The preoccupation of public figures with their reputation is not a recent phenomenon. Myriad eighteenth-century memoirs bear witness to their authors’ desire to write their histories in order to transmit to posterity an image of their own creation. Few twenty-first-century historians would take these autobiographies without the proverbial grain of salt despite their authors’ customary protestations as to their veracity. Other ostensibly more reliable sources, however, are not always handled with the care they require. With regard to eighteenth-century musicology, a particularly important and frequently cited body of works in this context are the writings of Charles Burney. His Present State of Music in France and Italy, for instance, might appear to be a straightforward travel journal in which the author simply transferred his impressions onto the page.Footnote 1 However, as Roger Lonsdale has demonstrated, its contents are a result of careful selection and arrangement of materials arising from Burney’s agenda in publishing the volume.Footnote 2 To complicate matters, Burney may not always have fathomed the full extent of the agendas of personages who had no intention of being mere objects of description, but desired to be agents in the creation of their image. The focus of my article will be on one such person, Carlo Broschi Farinelli, whose example is particularly instructive because of the insight it offers into both Farinelli’s strategic manipulation of his reputation and Burney’s canny choices in his representation of the singer, revealing potential pitfalls of relying on ostensibly trustworthy ‘primary’ sources.
When Burney first met Farinelli and Padre Martini in Bologna in 1770, he told them that he ‘had long been ambitious of seeing two persons, become so eminent by different abilities in the same area, and that [his] chief business at Bologna was to gratify that ambition’.Footnote 3 Burney, on tour through France and Italy to gather material for his General History of Music, had good reason to want to meet both men. Farinelli he regarded as one of the most important performers in music history, and Burney was undoubtedly keen to meet him in person and obtain from him new, unpublished information, which would ‘[stamp] upon [his] intended History some marks of originality, or at least of novelty’.Footnote 4 As to Martini, Burney knew that he was in the process of writing his Storia della musica.Footnote 5 Since only its first volume had been published so far, Burney was both curious about the projected contents of the others and concerned about the positioning of his own work in relation to Martini’s, and therefore intended to speak to him before finalising his outline.Footnote 6
Martini and, though him, presumably Farinelli, too, were aware of the purpose of Burney’s visit ahead of time. However, while Martini encouraged Burney and generously gave him access to his famous library, Farinelli reacted with dejection: ‘Signor Farinelli, pointing to P. Martini, said, “What he is doing will last, but the little that I have done is already gone and forgotten.”’Footnote 7 Burney sought to convince Farinelli to the contrary, pointing out ‘that in England there were still many who remembered his performance so well, that they could bear to hear no other singer; that the whole kingdom continued to resound his fame, and I was sure tradition would hand it down to the latest posterity’.Footnote 8 But when Burney proposed:
to write his life, or, at least, to insert particulars of it in my history. ‘Ah’, says he, by a modesty rather pushed too far, ‘if you have a mind to compose a good work, never fill it with accounts of such unworthy beings as I am’.Footnote 9
While it is possible that Farinelli’s refusal to collaborate on his biography was engendered by modesty, or, perhaps, the former courtier’s habitual self-deprecation, Farinelli had a greater interest in the propagation of his fame than he seems to have cared to admit to Burney. By professing disinterestedness, Farinelli was promoting the reputation of propriety he had begun to establish more than forty years earlier.
‘It seems to me that until now, I have done myself much honour’Footnote 10
The course of Farinelli’s illustrious career was known throughout Europe. According to Quantz, it was ‘so well known that it [was] not necessary to discuss it in detail’,Footnote 11 and Arteaga stated that ‘no one could possibly be ignorant of it’.Footnote 12 Some 250 years later, however, a brief summary will provide a context for the ensuing discussion. Farinelli’s 1722 operatic debut in Rome, in the largest role in Sofonisba (Silvani–Predieri), propelled him to instant fame.Footnote 13 By 1727, he had an international reputation. His arrival in Venice in 1728 resulted in unprecedented displays of fandom, with hundreds of people following him around the Piazza di San Marco.Footnote 14 In 1734, Farinelli made a similarly sensational debut in London where he remained for three seasons. In 1737, Farinelli retired from the stage when he was offered the position of ‘Criado Familiar’ (‘personal assistant’Footnote 15) to Philip V of Spain because his singing alleviated Philip’s debilitating depression and enabled him to return to his government duties.Footnote 16 The apparently miraculous power of Farinelli’s voice and its inaccessibility to the public imbued it with a mythical quality and made the singer legendary by the 1740s. Under Philip’s successor, Ferdinand VI, Farinelli was appointed court music director and inducted into the prestigious Order of Calatrava, whose membership was restricted to nobility. Throughout Europe, he was believed to hold great political power at the Spanish court. Shortly after the ascension of Charles III, in 1760, Farinelli had to return to Italy. He spent his retirement in Bologna, continuing his correspondence with his lifelong friend Metastasio and receiving visits from European aristocrats, royalty, musicians and intellectuals until his death in 1782.Footnote 17
