Domenico de' Panzacchi was an Italian operatic

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...

 tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

, and the first Arbace in Mozart's Idomeneo re di Creta.

Idomeneo

Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante is an Italian language opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712...

By 1780, his singing style was completely out of date, but Leopold Mozart advised his son to engage Panzacchi because he was such a good actor. He sang the title roles in Bernasconi’s Agelmondo (1760), Temistocle

Temistocle

Temistocle is an opera seria in three acts by the German composer Johann Christian Bach. The Italian text is an extensive revision of the libretto by Metastasio, by Mattia Verazi, court poet and private secretary to the Elector Palatine Carl Theodor.The opera was the first of two for the Elector...

 (1762) and Demofoonte (1766). Indeed in the role created for him Panzacchi moves very easily between fear and hope, and the role was so influential that it was imitated many times. From 1760 until he was pensioned in 1782, he was one of the highest-paid tenors in Europe.