Venanzio Rauzzini in Britain: Castrato, Composer, and Cultural Leader by Paul F. Rice (review)

A number of recent studies have centred on eighteenth-century opera singers, including Saskia MariaWoyke, Faustina Bordoni: Biographie – Vokalprofil – Rezeption (Frankfurt, 2009) and Patricia Howard, The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the Coming of a New Operatic Age (Oxford, 2014). Paul Rice’s volume continues this trend, focusing on the career of the Italian castrato Venanzio Rauzzini in Britain from 1774 to 1810. Rauzzini also enjoyed success as a composer, singing teacher, and concert organizer, and Rice sets about demonstrating his role as a cultural leader in Britain’s music life, despite the stigmatization of castrati as social outcasts at this period.

He opens with an overview of Rauzzini’s early career in Europe, highlighting such important events as his engagement at the Munich court and in Vienna, and offers a critical assessment of the characteristics of his voice through analyses of compositions written for the singer by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Sacchini, and Rauzzini himself. Rice links his findings to British audiences’ often ambivalent perception of the castrato voice (ch. 1). In chapters 2 and 3 he gives a chronological account of Rauzzini’s performances at the King’s Theatre between 1774 and 1777, noting the operas in which he performed, the company for those seasons, and the reception of the performances. Using memoirs (Charles Burney, Edward Edgecumbe, and Michael Kelly), newspaper reviews, and a range of secondary sources, he paints a vivid picture of Rauzzini’s position as an opera singer in London society, and his influence on operatic practice.

Rice devotes a considerable amount of space to Rauzzini’s compositional activity. There are no extant performing materials for his only surviving opera, Piramo e Tisbe (1775), and so Rice reconstructs the London version from a manuscript score of a performance in Vienna and published settings of different libretto versions (pp. 37–48). This process leads to fascinating insights concerning Rauzzini’s compositional techniques and the characteristics of the arias he wrote for himself. Surprisingly, perhaps, Rauzzini did not emphasize spectacular coloratura, but was ‘very conscious of setting text so that it could be understood in the manner of speech’ (p. 44)—which Rice relates to the approach of Christoph Willibald Gluck. Rauzzini’s orchestration and treatment of melody and accompaniment are similarly more muted than one might expect. For Rauzzini’s other operatic compositions where no manuscript scores have survived, Rice compiles the music from published excerpts of the opera. He also provides insights into the reception of Alina ossia la regina di Golconda (pp. 145–7) and L’omaggio di paesani al signore del contado (pp. 129–30), which were, as he suggests, ideologically influenced by the anti-French attitude of the British at that time. Prejudice regarding a castrato singer is examined in the context of the so-called Sacchini–Rauzzini controversy, in which Rauzzini was accused of plagiarism (ch. 5), and a complex picture of eighteenth-century opera’s sociocultural milieu emerges. Rauzzini also composed chamber music, including string quartets, keyboard sonatas, and quartets for pianoforte and harpsichord, which were intended for musically skilled amateur performers (ch. 4). Rice suggests that Rauzzini wanted to present himself in society as a ‘serious composer’ by writing pure instrumental music (p. 102). The musical analysis undertaken in the book, illustrated with a large number of music examples, reveals Rauzzini’s accomplished compositional style for the different technical demands of domestic music-making.

Rauzzini’s compositional activity was closely linked to the wider musical and cultural life of Bath, an important cultural centre for the British aristocracy in the eighteenth century (pp. 174–8). In the 1780s Rauzzini established his own concert series. This was a unique venture, as ‘a castrato had assumed a position of cultural leadership for one of the most affluent audiences in Britain’ (p. 204). Rice reveals the various factors involved in the programming of these concerts, such...