of the Nobility, Senesino was lured away for good.

In his new position, he sang alongside the aforementioned Farinelli, who is regarded as the finest soprano castrato of all time.

Senesino ended his career in England in 1736. He continued to perform in Italy before deciding to retire in 1740, by which time the opera-going public had new favourites and saw his style as somewhat dated. He made his final appearance in Porpora's Il trionfo di Camilla at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.

He returned to Siena, where he used his wealth to build a handsome town house. It was stocked with furniture imported from England. In fact, he lived as much as he could like an English gentleman. Tea was his preferred drink, he employed a black servant, as was popular in England during his time there, and amused himself with pets that were fashionable in London, including a monkey and a parrot.

The shell-shaped Piazza del Campo in Siena is regarded as
one of Europe's most beautiful medieval squares

Travel tip:

At the centre of Siena is the shell-shaped Piazza del Campo, established in the 13th century as an open marketplace on a sloping site between the three communities that eventually merged to form Siena. It is regarded as one of Europe's finest medieval squares, looked over by the Palazzo Pubblico and the Torre del Mangia.  The red brick paving, fanning out from the centre in nine sections, was put down in 1349. It has become famous as the scene of the historic horse race, the Palio di Siena.

Siena's magnificent Duomo, where Senesino sang as a boy.
is a masterpiece of Italian Romanesque architecture

Travel tip:

Siena’s Duomo - the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption - was designed and completed between 1215 and 1263 on the site of an earlier structure. It has a beautiful façade built in Tuscan Romanesque style using polychrome marble. There had been plans to build an enormous basilica, which would have been the largest in the world, but the idea was abandoned because of lack of funds due to war and the plague. Nonetheless, the cathedral built in its place, with a pulpit designed by Nicola Pisani, is considered a masterpiece of Italian Romanesque-Gothic architecture.



More reading:

Why Farinelli was music's first superstar

When Cuzzoni and Bordino came to blows on stage

How Nicola Porpora died impoverished

Also on this day:

8BC: The death of the Roman poet Horace

1570: The death of the architect Jacopo Sansovino

1964: The birth of former soccer player and Italy coach Roberto Mancini


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Francesca Cuzzoni - operatic soprano

Diva who came to blows with rival on stage

Francesca Cuzzoni, depicted in an 18th century engraving
by the English artist James Caldwall

Francesca Cuzzoni, an 18th century star whose fiery temper earned her a reputation as one of opera’s great divas, was born on this day in 1696 in Parma.

Described rather unkindly by one opera historian of the era as “short and squat, with a doughy face” she was nonetheless possessed of a beautiful soprano voice, which became her passport to stardom.

However, she was also notoriously temperamental and jealous of rival singers, as was illustrated by several incidents that took place while she was in the employment of George Frideric Handel, the German composer who spent much of his working life in London.

Already established as one of the finest sopranos in Europe, Cuzzoni was hired by Handel in 1722.

Handel at that time was Master of the Orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music, the company set up by a group of English aristocrats to stage Baroque opera, partly for their own entertainment but also as a commercial enterprise.  One of his responsibilities was to engage the soloists for the company’s productions.

He ran into immediate trouble with Cuzzoni, who was due to make her debut in Handel’s own Italian language opera Ottone at the King’s Theatre in Haymarket.  On discovering that her part had been written originally with another singer in mind, one whose services the composer had been unable to secure, she is reputed to have refused to perform, coming into line only when Handel allegedly picked her up by the waist and threatened to throw her out of a window.

Cuzzoni (right) and Faustina Bordoni (left) were fierce
rivals notoriously involved in an on-stage fight

In the event, her interpretation of the role was hailed as a triumph and she soon became a star, her performances winning her an army of fans and enabling her to demand a handsome salary of £2,000 a season, which in today’s money would be the equivalent of about £250,000.

Opera’s popularity soared, despite the company jacking up ticket prices eightfold, and Handel was instructed to recruit more stars to satisfy demand.

Cuzzoni, though, was said to be furious, particularly when she learned that one of the new arrivals was Faustina Bordoni, a Venetian soprano who was much more attractive than she and who had been a rival in Italy.

Fanned by the press, their rivalry extended to the stalls and boxes, where opera-goers raucously supported their favourite and sometimes openly booed the other singer. Matters came to a head when they were cast to appear alongside one another in a performance of Giovanni Bononcini’s opera Astianatte.

Despite the presence in the audience of the Princess of Wales, rival factions took turns to jeer and catcall whenever one or the other began to sing and when the two singers appeared on the stage together a fight broke out in the stalls.

On stage, Cuzzoni is alleged to have turned on Bordoni, sparking an exchange of insults. Soon they were said to have begun pulling at each other’s hair and tearing pieces from their costumes. After they were separated, the performance was abandoned.

