Gaspare Pacchierotti

Gaspare Pacchierotti (21 May 1740 – 28 October 1821) was a mezzo-soprano castrato, and one of the most famous singers of his time.

Details of his early life are scarce. It is possible that he studied with Mario Bittoni, maestro di cappella in the cathedral of his home city, Fabriano. Under the stage name of Porfirio Pacchierotti, he made his début in Baldassare Galuppi's opera Le nozze di Dorina at the Teatro dei Nobili in Perugia during the carnival season of 1759, playing, as young castrati often did, a female role: Livietta. He made further appearances under his assumed name in Venice (1764) and Innsbruck (1765). On this latter occasion he sang Acronte in Hasse's Romolo ed Ersilia on the occasion of the marriage of Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine, future Grand Duke of Tuscany and Holy Roman Emperor, and the Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain. Here, for the first time, he encountered the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni, then at the height of his career.

By the late 1760s Pacchierotti was well established in Venice, both as an opera singer and member of the choir of St Mark's, where Galuppi was Director of Music. His first success as primo uomo (lead male singer) was in that composer's Il re pastore, in which he first sang the role of Agenore at the Teatro San Benedetto, Venice, in the summer of 1769. In that city he also received further vocal tuition from Ferdinando Bertoni, the composer and singing teacher, who became a lifelong friend.

In 1770, he was at Palermo, where he sang alongside the famous and notoriously capricious soprano, Caterina Gabrielli, whose every feat of virtuosity he not only equalled but so far surpassed that he earned that redoubtable lady's admiration. The following year saw him performing at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, perhaps the most famous opera house in Italy at this time. Here he remained for some five years, performing in twenty operas. His prima donna was often Anna de Amicis, and soon their respective adoring fans caused the sparks to fly. One supporter of the soprano, an officer in the Royal Guard called Francesco Ruffo, saw fit to insult Pacchierotti publicly, and a duel was fought as a result. Because of Ruffo's royal connection (and also because, as a nobleman, he was immune from prosecution), the poor singer spent several days in prison, but apparently the noble youth himself obtained his release. There is another version of this story in which Ruffo was the lover (cavalier servente) of a certain Marchesa Santa Marca, who had become infatuated with Pacchierotti on hearing him sing in Schuster's Didone abbandonata. His honour insulted, Ruffo again challenged the singer to a duel, and this time it was none other than the King of Naples who ordered Gaspare to be released from prison.

After such adventures, it is hardly surprising that Pacchierotti left Naples in 1776, never to sing there again. For the next fifteen years he worked in northern Italy, especially Milan, Venice, Genoa, Padua and Turin. In Milan, he famously appeared at the inauguration of the Teatro alla Scala on 3 August 1778, taking the protagonist's role of Asterio in Europa riconosciuta by Antonio Salieri. While appearing at Venice in 1785, he sang at the funeral of his old patron Galuppi, remarking that "I sang very devoutly indeed to obtain a quiet for his soul".

Pacchierotti also visited London on several occasions between 1778 and 1791. There he was universally adored, perhaps even more by real opera cognoscenti than by the public in general. One of the former, Lord Mount Edgcumbe, left a detailed description of the singer's many merits:

Pacchierotti's voice was an extensive soprano, full and sweet in the highest degree: his powers of execution were great, but he had far too good taste and good sense to make a display of them where it would have been misapplied, ... conscious that the chief delight of singing and his own supreme excellence lay in touching expression and exquisite pathos. Yet he was so thorough a musician that nothing came amiss to him; every style was to him equally easy, and he could sing, at first sight, all songs of the most opposite characters, not merely with the facility and correctness which a complete knowledge of music must give, but entering at once into the views of the composer, and giving them all the spirit and expression he had designed. Such was his genius in his embellishments and cadences, that their variety was inexhaustible. ... As an actor, with many disadvantages of person ... he was nevertheless forcible and impressive ... His recitative was inimitably fine, so that even those who did not understand the language could not fail to comprehend, from his countenance, voice and action, every sentiment he expressed. As a concert singer, and particularly in private society, he shone almost more than on the stage ... he was a worthy and good man, modest and diffident to a fault ... He was unpresuming in his manners, grateful and attached to all his numerous friends and patrons.

During his visits to London, Pacchierotti mainly performed in operas by his friend Bertoni, now well known as a composer in the genre. In spite of the "many disadvantages of person" remarked on by Mount Edgcumbe, the singer continued to have ladies fall in love with him, notably Susanna Burney, daughter of the music historian Charles Burney, who described his singing as "divine". Known as "sweet Pacc" to Susanna and her sister Fanny (herself a well-known author and later Madame d'Arblay), he also earned their respect during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780 by refusing to remove his name from his door and, though an Italian Catholic, insisting on walking the streets openly while the mob yelled "No Popery!" As to further emotional entanglements, the notorious William Beckford wrote of one noblewoman, Lady Mary Duncan, that she was "more preciously fond" of the singer "than a she-bear of its suckling". Pacchierotti had met Beckford in 1780 at Lucca, during the young aristocrat's grand tour, and the following year he became involved in a performance marking that dissolute young nobleman's twenty-first birthday. This was of a cantata entitled Il tributo, by a fellow castrato, Venanzio Rauzzini, long settled in England, and took place at Beckford's mansion Fonthill Splendens, near Bath. The third soloist was another castrato, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, a friend of Gainsborough. On 27 May 1784 Pacchierotti sang various arias by Handel at the centenary celebrations of the composer's birth held in the London Pantheon. His last visit to London in 1791 has become famous to posterity for his numerous performances of Haydn's cantata Arianna a Naxos to the composer's own piano accompaniment.