Guadagni the Modern Castrato
Born in Lodi, near Milan, on 16 February 1728, Guadagni was brought up in a family of professional musicians. Launched on a career in church music by his father, he
was steered towards opera by a brother and three sisters who earned their livings on
the stage. Guadagni was quick to learn from his early musical experiences. In his first
post he studied with Vallotti and Tartini, imbibing a life-long passion for accuracy.
His early operatic engagements introduced him to both comic and heroic genres,
and in the first ten years of his career he encountered styles as diverse as Handel’s
oratorios in London and Italian opera at Versailles. He learned to act from Pertici
and Garrick, the greatest masters of his age. He was a tolerable linguist. A popular
figure among his contemporaries, he mixed on equal terms with patrons and fellow performers, composers and writers, absorbing a good deal of the current debate
on dramatic theory, and correctly inferring that he had a part to play in the new
operatic age.
The New Operatic Age
Through a fortunate coincidence of time and place, Guadagni found himself a
principal player in the new operatic movement that flourished in the second half
of the eighteenth century. Driven by composers such as Gluck and Traetta, librettists Calzabigi and Coltellini, dancers and choreographers including Angiolini and
Noverre, designers such as Bernardino Galliari and above all the theatre director
Count Giacomo Durazzo, the movement, widely known as the reform of opera,
transformed the traditions and conventions of heroic opera and promoted a new
style of music drama whose keywords were ‘nature’ and ‘feeling’.
Guadagni was the first, and perhaps the only, eighteenth-century singer fully to
realise what was at stake. He was quick to identify with the reform, building his
career around the one role that came to symbolise the new approach: Orpheus in
Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). Understanding the demands and opportunities of
this role, he recognised that it perfectly suited his skills and, just as importantly, his
limitations. (In the words of one of his fellow reformers, it ‘fitted him like a glove’.)
And when he became too old to enact it on the stage, he recreated it in his celebrated
marionette theatre.
The aims of reform opera embraced realism in costume, and asymmetry in stage
design. It welcomed the assimilation of dance and chorus into the narrative and
awarded an enhanced role to the orchestra. In performance terms, it eschewed closed
forms, virtuosity and static delivery. It gave primacy to the expression and enunciation of words. After Orfeo, other composers, notably Traetta and Bertoni, exploited
oxfordhb-9780199365203-web.indd 1
1/16/2014 12:39:15 PM
2

reform ideals particularly in the roles they created for Guadagni. The heritage of the
reform is less clear than its genesis. Gluck’s innovations did not find wide acceptance
until the work of nineteenth-century composers such as Berlioz and Wagner.
Guadagni’s Compositions
It is not surprising that many castratos composed. Their musical training was usually longer and often more thorough than that of any other professional musicians.
Among the many composing castratos, Farinelli wrote a considerable quantity
of songs, arias and cantatas; Rauzzini, Millico and Tenducci composed operas;
Pistocchi wrote oratorios; Mannelli violin concertos. In this company, Guadagni’s
known output appears small: just three items, though it is entirely possible that a
body of religious music lies uncatalogued in some Paduan archive. The following
works are discussed in Chapter 9.
‘Men tiranne’ was written to replace Gluck’s own setting when the pasticcio version of Orfeo ed Euridice was produced in London in 1770. It was included in The
Favourite Songs in the opera Orfeo (London, Bremner, 1770) and is Guadagni’s only
published score. Guadagni was clearly proud of his composition; on every subsequent occasion that he sang Gluck’s opera (in some form or other), he included
his own version of ‘Men tiranne’. See Web Example I and accompanying audio file
online.
We do not know exactly when Guadagni made his setting of ‘Che puro ciel’.
Existing in an undated score and part-books in the Biblioteca Antoniana in Padua,
it must have been performed in one of the many private performances of a pasticcio
version of Orfeo in Padua between 1775 and 1785. See Web Example 2.
‘Pensa a serbarmi, o cara’ comes from the metastasian libretto Ezio. We do not
know for certain when Guadagni composed it. If, as seems likely, he wrote it to be
inserted in Guglielmi’s setting of Ezio in 1770, it is the earliest known example of his
compositions. See Web Example 3.
oxfordhb-9780199365203-web.indd 2
1/16/2014 12:39:15 PM