Overview

The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. In collaboration with the English composer Thomas Arne, he popularized Italian opera, translating it for English audiences and making it accessible with his own compositions which he performed in London's pleasure gardens. Mozart and J. C. Bach both composed for him. He was a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato. Women flocked to his concerts and found him irresistible. His singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, a teenage girl from a genteel Irish family, eloped with him. There was a huge scandal; her father persecuted them mercilessly. Tenducci's wife joined him at his concerts, achieving a status as a performer she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage; whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.

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9780199655267

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Reviews

<br> A fascinating account of how masculinity, femininity and marriage were being reshaped in 18th-century Europe just when modernity was taking shape. <br>--Washington Post<br><p><br> Utterly enthralling.... Writing clearly, judiciously, and sympathetically...Berry rescues an eighteenth-century scandal from oblivion. <br>--Booklist<br><p><br> Berry deploys her considerable skills as a historian and writer to re-create with panache the world in which Dorothea and Tenducci both flourished and floundered. <br>--The Sunday Times<br><p><br>

Helen Berry's history of the famous 18th-century castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and his young wife, Dorothea, is steeped in its period, but has the natural allure of a novel. Sally Cousins, The Sunday Telegraph {Seven}

Helen Berry's history of the famous 18th-century castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and his young wife, Dorothea, is steeped in its period, but has the natural allure of a novel. * Sally Cousins, The Sunday Telegraph {Seven} *

Author Information

Helen Berry is Reader in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. She is the author of numerous articles on the history of eighteenth-century Britain, and is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Foyster) of The Family in Early Modern England (2007). This is her second book.

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