Benedetto Frizzi on Singers, Composers and Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Benedetto Frizzi, an enthusiastic opera lover, attended operas in several northern Italian cities from the 1770s to the early nineteenth century. He recorded his impressions in his Dissertazione di biografia musicale, published in Trieste around 1803. The last part of this book consists of eight letters dealing with opera, both serious and comic, as Frizzi himself experienced it in Mantua, Milan, Brescia, Novara, Venice, and Trieste. 

    Frizzi briefly considered operatic composers and provided a useful discussion of the different kinds of roles in opera buffa (mezzo carattere, buffo caricato, etc.).  But his primary interest was in singers: his letters constitute a source of information about some of the leading singers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Gasparo Pacchierotti, Luigi Marchesi, Luisa Todi, Brigida Banti, Elizabeth Billington, Elisabeth Mara, Franziska Danzi Lebrun, Giuseppina Grassini, Angelica Catalani, Anna Morichelli, Giovanni Ansani, Matteo Babbini, Giacomo David, Stefano Mandini, Teresa Strinasacchi, and Giovanni Battista Brocchi.

    This article, which presents Frizzi's letters on contemporary opera with an introduction, annotations, and an index of names, appeared in Studi musicali 28 (1994), 367–93. For further discussion of Frizzi's comments on types of operatic roles, see Daniel Brandenburg, "Benedetto Frizzis 'Dissertazione di biografia musicale' (Triest 1802). Eine Quelle zur Rollencharakteristik in der Opera Buffa," in Bühnenklänge. Festschrift für Sieghart Döhring zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Thomas Betzwieser, Daniel Brandenburg et al., Munich, 2005, 37–45. For more on Frizzi, see Benedetto Frizzi: Un illuminista ebreo nell'età dell'emancipazione, ed. Marida Brignani e Maurizio Bertolotti, Florence, 2009.

Full text: https://www.academia.edu/7621041/Benedetto_Frizzi_on_Singers_Composers_and_Opera_in_Late_Eighteenth-Century_Italy