Gaetano Guadagni
Encyclopedia
Gaetano Guadagni was an Italian mezzo-soprano
Mezzo-soprano
A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...

 castrato
Castrato
A castrato is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.Castration before puberty prevents a boy's...

 singer, most famous for singing the role of Orpheus at the premiere of Gluck's opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 Orfeo ed Euridice
Orfeo ed Euridice
Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck based on the myth of Orpheus, set to a libretto by Ranieri de' Calzabigi. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, meaning an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing...

in 1762.

Career

Born at Lodi, Guadagni joined the cappella of Sant'Antonio in Padua
Padua
Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

 in 1746, but also made his public operatic debut at Venice that year, which did not meet with ecclesiastical approval: he was dismissed from his position in Padua by 1748, and soon after appeared in London as a member of Giovanni Francesco Crosa ("Dr Croza")'s buffo (comic) company. He does not appear to have had the typical rigorous training that most castrati undertook (see castrato
Castrato
A castrato is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.Castration before puberty prevents a boy's...

), which may account for his being described by the music historian Charles Burney
Charles Burney
Charles Burney FRS was an English music historian and father of authors Frances Burney and Sarah Burney.-Life and career:...

 as a "wild and careless singer" on his arrival in England. He was rapidly taken up in theatrical and musical circles in the capital, and also acquired a reputation for non-artistic activities, as did many castrati. This was reported by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann
Sir Horace Mann, 1st Baronet
Sir Horace Mann, 1st Baronet KB , diplomat, was a long standing British resident in Florence.-Biography:...

 dated 23 March 1749:

For performances in 1750 Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....

 rewrote three arias in Messiah
Messiah (Handel)
Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel, with a scriptural text compiled by Charles Jennens from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and received its London premiere nearly a year later...

for him, the first, "But who may abide", being particularly adapted to a castrato's bravura technique (which he clearly had acquired by this date). Handel had previously set this text as recitative, and then as a comparatively gentle minuet
Minuet
A minuet, also spelled menuet, is a social dance of French origin for two people, usually in 3/4 time. The word was adapted from Italian minuetto and French menuet, and may have been from French menu meaning slender, small, referring to the very small steps, or from the early 17th-century popular...

 in triple time throughout. Both of these were for bass voice: for Guadagni, as well as transposing the first section up an octave, Handel wrote a new, virtuosic setting of the text "For he is like a refiner's fire", especially exploiting the singer's fine low notes. Guadagni also took part in revivals of Samson
Samson (oratorio)
Samson is a three-act oratorio by George Frideric Handel, considered one of his finest dramatic works. It is usually performed as an oratorio in concert form, but on occasions has also been staged as an opera...

 (for which Handel reworked a part originally written for Susannah Cibber), Judas Maccabeus, Belshazzar and Esther. The one role that Guadagni actually created for Handel was Didymus in Theodora
Theodora (Handel)
Theodora is an oratorio in three acts by George Frideric Handel, set to an English libretto by Thomas Morell. The oratorio concerns the Christian martyr Theodora and her Christian-converted Roman lover, Didymus....

. Where Messiah had exploited his virtuosity in rapid passage work, this new role gave him, at the beginning of the aria "The raptur'd soul", a fine opportunity to display his "artful manner of diminishing his voice like the dying notes of an Aeolian harp", as Burney described it. The latter also claimed to have helped Guadagni with his English, saying that, "during his first residence in London he was more noticed in singing English than Italian". In 1755, he was engaged by David Garrick
David Garrick
David Garrick was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer who influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice throughout the 18th century and was a pupil and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson...

 to sing in an English opera The Fairies by Handel's sometime amanuensis, John Christopher Smith, and the famous actor, again according to Burney, "took much pleasure in forming him". At this time his voice was described by Burney as a "full and well-toned countertenor
Countertenor
A countertenor is a male singing voice whose vocal range is equivalent to that of a contralto, mezzo-soprano, or a soprano, usually through use of falsetto, or far more rarely than normal, modal voice. A pre-pubescent male who has this ability is called a treble...

 (here meaning that his range matched that of the contemporary English voice of that name; however, the historian was mistaken in his perception that Guadagni's voice changed from alto to soprano in later life). Burney also remarked on unusual details in the manner of Guadagni's performance: "attitudes, action and impassioned and exquisite manner of singing the simple and ballad-like air Che farò [in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, see below], acquired his very great and just applause".

In Italy he had further great success in the years 1756 to 1761, being admired as much for his singing as his acting, though was often in trouble with impresarios: "he rarely does his duty" was the complaint, probably meaning that he would not curry favour with audiences, neither bowing to acknowledge applause, nor being willing to repeat arias. In his desire thus to maintain dramatic unity, he was an ideal interpreter for the role of Orpheus in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, which he premiered in Vienna on 5 October 1762 . This opera, to a libretto by Calzabigi
Ranieri de' Calzabigi
Ranieri de' Calzabigi was an Italian poet and librettist, most famous for his collaboration with the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck on his "reform" operas....