Farinelli began to strategically shape his public image in the late 1720s. His main aims were to establish his artistic superiority and cultivate the reputation of a gentleman. Although his singing constituted sufficient proof that he surpassed contemporary singers in virtuosity, range, breath control and volume, Farinelli made it known that he was continually expanding his technical and stylistic expertise.Footnote 18 In addition, Farinelli promoted his extraordinary agility by imitating birdsong in highly virtuosic arias whose texts make reference to songbirds, most importantly the nightingale.Footnote 19 His virtuosity, however, gave rise to the criticism that he astonished his listeners more than he touched them.Footnote 20 Given that the aim of musical tragedy, the dramma per musica (or opera seria), was to move the audience, this criticism raised questions about the validity of Farinelli’s performance at a fundamental level, prompting him to react with dramatic changes. In the second opera of the 1730 Venetian carnival, Idaspe (Candi/Lalli–R. Broschi), he began to limit virtuosic singing in his roles to one, or at the most two arias and introduced a large-scale slow, expressive aria that provided a musical counterweight to his gargantuan main aria di bravura. In this manner, he catered to admirers of both virtuosic and expressive singing. Farinelli underlined this stylistic change by starting to make strategic allusions to the Orpheus myth in several of his roles, thereby laying claim to the ancient singer’s legendary fame and power to move emotions.Footnote 21
Farinelli continued to promote his artistic reputation after his retirement from the stage. Restricting his appearances to private concerts for the Spanish royal family resulted in the impression that ‘in Spain, his performance was thought too exquisite for subjects’.Footnote 22 In 1753, by which time his virtuosity had come to be widely emulated, Farinelli compiled a unique manuscript as a gift to Empress Maria Theresa, in which he documented his vocal performance practice, thereby setting himself apart from his imitators.Footnote 23 The difficulty of the notated cadenzas and ornamentation is such that the Farinelli biographer Sandro Cappelletto plausibly suggests that the singer ‘evidently [presupposed] that no one at the Viennese court would be able to sing his variations and cadenzas’.Footnote 24 Farinelli probably expected the handsome volume to be examined by connoisseurs at the court and preserved for posterity in the imperial library. With the manuscript, Farinelli also furthered his reputation as a gentleman and courtier. It makes no reference whatsoever to his stage career; instead, the dedication invokes the empress’s memory of Farinelli’s visit to Vienna (during which Farinelli had been granted the title of Imperial Chamber Singer) and emphasises his long-standing service at the Spanish court.Footnote 25
Unlike most castrati, who came from the lower or middle classes, Farinelli descended from a family of possibly noble government officials and had the Duke of Andria as a godfather.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, he had to employ a wide range of means in order to achieve his objective of acquiring the reputation of a gentleman, due to the disrepute of the stage performer’s profession. A highly effective tool was Farinelli’s purposeful use of visual representations, which has been analysed by Berta Joncus. A 1735 portrait by Amigoni,Footnote 27 for example, ‘apotheosised the singer in a manner generally reserved for aristocratic portraiture’ and pitched him as a modern Orpheus.Footnote 28 In addition to being publically exhibited in London alongside a portrait of Queen Caroline of England, the painting was engraved to enable the dissemination of Farinelli’s ‘“official” public image’ by means of mass-produced prints.Footnote 29 The paintings of Farinelli from his Spanish period portray their subject in a similar manner.Footnote 30
On stage, Farinelli established a dramatic profile that communicated the moral values with which he wished to be associated, at the level of both roles and aria texts. Already early in his career he showed a marked preference for the roles of galant, respectful suitors and loyal friends. Starting in the late 1720s, Farinelli increasingly portrayed tragic protagonists who conduct themselves with uncompromising virtue in situations in which they are innocently accused of a crime meriting capital punishment. The two roles Farinelli sang more often than any other, Arbace in Artaserse and Epitide in Merope, both exemplify this character type.Footnote 31 Farinelli’s aria texts convey the moral integrity of his characters, who react to insult and injustice by pleading or expressing torment, sorrow or despair rather than by expressing anger, disdain, reproachfulness or vengefulness; aggressive sentiments are conspicuous by their absence. Farinelli often performed roles previously taken by other singers (as was standard in the period), but his characters were always created or adapted to his dramatic preferences by means of cuts and changes in the recitatives and the substitution or alteration of between half and all pre-existing aria texts, sometimes possibly by Farinelli himself.Footnote 32 Farinelli, Nicolini, Senesino and Carestini, for example, all sang the roles of Siroe and Ezio in different settings of Metastasio’s eponymous libretti.Footnote 33 However, the sentiments of defiance, veiled threats, pride and offence, which occur in the original aria texts and are retained by the other singers, are significantly toned down or eliminated altogether in Farinelli’s texts. Libretto alterations also served to reduce the emphasis on military heroism in Farinelli’s renditions of roles in comparison with those of other singers (in terms of both the content of aria texts and presence of on-stage battles), shifting the focus of his roles towards values such as faithfulness in love, loyalty, fortitude and forgiveness instead.