George Frideric Handel engaged Cuzzoni
to sing with the Royal Academy of Music

In fact, the remainder of the season was cancelled and Cuzzoni was told to leave, only to be reinstated following the direct intervention of the King. An uneasy truth allowed the next season to go ahead but the company wanted rid of Cuzzoni. Eventually it was decided that Bordoni would be offered more money, at which Cuzzoni resigned in a fit of pique and left first for Vienna and then Italy.

She returned to London in 1734, this time at the invitation of a rival company to Handel’s, although she did not make the same impact, her thunder stolen to an extent by the presence in the company of the superstar castrato, Farinelli.

Nonetheless, Cuzzoni continued to prosper until the 1740s, when the quality of her voice began to decline and her extravagant lifestyle found her increasingly in debt. At one point she was arrested in London over a debt of £30 and released from prison after the Prince of Wales paid her bail.

After a final concert in 1751, which was prefaced by a rather sad appeal for support published in her name by the General Advertiser, she returned to Italy for a final time.  She is said to have then eked out a living of sorts by making buttons. She died in virtual poverty in Bologna in 1778.

The Palazzo di Riserva in Parma, where Cuzzoni is
thought to have made her opera debut in 1714

Travel tip:

Cuzzoni, whose father was a professsional violinist,  made her stage debut in Parma in 1714, probably at the Teatro Ducale inside the Palazzo di Riserva, a neoclassical palace in what is now the Strada Giuseppe Garibaldi.  The theatre was replaced in the 19th century by the Nuovo Teatro Ducale, which was built on the site of a former monastery next to the Ducal Palace. Subsequently renamed the Teatro Regio di Parma, the house grew in prominence thanks to the fame of Giuseppe Verdi, who was born in nearby Busseto, and is nowadays regarded as one of Italy’s great opera houses, less well known but on a par with La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice.

Parma's pink marble Baptistery is one of
many attractive buildings in the city

Travel tip:

A university city in the Emilia-Romagna region, with a population of almost 200,000, Parma is famous for Grana Parmigiana (Parmesan) cheese and Prosciutto di Parma ham, as well as a wealth of Romanesque architecture, including a cathedral containing acclaimed frescoes by Antonio da Correggio, and a pink marble Baptistery next door. More works by Correggio - and by Canaletto - are displayed at the Galleria Nazionale inside Palazzo della Pilotta.

More reading:

Why Farinelli, the 18th century castrato, was music's first superstar

How Francesco Gemianini, a Tuscan violinist, came to accompany Handel in playing for the English court

Pietro Metastasio, the most celebrated librettist of the 18th century

Also on this day:

1725: The birth of 18th century playboy Giacomo Casanova

1959: The birth of Olympic marathon champion Gelindo Borodin


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Farinelli – music’s first superstar

Castrato rated among all-time opera greats

The castrato Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, in
a 1752 painting by Jacopo Amigoni

The opera singer Carlo Broschi – better known by his stage name of Farinelli – was born on this day in 1705 in the city of Andria in what is now Apulia.

Farinelli was a castrato, a type of classical male singing voice that was enormously popular from the 16th to the 18^th century, one which had an enormous range and flexibility, a little like a female soprano but subtly different.

It was achieved through the somewhat barbaric practice of castrating a male singer before puberty, which is why there are no castrati today. Among other things, the procedure caused changes in the development of the larynx, meaning the voice effectively never breaks, and of the bones, including the ribs, which grew longer than in non-castrated boys and gave the castrato singer considerably enhanced lung power and capacity.

Although many survived and, like Farinelli, went on to enjoy a normal lifespan, the practice was hugely risky and there were many deaths not only from post-operative infections but also from overdoses of opium or other narcotic drugs administered as painkillers, or else from the compression of the carotid artery in the neck employed as a means of rendering the boy unconscious.

During the early part of the 18^th century, when castrato singers were in demand and could earn a considerable income, many poor families had their sons castrated in the hope that they would turn out to have beautiful voices that would provide the family with a route out of poverty.  Legally, a castration could be carried out only if there was a medical need, but tenuous reasons were often accepted with little argument.

Another depiction by Amigoni of the
artist in a fantasised setting

Farinelli’s story was somewhat different. His father, Salvatore Broschi, was a composer and maestro di cappella at Andria’s cathedral, and both he and Carlo’s mother, Caterina Barrese, were related to nobility. They were a well-to-do family.

Carlo had natural singing talent and, after the family had moved from Barletta, a coastal town not far from Andria, to Naples, primarily so his brother, Riccardo, could enroll at the Conservatory of Santa Maria di Loreto, he began to receive lessons from the renowned composer and voice teacher, Nicola Porpora.

