Giusto Fernando Tenducci

Giusto Fernando Tenducci, sometimes called “il Senesino” (c.1735 Castration was illegal in both church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses. In 1753, when he was about seventeen, Tenducci made his professional opera appearance in Venice, as Gasparo in Ferdinando Bertoni’s Ginevra. In 1768, he returned to London from Edinburgh where he remained for most of the rest of his life, except for a period between 1771 and 1778 when he appeared in many roles in Italy, then traveled to Paris. He taught singing to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Paris in 1777–8. Impressed with his teacher’s singing abilities, Mozart wrote a concert aria for him which is now lost (K. 315b). He returned to Italy just months before his death in January 1790 in Genoa. Marriage: 1766–1772 Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a licence granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. Two portraits of Tenducci were pa