While libretto alterations conformed to the conventions of the eighteenth-century opera industry, Farinelli departed from convention in terms of his idiosyncratic manner of delivering arias, possibly in order to differentiate himself from other leading singers in visual terms.Footnote 34 Instead of acting throughout, or at least striking different poses according to the arias’ affects, he appears to have struck an ‘all-purpose’ pose for his arias, resting his left hand on his hip and his right hand on his breast. This was unusual and consequently frequently criticised or satirised.Footnote 35 So far, the general assumption has been that Farinelli simply had no talent for acting.Footnote 36 It is possible, however, that Farinelli eliminated gesture as an expressive parameter in order to focus the audience’s attention on his singing and encourage them to perceive him as a singer only, not as an actor,Footnote 37 for ‘the Public of all Countries where Theatres are established agree in the Opinion, that the Profession of an Actor is low and contemptible’.Footnote 38 As is evident from period treatises and cast lists, the term attore (actor) was commonly used to denote performers on both the operatic and the spoken stage. However, one of the most frequently used terms referring to operatic stage performers in their capacity as singers was virtuoso, which derives from virtù (virtue, ability). While the notion that Farinelli may have wanted to be perceived as a virtuoso because of the term’s literal meaning might seem pedantic or naive today, eighteenth-century writers remarked upon the discrepancy between the semantics of this term and stage performers’ morally suspect reputations. Martello, for example, opined that an opera librettist merits the title of a poet ‘as little as castrati and female singers merit that of virtuosi’.Footnote 39
Moreover, given that Farinelli ‘was a cunning negotiator of the image industry’,Footnote 40 he was probably aware that the visual impression a performer made on the stage affected the audience’s perception of both his on- and offstage persona. Cultivating a distinct persona was crucial to the success of eighteenth-century star singers,Footnote 41 so he may have wanted to differentiate himself from other leading castrati, such as Nicolini, Senesino and Carestini, who were excellent actors.Footnote 42 Farinelli certainly set himself apart by eschewing stereotypical star behaviour. No instances are recorded in which he refused to collaborate with other singers or demanded their engagement; there were no late arrivals at rehearsals or disagreements with composers. Nor did he engage in open competition with colleagues, aside from possibly once, early in his career, with Bernacchi.Footnote 43 Instead he collaborated peaceably even with singers who were notoriously difficult and competitive.Footnote 44
A strong indication of Farinelli’s desire to distance himself from his profession is given by the singer in a letter of 1738: despite his success, he could ‘not stand the draining productions, theatre environment and behaviour of the crowd’.Footnote 45 Farinelli evidently so disliked the stage that he wanted to quit it as soon as this was financially feasible. The first written evidence of this intention dates to a few weeks after his sensational London debut.Footnote 46 However, his extremely busy schedule from the late 1720s on,Footnote 47 purchase of land in Bologna in 1732, frugal spending habits and strategic saving (which are documented in his letters to Count Sicinio Pepoli, who managed his savings), all suggest that he had arrived at this resolution much earlier.Footnote 48
Whilst many singers gained the patronage of aristocrats and royalty on account of their professional abilities, Farinelli’s cultivation of a reputation of gentlemanly respectability and his – by all accounts excellent – social skills and amiable character enabled him to win and maintain their respect and personal friendship. His close association with noblemen such as Count Sicinio Pepoli and the Duke of Leeds, influential politicians such as the Marqués de la Ensenada, as well as the Spanish royal family was crucial to him attaining the reputation of a gentleman himself.Footnote 49 Farinelli’s social success was not fortuitous, but the result of the singer’s self-discipline and careful regulation of his personal conduct. His letters to Pepoli attest to his continual concern with his reputation and the pains he took to avoid giving rise to gossip.Footnote 50
‘Signor Farinelli talked over old times very freely’Footnote 51
Evidence for his concern for his reputation is provided by Farinelli’s probably intentional misidentification of the female singer seated next to him in a group painting by Amigoni of c.1750–2,Footnote 52 when he showed it to Burney, as Faustina Bordoni rather than Teresa Castellini.Footnote 53 Farinelli had engaged the little-known Castellini as seconda donna to the Spanish court theatre in 1748, had given her singing lessons and had promoted her to prima donna within two seasons. In addition to her appearances in the acclaimed opera productions directed by Farinelli, Castellini also became the most highly remunerated singer in court concerts until her return to Italy in 1756.Footnote 54 Farinelli may have concealed the identity of Castellini from other visitors, too; Count Lamberg’s list of sitters accords with Burney’s.Footnote 55 Whilst no proof for a romantic relationship between Farinelli and Castellini survives, Metastasio’s playful allusions to her in his letters, her inclusion in the group portrait, alongside Metastasio and Amigoni, two of Farinelli’s most intimate friends, as well as Farinelli’s promotion of her career, attest to his fondness for Castellini.Footnote 56 Owning up to her identity would have invited viewers to make conjectures about the nature of their relationship. However, the presence of Faustina, a singer nearly as well known as Farinelli, in a group painting with himself, Metastasio and Amigoni (i.e., the most famous opera poet and an internationally renowned painter), required no explanation. It prompted the viewer to assume a professional relationship between the two singers and to read the painting as a testimony to Farinelli’s illustrious career. Faustina was also a particularly suitable choice because of her respectability; by 1770, she and Hasse had been possibly the most famous married musical couple in Europe for forty years. Farinelli seems to have obscured the truth further in conversation with Burney by dating the painting to his early stage career,Footnote 57 although he undoubtedly knew full well when and where it had been painted.
With regard to Farinelli’s artistic reputation, three anecdotes reported by Burney in the Italian Tour are revealing. The first, the story of Farinelli’s victory over a trumpet player in a musical battle of endurance, is clearly intended to establish the idea of ‘that superiority which he ever maintained over all his contemporaries’.Footnote 58 It does not acknowledge that Farinelli’s victory over the trumpeter had been written into the score by Porpora.Footnote 59 Another anecdote, which Burney included although he ‘had often heard and never before credited’ it until Farinelli confirmed it,Footnote 60 furthers the idea of Farinelli’s uncommon ability to touch his listeners. In Burney’s version of this story, Senesino, who has never heard Farinelli before, as the two singers have been engaged at different theatres in London, is so moved by Farinelli’s singing that he forgets his stage character, a tyrant, and runs to embrace Farinelli, who portrays his unfortunate prisoner. Judging by Senesino’s and Farinelli’s roles, the opera in question is ostensibly the Artaserse pasticcio in which Farinelli made his London debut in 1734. However, Senesino had first heard Farinelli in Parma in May 1728, they had sung together at San Marco in Venice on Christmas Day 1728, and in London Farinelli was engaged by the so-called ‘Opera of the Nobility’, in whose formation Senesino had played an important role following his break with Handel.Footnote 61 If Burney reproduced Farinelli’s recollections faithfully (and we know he set great store by accuracy), the singer was none too scrupulous regarding historical fact and indeed ‘talked over old times very freely’, though not in Burney’s sense of the phrase.Footnote 62
A third passage in which Burney appears to have quoted Farinelli as closely as his memory and pocketbook permitted is of special interest:
He [Farinelli] told me that at Vienna, where he was three different times, and where he received great honours from the Emperor Charles the VI, an admonition from that prince was of more service to him than all the precepts of his masters, or examples of his competitors for fame: his Imperial Majesty condescended to tell him one day, with great mildness and affability, that in his singing, he neither moved nor stood still like any other mortal; all was supernatural. ‘Those gigantic strides (said he); those never-ending notes and passages (ces notes qui ne finissent jamais) only surprise, and it is now time for you to please; you are too lavish of the gifts with which nature has endowed you; if you wish to reach the heart, you must take a more plain and simple road.’ These words brought about an entire change in his manner of singing; from this time he mixed the pathetic with the spirited, the simple with the sublime, and, by these means, delighted as well as astonished every hearer.Footnote 63
The comments Farinelli attributed to Charles VI, an excellent musician himself, serve to elevate his singing and career in several ways. First, despite the advice to sing in a plainer style, they express amazement at his virtuosity. The accumulation of hyperboles (unlike ‘any other mortal’, ‘supernatural’, ‘gigantic strides’ and ‘never-ending notes’) sets Farinelli apart from all other contemporary singers and implies that his singing exceeded the boundaries of the humanly possible; it thus supports the narrative of Farinelli’s inimitability. Second, the emperor’s alleged description of Farinelli’s stage deportment glorifies and thereby endorses his idiosyncratically static manner of delivering arias, raising it above the recurring criticism of his acting skills. Third, it attributes the impetus for a change of emphasis from virtuosic to expressive singing in Farinelli’s roles to Charles VI, the highest-ranking monarch in the Western world.