There are differing versions of how he came to be castrated. One is that, after Salvatore Broschi died unexpectedly at the age of just 36 in 1717, the family suddenly faced financial insecurity and, knowing that Porpora was an especially gifted coach of castrati voices, Riccardo took the decision that Carlo should be castrated. But this is disputed by some historians, who argue that at 12 years old he was too old for the procedure to have saved his voice and that he probably underwent it earlier, while his father was alive.

Whatever the truth was, Carlo Broschi’s singing talent developed rapidly under Porpora’s tutelage and he made his stage debut at the age of 15 in one of Porpora’s own compositions, a serenata entitled Angelica e Medoro, with a libretto by the poet Pietro Trapassi, who would go on to be famous in his own right under the name of Metastasio.

It is thought Broschi adopted Farinelli as his stage name as a nod to the help provided for the family in paying for his singing lessons by the Farino brothers, who were wealthy Neapolitan lawyers and music lovers.

The cathedral at Andria, where Farinelli's father was
the maestro di cappella

Farinelli’s extraordinary voice, described by one critic as “a penetrating, full, rich, bright and well-modulated soprano voice, with a range from the A below middle C to the D two octaves above middle C”, soon made him famous across Italy and beyond.

After making his Rome debut in 1722, he sang in Vienna in 1724, then Parma and Milan in 1726, subsequently performing in Munich and again in Vienna.  In 1729, he was engaged to perform in two works by Metastasio during the carnival season in Venice, appearing at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo alongside some of the greatest singers of his time.

Audiences were large and appreciative. In addition to his handsome appearance fees, Farinelli was regularly showered with lavish gifts and acquired a wealth to go with his fame.

In 1734, he moved to London, where he was signed up by Senesino, an Italian contralto-castrato who had formed his own company, the Opera of the Nobility, performing at a theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with Porpora as a composer. 

The company paid Farinelli £1,500 per season – an enormous salary for the times and possibly swelled to £5,000 with gifts – although the sum was not sustainable in the long run and by the end of his time in London he was performing for much more modest fees.

Farinelli's tomb at the Certosa
cemetery in Bologna

When Farinelli left London in 1737, his career took a turn that removed him from the public arena for good but assured his financial security.  Summoned to Madrid by the Spanish queen, Elisabetta Farnese, in the hope that his voice might help lift her husband King Philip V, out of his depression, he was offered the position of Chamber Musician to the King.

He kept that position for 22 years, performing private concerts nightly for the royal couple and developing a still closer relationship with their successors, King Ferdinand VI and his wife, Barbara of Portugal, with whom he sang duets.

With a generous pension guaranteed, he left Spain in 1759 after Ferdinand was succeeded by Charles III, who was no music lover.  He retired to Bologna, where he had owned property since 1732, and died there in 1782, by then a rather lonely figure who had outlived most of his contemporaries.

He was buried at the Capuchin monastery of Santa Croce in Bologna and removed to the Certosa cemetery in Bologna after the monastery was destroyed during the Napoleonic wars.

Hotels in 

The Castel del Monte, outside Andria

Travel tip:

Andria, where Farinelli was born, is a city well off the usual visitor trail yet is a substantial place with a population of more than 100,000, the fourth largest municipality of the Apulia region, an important centre of the agricultural service industry and a producer of wine, olives and almonds. Situated some 60km (37 miles) northwest of the port of Bari, it is about 210km (130 miles) almost due east of Naples across the peninsula. The centre of the city is Piazza Catuma and a short distance away is Piazza Duomo, the site of a 12^th century cathedral. About 15km (10 miles) south of the city is the impressively well preserved 13^th century Castel del Monte, built by the Emperor Frederick II, who was particularly fond of the area.

Hotels in Andria by Booking.com

The Norman motte and bailey castle at Barletta

Travel tip:

Like Andria, the nearby coastal city of Barletta, where Farinelli grew up, is not a well known destination among tourists, with those who do visit the area tending to gravitate towards Trani, the attractive fishing port a few kilometres south. Yet Barletta is known for its sandy beaches to the north and south of the city and its reputation as a centre for concrete and cement production should not put off would-be visitors, who will find an attractive and historic old town and an impressive Norman castle of the traditional motte and bailey structure that was built in the 10^th century, when it served as a hostel for soldiers heading for the Holy Land during the crusades.

Stay in Barletta with Booking.com

Also on this day:

41: The assassination of Caligula

1444: The birth of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan

1916: The birth of actor Arnaldo Foà

1947: The birth of footballer Giorgio Chinaglia

1987: The birth of racing driver turned commentator Davide Valsecchi

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