Output details

Castrati and impresarios in London: two mid-eighteenth-century lawsuits

This, the first detailed study of common-law litigation by a musicologist, demonstrates the potential of certain documentary sources that have long been dismissed as formulaic and arcane. Two important cases of breach of contract involving castrati and their employers in London discovered by the author provide invaluable data about rates of remuneration and working conditions in the capital’s opera houses around the mid-century. The King’s Bench case between Charles Sackville, director of the Italian opera at the King’s Theatre and Angelo Maria Monticelli, confirms Horace Walpole’s testimony that the impresario paid his singers enormous salaries. Carole Taylor’s account of Sackville’s financial demise during 1739–45 deals with the issue from a managerial standpoint; in focusing attention on Monticelli’s suit (1748), my article sees events from the singer’s perspective. New evidence from Giuseppe Manfredini v. Geminiani (1751) provides another piece in the incomplete jigsaw that is Italian opera in London c.1750. Taken in context, it suggests that Geminiani considered using the Little Theatre in the Haymarket as an alternative venue for opera seria while opera buffa played at the King’s. The Manfredini suit not only illuminates the career of a singer/composer whose presence in England has hitherto gone virtually unnoticed, it also explores a little-known aspect of Geminiani’s activities as a would-be opera impresario, and demonstrates how he unscrupulously invoked the notorious 1737 Licensing Act in an attempt to shirk his contractual obligations. This study opens a new interface of music with the law, as a source for the history of the theatrical, operatic and concert life of 18c. London.