Burney dates Farinelli’s visits to Vienna to 1724, 1728 and 1731.Footnote 64 However, while Farinelli did enjoy unprecedented success at the Viennese court and was treated with a great deal of ‘mildness and affability’ by the imperial family, it is unlikely that he travelled to Vienna in 1724 and 1728.Footnote 65 In 1724, he could theoretically have crossed the Alps with Porpora, but due to his Italian engagements, Farinelli could only have journeyed to Vienna during the summer months when royalty and aristocracy typically retreated to their country residences; the same is true for 1728.Footnote 66 Moreover, no evidence for such visits survives. Instead, it seems certain that Farinelli first encountered Charles VI on 29 March 1732; this was more than two years after he introduced large-scale expressive arias into his roles in response to criticism from parts of the Venetian audience.Footnote 67 That the 1732 encounter with the emperor was his first is further evident from his report to Count Pepoli: ‘I found myself shoulder to shoulder with the emperor without knowing who he was, thinking I would be able to distinguish him by his clothes.’Footnote 68 It is not clear whether Farinelli invented the two additional journeys to the Viennese court or whether Burney misunderstood a reference to Farinelli’s engagements in Munich in 1727 and 1728, or drew incorrect conclusions from other data he collected. In any event, by reinventing the motivation for his stylistic shift of focus from virtuosic towards expressive singing and, possibly, increasing the number of visits to the imperial court from one to three, Farinelli distanced himself from his operatic career and dependence on public opinion, emphasising the importance of his court appearances even prior to his engagement at the Spanish court.
Altogether, Burney’s accounts of their conversations indicate that Farinelli spoke little about his stage career, preferring to talk about and show him portraits of ‘great personages, chiefly sovereign princes, who [had] been his patrons, among whom [were] two emperors, one empress, three kings of Spain, two princes of Asturias, a king of Sardinia, a prince of Savoy, a king of Naples, a princess of Asturias, two queens of Spain, and Pope Benedict the XIVth’.Footnote 69 Similarly, Farinelli’s recollections of his sojourn in England focused on his encounters with royalty and connections with the aristocracy, disconnecting his career from the boisterous environment of the playhouses. It would perhaps be cynical to allege that Farinelli’s emphasis on ‘great personages’ and courts was calculated. It may have been a matter of recalling and sharing those aspects of his career that meant most to him; judging by the historical inaccuracy of a dictionary article based on information obtained from his nephew, Matteo Pisani, who lived in his house in Bologna, Farinelli may not have talked much about his operatic career during his retirement at all.Footnote 70
In contrast, Farinelli’s decision not to sing for Burney is very likely to have been strategic, and it was a prudent move – nothing he told Burney served better to perpetuate the legend of his voice. While he seems to have given the impression to Burney that he had ‘long since left off singing’,Footnote 71 Farinelli reportedly sang for other visitors in the early 1770s, such as Count Lamberg and the Electress of Saxony;Footnote 72 as late as 1779, he sang for Elisabetta Rangoni, Princess Gonzaga.Footnote 73 According to Giovenale Sacchi, ‘his voice remained strong and beautiful until the end. Until three weeks before his death, he sang almost all day. Comparing himself [in old age] with himself when he was young, he felt that there was a great difference; but other listeners still heard him with pleasure and wonder.’Footnote 74 However, even if Sacchi was not guilty of flattery and Farinelli’s voice had withstood the adverse effects of aging unusually well, his listeners were apparently aware that his vocal style was dated.Footnote 75 Lamberg, for example, remarked about Farinelli’s singing that ‘hearing him sing, one could easily make a very good comparison between music in the old style and in our [modern] style’.Footnote 76 As is evident from numerous contemporary writings, including Burney’s, even many musical experts had a negative perception of old-fashioned vocal style.Footnote 77
Burney’s report of a performance by Caffarelli, who, though only five years younger than Farinelli, still sang frequently in church and private homes, gives an idea of the impression Farinelli might have made on Burney, had he sung for him.
