Giusto Fernando Tenducci (c.1736-1790)
- Sonata in D, No.4 (1768)
World Premiere Recording
Performers: Sibelius + Harpsichord samples (edited by Pau NG)
Painting: Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) - Portrait de Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci tenant une partition
Further info: Sheet music
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Italian soprano castrato and composer. He made his début in Cagliari in
1750, during the wedding festivities of the Duke of Savoy. After
appearing both in minor roles and in comic opera in Milan, Naples,
Venice, Dresden and Munich, in 1758 he went to London, where he spent
two seasons at the King’s Theatre and sang in Cocchi’s Ciro riconosciuto
as secondo uomo. His extravagant living led to a short spell in a
debtors’ prison in 1760, but in 1762 he created Arbaces in Arne’s
Artaxerxes, subsequently appearing in the première of J.C. Bach’s
Adriano in Siria (1765). He visited Dublin in 1765 and the following
year (despite some scandal) married Dora Maunsell, the daughter of a
Dublin lawyer. Her relations were outraged; Tenducci was jailed and his
wife kidnapped, though Casanova claimed the couple had two children.
Tenducci spent a year or more in Edinburgh before returning in 1770 to
London, where he sang in a pasticcio of Gluck’s Orfeo and was
responsible for popularizing ‘Che farò’. Impressed with ‘Scotch’ songs,
he persuaded his friend J.C. Bach to arrange some for insertion into
English operas, a practice which was then widely adopted by other
composers, notably Linley in The Duenna. Tenducci left England and
returned to Italy until 1776 (repeating Orfeo in Florence), and then
appeared in London (1777-85), Paris (1777) and Dublin (1783-4). Smollett
described his voice as particularly lyrical and the ABCDario Musico
(Bath, 1780) compared him with Gioacchino Conti; he was widely known as
another Senesino. He adapted several operas, but none was very
successful; his singing tutor Instruction of Mr Tenducci to his Scholars
(London, 1782) is of more lasting value.
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