Writing a tenor’s voice: Cesare Grandi and the Siena production of Il Farnaspe (1750)

Scholars have made great progress in exploring individual eighteenth-century drammi per musica as events (departing from the more singular focus on the work as captured in a musical score), and the singer often stands at the center of such an event. We have long known that composers took into consideration singers’ voices when composing scores, but we also have gained insight into how singers could hold sway over the hiring of other cast numbers and determine the choice of repertory. Such case studies often focus on famous castratos — as stars, they could extract concessions of many kinds in exchange for their services as lead singer. Until now, it has been assumed that singers standing lower in the operatic hierarchy — second and third men, for instance—had little influence. This assumption is, however, belied by a newly discovered cache of 119 letters from agents, singers, dancers, instrumentalists, and the costume designer to the impresario of the opera Il Farnaspe, staged in Siena in 1750. This essay examines the information we can glean about the production from that source in the context of the history of musico-dramatic performances in the city. Opera flourished in Siena during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century under the sponsorship of a powerful expatriate clan, the Chigi, who understood how to exploit festive occasions and the sociable enterprises surrounding them as expressions of senesità, or the Sienese way of doing things. In 1750, it was not the Chigi who were in charge, but rather another powerful local clan, the Sansedoni. The most compelling information on the production comes from a hitherto unknown tenor, Cesare Grandi, originally cast as third man in the opera. Over the course of six months, he wrote nineteen letters to the ostensible impresario of the production, Francesco Sansedoni. The letters show the singer negotiating on his own and his wife’s behalf, and then on behalf of a much more famous castrato, Gioacchino Conti, who he wanted cast in the lead role. They demonstrate that it was Grandi who had had the greatest impact not only on who was engaged for all the main singing roles, but also on who was hired to enlarge the local orchestra, what opera was chosen, and when it was scheduled. He also oversaw the revisions to the libretto and the score, supervised the music copying, and made decisions about costumes. Cesare Grandi’s letters allow us to observe the mechanics of putting together an eighteenth-century Italian opera seria at close range and in real time. They reinforce much of what we already know about the prevalence of the pasticcio (even when not indicated as such) and the unreliability of the libretto as a faithful record of every performance. Most important, however, they demonstrate that we might want to look in beyond the usual suspects to understand who might have influenced the most basic decisions regarding the choice of work, casting, scheduling, costuming, and musical score of a mid-eighteenth-century Italian opera.