Many notes in his voice are now thin, but there are still traits in his performance sufficient to convince those who hear him, of his having been an amazing fine singer; he accompanied himself, and sung without any other instrument than the harpsichord; expression and grace, with great neatness in all he attempts, are his characteristics. Though Caffarelli ... [is] rather ancient and in ruin, yet what remains of [him] is but the more precious.Footnote 78
While Farinelli’s voice and technique seem to have been superior to Caffarelli’s, the latter had become the leading singer in Italy upon Farinelli’s departure for London and some experts purportedly preferred him to Farinelli, including their teacher, Nicolò Porpora.Footnote 79 But even though Burney understood Caffarelli’s historical importance and respected him as a ‘sire of song’,Footnote 80 his mental image of the singer at the height of his powers seems to have been no match for the reality of his physical decline.Footnote 81 There is no reason to believe that a performance by Farinelli would not have had a similar effect on Burney.
Farinelli did, however, perform extensively and ‘with great judgment and delicacy’ on his favourite keyboard instruments, prompting Burney to comment, ‘he sings upon it [his Florentine fortepiano] with infinite taste and expression’.Footnote 82 By using the imperishable voice of a fortepiano instead of his own, Farinelli succeeded in demonstrating those aspects of his art that had not been diminished by age – that is, taste, expression and musical creativity – without marring Burney’s mental image of his legendary voice. Although he never heard it, in his General History Burney describes Farinelli’s voice at greater length and in more detail than any other singer’s.Footnote 83 Its tantalising inaccessibility seems to have stimulated Burney to reconstruct it by recording every detail he had gathered from people who had heard Farinelli at the height of his powers and in whose memories his voice had not only remained unassailably timeless, but had also been apotheosised by the singer’s uncanny, Orphic effect on Philip V of Spain and his legendary court career.
‘Such merchandise as is capable of adulteration is seldom genuine after passing through many hands’Footnote 84
If Farinelli was mindful of his reputation, Burney was no less interested in self-promotion. The success of his General History of Music was a matter of tremendous importance to him. First, he staked a great deal of time, money and intellectual effort on it.Footnote 85 Second, he intended to establish himself as a man of letters by its publication.Footnote 86 Raising his status above that of a music teacher and performing musician was probably a matter not only of procuring immediate advantages for himself and his family, but also of leaving a lasting legacy, for, like Farinelli, he was acutely aware that ‘practical musicians and performers, however wonderful their powers, are unable, from the transient state of their art, to give permanence to their fame’.Footnote 87 Burney understood the power of print to propagate fame and make or break literary success. Even before the publication of the Italian Tour in 1771, Burney had been ‘significantly if unofficially involved’ with a leading journal, the Monthly Review, through one of its main critics, his friend William Bewley, who discussed his articles with Burney in his letters, consulting him especially on matters of music in which he himself was no expert.Footnote 88 Burney strategically used his connections with both the Monthly Review and its rival, the Critical Review, to ensure the success of his own publications and to discredit rival works, most notably John Hawkins’s A General History of the Science and Practice of Music,Footnote 89 which Bewley demolished in a three-part review in 1777.Footnote 90 Altogether, Burney undoubtedly went about using the information obtained from Farinelli with no less strategy than the singer had shown in imparting it to him. Several factors play into Burney’s representation of Farinelli in his Italian Tour and later General History; most notably, Burney’s conception of history; the historical context, that is, the image in England of Italian opera singers in general and Farinelli in particular; and finally, Burney’s career aims.
The fact that in both the Italian Tour and the General History, Burney discusses Farinelli in more detail than any other performer is in keeping with his view of music history and historiographical principles. Burney, who conceived of music history in terms of continuous progress, regarded eighteenth-century opera as its culmination, or ‘the Epopeia – the Opus Magnum of modern music’.Footnote 91 Farinelli had played an important role in advancing vocal art, ‘having arrived at the ultimate degree of perfection’.Footnote 92 Thus, as ‘the performer that comprise[d] the greatest number of … excellences, and in the most perfect degree’, Farinelli was ‘entitled to pre-eminence’.Footnote 93 Furthermore, Burney felt that the length and amount of detail in which a musician was discussed in a historical work should be proportionate to his importance (at least, through Bewley, he criticised Hawkins for failing to apply this principle).Footnote 94
One of the strategies Burney employed to establish Farinelli’s pre-eminence was by means of music examples. Those from arias sung by Farinelli amount to eight pages; in comparison, none of the other examples illustrating Italian eighteenth-century opera singers’ abilities (i.e., ‘Divisions in Nicolini’s Songs, and in those of his Cotemporaries and immediate Successors’, Senesino’s aria ‘Ah traditore’ from Vespasiano and ‘Vocal Divisions and Refinements in Dramatic Music from 1740 to 1755’) exceed two pages.Footnote 95 Not only the length of the examples, but also their purpose, highlights Farinelli’s uniqueness. In Farinelli’s case, Burney included the examples to afford the ‘musical reader a view of the most difficult divisions of his bravura songs’ so they ‘will be enabled to judge’ his agility.Footnote 96 In the case of the other singers, Burney used musical examples to demonstrate lack of distinctiveness, choosing excerpts that demonstrated the similarity of the passagework performed by different singers and used by several composers in multiple works. On the coloratura passages performed by Nicolini and other singers in Handel’s earlier operas, he comments that ‘many of these Divisions occur in Operas of the same period, particularly in HANDEL’S Julius Cæsar, and ATTILIO’s Vespasian. These passages by frequent use became as common as the Aphorisms in Swift’s [C]ritical Essay, or the Jokes in his Polite Conversation.’Footnote 97 Similarly, he dismisses Senesino’s ‘Ah traditore’ from Vespasiano, remarking that:
Handel, Bononcini, and Attilio, all give the same divisions in songs of execution, as they did in rapid accompaniments to other songs. As Senesino’s aria d’abilità, in Vespasiano, seems to include all the roulements, or rapid passages he was able to execute, I shall, on the next plates, insert it, as an an [sic] exhibition of all the furbellows, flounces, and vocal fopperies of the times.Footnote 98
