Girolamo Crescentini
Girolamo Crescentini | |
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| Born | 2 February 1762 |
| Died | 24 April 1846 (aged 84) |
| Occupation(s) | Castrato, singing teacher, composer |
Girolamo Crescentini (Urbania, 2 February 1762 – Naples 24 April 1846) was an Italian soprano castrato, singing teacher, and composer.
Biography
He studied in
Real Collegio di Musica, where he had, among his pupils, Isabella Colbran and Raffaele Mirate
. In 1811 he had already published a didactic essay with the title “Esercizi per la vocalizzazione”.
Artistic features
With
Velluti, Crescentini led castrati’s last charge: he was called, for his singing’s prodigies, the “Italian Orpheus”, and for his great, theoretical too, competence in this art, the “Nestor of the musici".[3] Decidedly unimposing on the stage (like Pacchiarotti), he was endowed with a clear, pliant and pure voice which won him the admiration of such personages as Alfred de Vigny, who, in his story “La vie e la mort du Capitaine Renaud ou La canne de jonc”, wrote of “a seraph’s voice which sprang from an emaciated and wrinkled face”, or as the seventeen-year-old Arthur Schopenhauer who, in his turn, entered in his diary a voice that was “beautiful in a supernatural way” and provided with a full and sweet timbre. Crescentini, who was not an exceedingly wide-ranged sopranista, always shunned the rush towards the highest notes which the C7 whistled by his contemporary La Bastardella was the living representation of, and shunned as well eagerness for immoderate singing ornamentation in all the cases where it was not actually necessary to the expression of those "infinitely minute nuances which form the secret of Crescentini's unique perfection in his interpretation of [an] aria;[4] furthermore all this infinitely minute material is itself in a perpetual state of transformation, constantly responding to variations in the physical condition of the singer’s voice, or to changes in intensity of the exaltation and ecstasy by which he may happen to be inspired". Which would make any performance unfailingly different from the preceding one and from the following, too.[5]
As the champion of the true “cantar che nell’anima si sente”Rossini grand finale of two centuries’ history of operatic singing.
Something of his concept of singing, as he had expressed it in the mentioned “Esercizi per la vocalizzazione”, is likely to have passed as well in the vocal style of Bellini operas.
Sources
- Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. Trans. Margaret Crosland. Suffolk: Souvenir Press, 1996.
- Caruselli, Salvatore (ed), Grande enciclopedia della musica lirica, Longanesi &C. Periodici S.p.A., vol 4, Roma, I, ad nomen
- Celletti, Rodolfo, Storia del belcanto, Discanto Edizioni, Fiesole, 1983, passim
- Richard Somerset-Ward. Angels and Monsters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
- Sadie, Stanley (ed), The new Grove Dictionary of Opera, Oxford University Press, 1992, vol 4, ad nomen
- This article contains substantial material translated from Girolamo Crescentini in the Italian Wikipedia
Notes
- ^ According to Grove Dictionary, he might have already "made his début in 1776, in Fano, in female roles, and in 1781, in Treviso, as primo uomo" (op cit, I, p 1005).
- ^ Caruselli, S., op cit, I, p 310.
- ^ musico (plural musici) means "musician" and was used as a euphemism to refer to castrati (and later to contraltos singing en travesti).
- Giulietta e Romeo.
- ^ Stendhal, Life of Rossini (translated by Richard N. Coe), New York, Criterion Books, 1957, chapter XXXII, p 344 (copy at Internet Archive).
- ^ This phrase is repeatedly used by Rossini to mean the expressive singing of yore (Celletti, R., op cit, pp 21 and 142). It is rather hard to be translated, for it is referred, at the very same time, to singing which is deeply felt in the singer’s soul and which can be heard by, and therefore talk to and move, the listener’s soul as well.
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