Maddalena Allegranti

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Maddalena Allegranti,
portrait by Francesco Bartolozzi after Richard Cosway

Maddalena Teresa Allegranti (probably 1754 in Venice - after 1801 in Ireland ) was an important Italian opera singer ( soprano ) of the second half of the 18th century.

life and work

The year and place of birth are not guaranteed, an Italian music encyclopedia mentions "approx. 1750 in Florence ”. The first name is sometimes also written Madelaine .

Allegranti first made her debut in 1770 and 1771 in smaller roles on the Venetian stages. The Musikalische Conversations-Lexikon writes that she “entered the stage of her hometown as a naturalist at a very young age, where she was very lucky with her bright, high-pitched, extensive voice and her unmistakable drama.” This was followed by guest appearances in Florence and Bologna , where it was owned by Giacomo Casanova and described as "adorabile" and "pericolosa", as admirable and dangerous . In the second half of 1771 she came to the Electoral Palatinate court of Karl Theodor (1724–1799) in Mannheim , where she took singing lessons from Ignaz Holzbauer , who had served there as court conductor since 1753. In the same year Allegranti made his debut on the large opera stage of the Mannheim Palace , and in the following year also on the stage of the early classicist Schlosstheater Schwetzingen . The reason for the great Piccinini performance was the name day celebrations of the elector couple, which were also noticed nationwide. The following roles during the Electoral Palatinate engagement could be proven - on the basis of libretti and reports:

The English musicologist Charles Burney was full of praise for the young singer he had heard in the Sacchini opera: he praised her “good, unaffected manner”. In the spring of 1774 she moved to the Princely Court of Thurn and Taxis in Regensburg and, according to Christoph Meixner, should have stayed there until 1778, but according to Kutsch / Riemens she was "a guest at various court theaters in German residences". These two narratives are not necessarily mutually exclusive; both may have been the case.

In 1778 she returned to Italy and initially sang in Bologna. In 1779 she made guest appearances during the Carnival at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice as well as in Florence and Milan. In 1780 she sang in Venice, Florence and Pisa, in 1781 in Venice, Treviso and for the first time in London. Her first appearance in England in the opera Viaggiatori felici by Pasquale Anfossi was enthusiastically celebrated and two very successful years followed in London. Her voice, although delicate, appeared to contemporaries to be extremely lovely, precise in the coloratura and so flexible that she could develop her own blossoming style, which was seen as a novelty. She was also considered an excellent actress, but she was prone to repetition, which is why the audience soon got tired of her.

In 1783 she followed a call to the Dresden Court Theater, which was then playing in the Morettian Opera House . She was the first female singer to join the Italian ensemble, her annual salary was the unusual amount of 1,000 ducats, which was sensational at the time. There she took more singing lessons from Christian Ehregott Weinlig , the cantor of the Kreuzkirche. The Musikalische Conversations-Lexikon reports: "Her fame and representation of one of those ornaments for which the electoral residence was envied by the whole art world rose ever higher." Her musical and performance focus in Dresden was on buffo games - for example the Italian Ferdinando Bertoni and Antonio Sacchini or the Belgian-French composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry . In 1787 she married an English guard of Irish origin named Harrison. In 1789, Mozart judged her voice to be “better than that of the Ferrarese”, meaning Adriana Ferrarese del Bene (1759 – after 1803), adding, of course, “which doesn't mean much”. In 1797 she followed her husband - "to the deep sorrow of the Dresden art lovers" - to London.

She made another guest appearance in 1798 in her hometown of Venice before she appeared in London in 1799 as Carolina in Il matrimonio segreto . However, her voice “began to decrease.” Her musical zenith was definitely exceeded and the merciless public in London made her feel this “and she did not fail to renounce the stage in real self-knowledge […]”. After the end of her singing career, she worked as a singing teacher and eventually went to Ireland with her husband, where she probably died around 1802.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Claudio Sartori : I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800 , 7 volumes, Cuneo 1990-1994, 7th volume, 1994, p. 14.
  2. ↑ Taddeo Wiel: I teatri musicali veneziani del settecento [...]. Photomechanical reprint of the original edition Venezia 1897 (= Musicological Study Library Peters, Peters Reprints), Leipzig 1979, No. 758, 759, 767, 768.
  3. ^ A b c Hermann Mendel , August Reissmann : Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon. An Encyclopedia of the Entire Musical Sciences, Berlin, Volume 1, 1870, p. 164.
  4. ^ A b Charles Burney : Diary of his musical journeys , 2nd vol. Through Flanders, the Netherlands and on the Rhine to Vienna, trans. by Christoph Daniel Ebeling , Hamburg 1773, p. 71.
  5. ↑ Kutsch / Riemens translate the quote as follows: "Nice, unaffected manner of singing".
  6. ^ Christoph Meixner: Music theater in Regensburg in the age of the everlasting Reichstag (= music and theater 3), Sinzig 2008, p. 154.
  7. ↑ Taddeo Wiel: I teatri musicali veneziani del settecento [...]. Photomechanical reprint of the original edition Venezia 1897 (= Musicological Study Library Peters, Peters Reprints), Leipzig 1979, No. 895, 896, 909, 910, 924, 925, 1192.
  8. ↑ Sartori 1994, p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Allegranti, Maddalena
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Allegranti, Maddalena Teresa (full name); Allegranti, Madelaine
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian opera singer with a soprano voice
DATE OF BIRTH uncertain: 1754
PLACE OF BIRTH Venice
DATE OF DEATH after 1801
Place of death Ireland