And the careful contemporaneous musical reader of the ‘Vocal Divisions and Refinements in Dramatic Music from 1740 to 1755’ might well have noticed that nearly all the techniques employed occurred previously in Farinelli’s passagework or imitated it.Footnote 99 Of course, the music examples and detailed discussion of specific operas also showed off Burney’s musical expertise and the fact that he had been granted access to the royal music manuscript collection.Footnote 100
Furthermore, as he had suggested to Farinelli in Bologna, Burney inserted a chronological account of Farinelli’s life into the General History.Footnote 101 Catering to an English readership, the description of Farinelli’s sojourn in England is especially detailed, but Burney also dedicates ample space to his Spanish career and thereby draws attention to its singularity. Burney’s highly detailed description of Farinelli’s singing covers all its aspects and illustrates two of them with anecdotes, presumably to enable the reader to form a mental image of it and make Burney’s points more memorable.Footnote 102
In terms of historical context, Burney’s portrayal of Farinelli in the General History seems systematically to counter critical and satirical representations that had been published in the English media since the 1730s.Footnote 103 The description of Farinelli’s static delivery of arias implies that, unlike other star castrati, Farinelli did not need gesture to enchant and astonish the audience.Footnote 104 In fact, Burney paraphrases Bontempi’s description of the performance practice of the legendary seventeenth-century castrato Baldassare Ferri, writing that ‘during the time of singing he was as motionless as a statue’,Footnote 105 creating an association between Farinelli and the most famous singer of the previous century. Moreover, Burney blames the dwindling turnout at the end of Farinelli’s stay in London on the ignorance of the audience, which was ‘blind and deaf to its own interest’.Footnote 106 Burney also mentions Farinelli’s contract with the ‘Opera of the Nobility’ for the 1737–8 season, possibly to answer Hawkins’s claim that ‘finding at his return to London [from France in 1736] but little encouragement to engage at the opera, [Farinelli] finally quitted England the following summer’.Footnote 107 Burney even points out Farinelli’s respectable ancestry in order to rebut conjectures that he descended from a miller.Footnote 108 He also observes that Farinelli ‘was remarkably civil and attentive to the English nobility and gentry who visited him in his retreat, and seemed to remember the protection and favour of individuals, more than the neglect of the public during his last year in London’.Footnote 109 Nevertheless, Burney cannot be censured for blind partiality. His comments on Farinelli’s contract for 1736–7, descent and politeness towards English visitors are accurate, as is his assessment of the operatic situation in 1737; that is, that the ruin of the rival opera companies was not a result of opposition to Handel but an oversaturation of the entertainment market with Italian opera.Footnote 110
More generally, Burney answers criticism that arose from a specifically English form of resistance to Italian opera and especially castrati, which was particularly common among intellectuals who considered themselves rationalist and patriotic. It comprised not only resentment against the perceived disproportionate earnings of singers and the aristocracy’s improper adulation of performers of a social status far beneath their own, but also the fear that Italian opera resulted in the moral corruption of the listeners as it afforded sensory pleasure rather than appealing to the audience’s rational minds.Footnote 111 Other Italian singers incurred censure and ridicule, too, but Farinelli was subject to especially severe criticism because of his extraordinary virtuosity and the amplitude of his success, as the English nobility had lionised him to an unprecedented degree and made his 1735 benefit night an unparalleled financial success. Hawkins, for example, complains that ‘the excessive fondness which the nobility discovered for this person [Farinelli], the caresses they bestowed on, and the presents they made him indicated little less than infatuation; their bounty was prodigality, and their applause adoration’, which ‘was loudly complained of as derogating from the national character’.Footnote 112
Given his career ambitions, it was in Burney’s interest to confute Hawkins’s criticism because it discredited his rival’s publication. More importantly, it gratified Farinelli’s numerous English patrons and admirers and their descendants, who belonged to a particularly important segment of Burney’s readership – that is, aristocratic connoisseurs.Footnote 113 Already in his Italian Tour, Burney reported anglophile remarks by Farinelli that emphasised his rank and political importance, for instance, that the singer ‘lamented his not being able, for political reasons, to settle in England; for, next to Spain, that he said was the place in the world, where he should have wished to spend the remainder of his days’ and that ‘he speaks of Sir Benjamin Keene with the highest respect and regard, and mentioned his death, not only as a misfortune to the two courts of England and Spain, but as an irreparable loss to himself and all his friends’.Footnote 114 This also lent prestige to the social success of Burney, whom Farinelli received as an equal and treated with distinction and courtesy. In his General History, Burney employed an even more effective means of establishing Farinelli’s rank and merit – anecdotes.
The use of anecdotes seems to have caused Burney some intellectual discomfort. Whilst he had the ambition to create a factually reliable history, he wanted to cater to a broad audience and ‘have [his] Book so divested of Pedantry & Jargon that every Miss, who plays o’ top o’ the Spinet should make it her manual’.Footnote 115 Burney points out that ‘though the mixing biographical anecdotes in order to engage attention, may by some be condemned, as below the dignity of science, yet I would rather be pronounced trivial than tiresome’. By writing in an engaging manner, Burney wanted to distinguish himself from earlier, ‘unskilful writers’, who had ‘deformed’ music history and thus made it inaccessible to the general reader.Footnote 116 Nevertheless, Burney justifies the inclusion of anecdotes about Farinelli, presumably seeking to forestall criticism:
The lovers of anecdotes might, indeed, be gratified with innumerable particulars concerning the effects of [Farinelli’s] amazing talents, if anecdotes were not below the dignity of history. One or two, however, that do honour to his heart and natural disposition as well as vocal powers, my graver and more critical readers will, perhaps, excuse.Footnote 117
He then proceeds to regale his readers with not just one or two, but three specimens; two of these are, moreover, unusually long in comparison with other anecdotes in the General History.