, marked the start of Gluck's reforms of opera seria
Opera seria
Opera seria is an Italian musical term which refers to the noble and "serious" style of Italian opera that predominated in Europe from the 1710s to c. 1770...

, in which the composer moved away from the more usual type of serious Italian opera then current, epitomised by the operas of composers like Vivaldi and Hasse
Johann Adolph Hasse
Johann Adolph Hasse was an 18th-century German composer, singer and teacher of music. Immensely popular in his time, Hasse was best known for his prolific operatic output, though he also composed a considerable quantity of sacred music...

 in their settings of the libretti of Metastasio
Metastasio
Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi, better known by his pseudonym of Metastasio, was an Italian poet and librettist, considered the most important writer of opera seria libretti.-Early life:...

. Guadagni sang in other "reform operas": Orestes in Traetta
Tommaso Traetta
Tommaso Michele Francesco Saverio Traetta was an Italian composer.-Biography:Traetta was born in Bitonto, a town near Bari, near the top of the heel of the boot of Italy. He eventually became a pupil of the composer, singer and teacher Nicola Porpora in Naples, and scored a first success with his...

's Ifigenia in Tauride (1763), and the title role in another of Gluck's operas, Telemaco (1765). He also continued to sing in Metastasian roles by composers such as Jommelli and Gassmann, and by Gluck himself. By 1767, his expressive, yet inherently simple style was finding much less favour with opera-goers than the more typical florid singing of his contemporaries.

In the summer of 1769, he made his last visit to London, and became embroiled in the financial problems involving his impresario, the Honourable George Hobart, manager of the King's Theatre, Haymarket, who also offended the singer by hiring one Zamperina (his then mistress) in preference to Guadagni's own sister. Eventually Guadagni left the company there, and took part in unlicensed performances of Mattia Vento's Artaserse, sponsored by the former singer Theresa Cornelys at her home, Carlisle House
Carlisle House, Soho
Carlisle House was the name of two late seventeenth-century mansions in Soho, London, on opposite sides of Soho Square. One, at the end of Carlisle Street, is sometimes incorrectly said to have been designed by Christopher Wren; it was destroyed in the Blitz...

, in Soho Square: for these he was fined £50, and threatened with Bridewell Prison, and maybe another whipping. His performances in London in the season of 1770-71 included a pasticcio version of Gluck's Orfeo, with additional music by Johann Christian Bach
Johann Christian Bach
Johann Christian Bach was a composer of the Classical era, the eleventh and youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is sometimes referred to as 'the London Bach' or 'the English Bach', due to his time spent living in the British capital...

, Pietro Antonio Guglielmi, and one aria arranged by Guadagni himself.

By 1773, the singer had fallen in with the blue-stocking Maria Antonia of Bavaria, Dowager Electress of Saxony, and had followed her to Munich. Here Burney encountered him again, and reports fascinatingly on his ability to sing perfectly in tune: so exact was his intonation in duets with his fellow castrato Venanzio Rauzzini that their singing generated "difference tones". He sang further settings of the Orpheus story by Antonio Tozzi
Antonio Tozzi
Antonio Tozzi was an Italian opera composer.He was born at Bologna, Italy. He studied with Padre Martini and became a member of the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna in 1761. His first opera Tigrane, was performed in Venice in 1762. His La morte di Dimone of 1763 was an early opera semiseria. In...

 (1775) and Ferdinando Bertoni
Ferdinando Bertoni
Ferdinando Bertoni was an Italian composer and organist.He was born in Salò, and began his music studies in Brescia, not far from his birthplace. Around 1740 he went to Bologna, where he studied till 1745 with the famous music theorist Giovanni Battista Martini...

 (1776), which by no means continued the reformist tendencies of Gluck.

Retirement

Guadagni retired to Padua, where he became something of an institution, renowned for his prodigal generosity: during his career he had amassed a large fortune, and he now built himself a splendid house in the city. Having rejoined the cappella of the church of San Antonio in 1768, he remained a member until his death, at an annual salary of four hundred ducats. For this, as Burney remarked, he was "required to attend only at the four principal festivals". His last operatic role was Deucalion in Deucalione e Pirra by Antonio Calegari (1781). Lord Mount Edgcumbe
Richard Edgcumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe
Richard Edgcumbe, 2nd Earl of Mount Edgcumbe PC , styled Viscount Valletort between 1789 and 1795, was a British politician and writer on music.-Background:...

heard him in 1784: "I had the good fortune to hear a motetto, or anthem, sung by Guadagni … He was now advanced in years … his voice was still full and well toned, and his style appeared to me excellent." By this time, Guadagni had become fond of singing Orfeo behind the scenes, with the action represented by puppets.

Sometime between 1785 and 1787 he suffered a stroke that rendered him incapable of speech, and for some time severely affected his ability to sing. His return to some public notice was an emotional occasion: "… at mass, the musico Guadagni came to sing from devotion, and without payment … this was about eight months after his attack, but he also wished to sing; and he sang the versetto "Qui tollis peccata mundi" in the Gloria to the great admiration of the public, who applauded him."
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