The first story exemplifies the power of Farinelli’s voice and his implicitly aristocratic disinterestedness. It relates how Farinelli cured the melancholy of Philip V of Spain with his singing and asked for no reward other than for the king to allow himself to be dressed and return to his government duties. Once permanently in Philip’s service, Farinelli’s judicious comportment earned him universal esteem. In the second anecdote, Farinelli repays evil with good and proves his loyalty to his sovereign and his forbearance. He obtained a promotion for a veteran guardsman, despite having overheard him speak ill of both himself and the king, and only pointed out to the soldier that he had done wrong to accuse the king of neglecting him. The third anecdote illustrates Farinelli’s affability and generosity, both of spirit and in financial terms, while recalling the unique quality of his voice and its inaccessibility to the public. He repaid his tailor, who requested an aria in payment for an expensive suit of gala clothes, by not only singing for him at length to the best of his abilities, but also obliging him to accept double the amount he was due. By means of these stories, Burney portrays Farinelli as the very antithesis of the stereotypical star singer to whom are attributed the characteristics of insolence, greed and belligerence; Farinelli seems, indeed, even a model of Christian virtues.
What is more, these anecdotes promote the image of Farinelli as a gentleman. The affability and generosity characteristic of a noble-minded aristocrat, or, in eighteenth-century terms, ‘condescension’ with which Farinelli treats the soldier and the tailor highlight both his good character and his social status. The nobility and personal merit of Farinelli as he emerges from the pages of the General History exonerate Farinelli from the reproach of money-mindedness and the English aristocracy from that of not having ‘been sufficiently tenacious of their own and the nation’s dignity’ when cultivating his company, thus gratifying an important segment of Burney’s readership.Footnote 118 At the same time, it serves to propagate the image Farinelli had been fostering for decades and had displayed to Burney.
In the informal, conversational Italian Tour, a travel diary, Burney made a point of giving credence to the anecdotes he included by mentioning that they had been ‘chiefly picked up in conversation with [Farinelli] himself and Padre Martini’.Footnote 119 One might expect Burney to have applied no less stringent criteria in his prized General History, for which, by his own estimation, it was necessary to ascertain the veracity of its contents.Footnote 120 However, Burney seems not to have been quite as scrupulous as he wanted to appear. His claim that the tailor anecdote was ‘frequently told and believed at Madrid, during the first year of Farinelli’s residence in Spain’Footnote 121 invites the reader to surmise that he obtained it from a reliable source, such as a contact in Spain or an acquaintance who had travelled there.Footnote 122 In fact, though, Burney copied it – without acknowledgement – from a pre-existing source, very likely the Dictionnaire des artistes by Abbé Fontenay. Burney’s version is a close translation of Fontenay’s text and included for precisely the same reason, that is, to prove Farinelli’s nobility of character.Footnote 123 Alternatively, Burney could have lifted the story from the same source as Fontenay, possibly the 1775 February issue of L’Esprit des journaux, françois et étrangers.Footnote 124 Thus it seems that Burney occasionally employed double standards, especially since he strongly resented unreferenced use of his works by other authors.Footnote 125 Perhaps the lack of scholarly rigour in Burney’s use of the tailor anecdote is not surprising. After all, Burney had already retold the anecdote about Farinelli and Senesino in the Italian Tour although he had doubted its authenticity and, possibly, seen through Farinelli’s reasons for telling it. Burney, however, had probably also understood the usefulness of anecdotes as a tool for promoting his writings.
After initial worries that the reproduction of ‘long Extracts’ in reviews of his Italian Tour might ‘too much satisfy the reader to make him inclined to purchase the Work’,Footnote 126 the success of the book, which was sold out by 1773,Footnote 127 probably made him realise the value of published excerpts as advertisement. By including in the General History not only mostly self-contained biographical sections on Farinelli (as well as on other famous singers), but also meaty anecdotes narrated in an animated style that contrasted with the overall factual tone of the General History, Burney provided editors with perfect material for extraction and reproduction in the numerous periodicals that flourished both in the British Isles and on the Continent. That the subject of these anecdotes was Farinelli was surely no coincidence. Burney’s introduction to his sections on him in the Italian Tour already bears witness to his anticipation of his readers’ interest in the internationally famous singer: ‘It will give pleasure to every lover of music, especially to those who have been so happy as to have heard him, to learn that Signor Farinelli still lives, and is in good health and spirits.’Footnote 128 In the year of the publication of the Italian Tour, the description of Burney’s visit to Farinelli was reprinted whole or in part in, for example, The Critical Review, The Monthly Review and The Hibernian Magazine.Footnote 129 And Burney’s discussion of Farinelli in the General History was extracted for the readers of The Edinburgh Magazine, The Tomahawk! and The Monthly Visitor.Footnote 130 This practice was not limited to England, Scotland and Ireland. In translation, excerpts from Burney’s books appeared in several European countries; for example, the French Journal encyclopédique and a Dutch reader’s digest of recent foreign publications, Nieuwe vaderlandsche letteroefeningen, reprinted excerpts on Farinelli from the Italian Tour; the Belgian L’Esprit des journaux françois et étrangers reproduced anecdotes from the General History.Footnote 131 Burney, who followed the success of his writings very closely – and even actively influenced it – could not have failed to notice that the sections on Farinelli were among the most frequently reproduced excerpts.
If the image of Farinelli in the General History seemed somewhat idealised to readers who were familiar with less flattering English commentary on the singer, Burney did not need to have qualms about a potential misrepresentation of Farinelli’s character and thus falsification of history – Burney’s account was based on scores of Continental publications.Footnote 132 The French origin of many of these would have strengthened the notion of the singer’s personal merit, as Farinelli had come to be highly esteemed in France despite the traditional French bias against castrati and Italian opera and despite his connections with England and with Austria (both enemies of France in the Austrian War of Succession) during his tenure at the Spanish court. The views of the few continental authors who were critical of Farinelli can mostly be explained by their connections to English opponents of Italian opera singers.Footnote 133 Furthermore, Burney had heard accounts of Farinelli from leading artists of the era, including Faustina, Hasse and Metastasio, whom he greatly respected, and had drawn his own conclusions from his personal encounters with the singer.Footnote 134
‘Longevity is insured by means of books’Footnote 135
Both Farinelli’s and Burney’s strategies proved highly successful. Burney’s Italian Tour and General History remained in currency and became the most influential sources on Farinelli from the late eighteenth century until today, in English and in translation. Burney’s and Farinelli’s fame was propagated not only through them, but also through the myriad periodicals that excerpted them. Directed at the general reader, they not only kept both men’s reputations alive among musical professionals and amateurs, but also spread them beyond their circles. No less importantly, Burney’s writings served as a source for some of the most influential encyclopedias of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most notably the Encyclopédie méthodique, an expanded and revised edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s famous Encyclopédie, and the Encyclopædia Britannica.Footnote 136 Of particular importance for the reception of Farinelli in musical circles was the use made of Burney’s writings in biographical music dictionaries such as Fontenay’s above-mentioned Dictionnaire des artistes and Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens. Footnote 137 The latter remained in use throughout the nineteenth century and constituted one of the main sources on Farinelli for musicologists, including the seminal Farinelli scholar Franz Haböck;Footnote 138 it has continued to be cited into the twenty-first century. References to Burney’s work cemented his reputation in the musical world. His books were also mined, sometimes plagiarised, by authors of travel journals, collections of letters and other informal kinds of publications, which further added to their diffusion and impact.Footnote 139 In this manner, Farinelli continued to be a European celebrity well into the nineteenth century, and Burney came to be acknowledged as a pioneering music historian.
Whilst Farinelli and Burney certainly profited from one another, it would probably do neither of them justice to view their relationship in the light of a common (though most likely unspoken) interest alone. Facets of Burney’s report of his visit to Bologna indicate that the two men developed a genuine liking for each other during their short acquaintance. Burney’s observation of Farinelli, including personal details such as Farinelli’s attachment to his toddler grandniece, Maria Carlotta Pisani, despite her being ‘cross, sickly, homely, and unamiable’,Footnote 140 may have confirmed to him the laudatory accounts of the singer’s character that circulated in Europe. Burney surely also felt sincere admiration for Farinelli as an artist. His career, constant self-improvement, perfecting of vocal technique and style, and rise to fame and fortune exemplified on an individual level the Enlightenment ideal of continual progress that formed the basis of Burney’s conception of historiography and also marked Burney’s own determined career advancement.
There is also the possibility that Burney pursued a similar aim to Roger Pickering. In his Reflections Upon Theatrical Expression in Tragedy of 1755, Pickering sought to rehabilitate the actor’s profession and raise its social status, for ‘a Master of Theatrical Expression, in all its extensive Significancy, must be possess’d of such Accomplishments, as to set the profession above all Contempt’.Footnote 141 Pickering’s example of an actor of outstanding merit, both professional and personal, is the famous David Garrick, a friend of Burney and collaborator on several occasions, whom the music historian admired greatly.Footnote 142 By the time he published the third and fourth volumes of his General History in 1789, Burney, the man of letters, was a member of the elevated circles in which Burney, the music teacher, had been a servant. An expert in both the practice and the theory of music, he was well able to assess the relative merits of creative musicians and writers on music and deplored, even as he capitalised on it, the ephemeral nature of the performer’s fame:
To the reputation of a theorist, indeed, longevity is insured by means of books, which become obsolete more slowly than musical compositions. Tradition only whispers, for a short time, the name and abilities of a mere performer, however exquisite the delight which his talents afforded to those who heard him; whereas, a theory once committed to paper and established, lives, at least in libraries, as long as the language in which it was written.Footnote 143
At a time when the modern conception of genius was beginning to take hold and musicians, actors and painters started to be regarded as artists rather than artisans, Burney found in Farinelli an example of a great artist whose reputation he intended to lend longevity by committing it to the pages of his General History.
In the preface to his autobiography, Carlo Goldoni raises an important historiographical issue, that is, the reliability of biographies:
It is true that a man’s biography should appear after his death; but do portraits that are made after the fact resemble the originals? If it is a friend who takes on the task, eulogies will alter the truth; if it is an enemy, one will find satire instead of [unbiased] criticism.Footnote 144
In this sense, Burney’s account of Farinelli is a eulogy, a verbal equivalent to Amigoni’s portraits of the singer, mediated by the personal agendas of both the singer and the historian. Highly sensitive to the level of civility and manners with which he was received,Footnote 145 Burney might have given a very different report of Farinelli if the singer had brought out possible residual resentment against ‘RostBif’Footnote 146 rather than his fine English dinner service for his guest.Footnote 147 Modern-day historians presumably share Burney’s desire ‘to allay [his] thirst of knowledge at the source’ and ‘hear with [his] own ears, and to see with his own eyes’ – in other words, to gain factually reliable, first-hand information.Footnote 148 However, the example of Burney’s rendition of Farinelli’s self-portrait is a reminder of the need to be aware that period sources – even works ostensibly as reliable as Burney’s – may offer an image created to a purpose rather than the unmediated truth.
