This is a slightly expanded version of the paper given at the conference "Music, Body, and Stage: The Iconography of Music Theater and Opera" (New York, 11–14 March 2008) and published in Music in Art 34 (2009), 153–64. For illustrations and musical example, please consult PDF. For another study of this print see Alessandra Mignatti, "Scena teatrale con ritratto e sonetto per la cantante Violante Vestri, Apamia in Tigrane, Regio Ducal Teatro, Carnevale 1750," in Festa, rito e teatro nella "gran città di Milano" nel Settecento, ed. Francesco Barbieri, Roberta Carpani, and Alessandra Mignatti (Studia Borromaica 24), 2010, 948–55. The system of sexual commerce within which Violante Vestri operated is explored in greater depth in Nina Kushner, Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Ithaca, NY, 2013).
During Carnival 1750 the soprano Violante Vestri created the role of Apamia in Giuseppe Carcani’s Il Tigrane at the Regio Ducal Teatro of Milan, in a production with sets by the fratelli (that is, Bernardino and Fabrizio) Galliari. Her performance was celebrated by an engraving by Marc’Antonio dal Re that serves as an extravagant frame for a sonnet addressed to her. The sonnet is dedicated, in the present tense, “Al merito impareggiabile della Signora Violante Vestri che con applauso ed universale agradimento rapresenta nel dramma intitolato il Tigrane il personaggio d’Apamia nel Teatro di Milano (“To the incomparable merit of Signora Violante Vestri, who is representing the character of Apamia in the drama entitled Il Tigrane in the theater of Milan”). Below the sonnet, two putti hold up a banner displaying music and a third putto holds up a portrait of the singer. Below these, Dal Re gives us a wonderfully vivid and detailed view—from the perspective of the ruler’s box at the back of the auditorium—of the staging of a serious opera in mid eighteenth-century Italy, the orchestra that accompanied it, and the audience that enjoyed it. At the very bottom of the print, enclosed in a leafy frame, a ship sails under the motto “Virtute et comite fortuna”—from Cicero’s phrase “Virtute duce, comite fortuna” (“With Virtue as leader, Fortune as friend.”[1]
The engraving has been published at least four times, but reproduced in images that do not convey many of the original’s details, and accompanied by commentary that is either insubstantial or inaccurate.[2] In this paper I will ask some of the questions that this print raises, and propose some preliminary answers.
A basic question—one to which all the others are related—is: what purpose did this print serve? Sonnets in praise of singers and dancers were common in eighteenth-century Italy. But they were normally printed on quite small pieces of paper, to be tossed like confetti from the highest tiers of the auditorium. For example, when Adriana Ferrarese (Mozart’s Fiordiligi) portrayed Semiramide in Florence in 1787, the Gazzetta toscana reported: “la Sig. Adriana Ferraresi, la quale con tanta verità, ed eleganza ha sostenuta col gesto, e col canto la parte di Semiramide, si è meritata l'approvazione universale con un Componimento poetico dispensato, e gettato al Popolo con pioggia d'oro.” And in Padua in 1790 two female dancers were greeted with "dimostrazioni di Sonetti, e spargimento discreto di Colombi in Parterre.”[3] But sheets of the size and elaborateness of our print are unlikely to have tossed out of a box in the theater.
The sonnet addressed to Vestri itself raises questions. Rather unusally for an operatic sonnet, it not only praises her singing and acting but defends her from attacks and encourages her to persevere in spite of them:
No, sprezzata non sei; l'Insubria onora
La tua virtude, e che ne porti il vanto
L'attesta il pieno applauder suo qualora
Vezzosa VESTRI apri le labbre al canto.
Gode, se mostri il riso, e si scolora
Il Popol folto, se tu fingi il pianto;
E negli atti, e tuoi motti ci trova ognora
O se taci, o se parli un nuovo incanto.
Prosegui pur la ben comincia impresa,
E 'l tuo Nome passar sopra ogni speme
Vedrem, ne paventar contraria offesa.
Chi seco ha il merto, di cader non teme,
E in van nel tosco suo l'Invidia accesa
Contro i tuoi pregi, si contorce, e freme.
No, you are not scorned; Lombardy honors your skill, and loud applause attests to your merit, charming VESTRI, whenever you open your lips to sing. If you smile, the crowded auditorium rejoices; and if you pretend to weep, it turns pale. And in your gestures and your words--in silence or in speech--it finds new enchantment. Now continue the enterprise begun so well, and we will see your name exceed every hope. Do not fear negative attacks. Whoever has merit should have no fear of failure; and Envy, raging in her own poison against your merits, writhes and trembles in vain.
What kind of attack was Vestri being subjected to? Why did one person--the person who commissioned and paid for this lavish print--go to such lengths to defend her and encourage her?
Yet another question has to do with the identity of the two women depicted in the print. I say two women because they seem to be quite different. The woman standing on stage looks younger, thinner, and prettier than the woman portrayed above her in the oval frame.
If these indeed are two different women, then possibly this is a kind of passpartout print presenting a generic operatic scene, intended to serve as a frame for sonnets addressed to any number of different female singers. And if that is the case, then we cannot conclude automatically from the inscription at the top of the print that the stage picture below represents a scene from Carcani’s Il Tigrane or that the auditorium and orchestra are those of the Regio Ducal Teatro in Milan.
The libretto Tigrane
Pietro Antonio Bernardoni’s dramma per musica Tigrane re d’Armenia rivalled some of Metastasio’s in the frequency with which it was set to music and the longevity with which it held the stage.[4] First performed in Vienna in 1710 with music by Antonio Bononcini, it was set to music dozens of times during the decades that followed. During Carnival 1724 it was presented under the title La virtù trionfante dell’amore e dell’odio, overo Il Tigrane, with music by three composers: the Romans Benedetto Micheli and Nicola Romaldi wrote acts 1 and 3 respectively while Antonio Vivaldi wrote act 2. It was this anonymous arrangement of 1724—rather than the Viennese original—that served as the basis for further revisions. Librettos entitled Tigrane, with music by Hasse (Naples, 1729) and Giuseppe Arena (Venice, 1741) established the title and text that became more or less standard during the next several decades. The version of the libretto set by Arena bears a dedication signed by Goldoni, who refers to it as “dramma ch'è fatica di penna errudita”; the dedication has led scholars, not unreasonably, to attribute that particular rifacimento to Goldoni.[5]
From the 1740s to the 1760s audiences all over Italy and in Vienna, Leipzig, Prague, London saw productions of Tigrane, with music by Gluck (Crema, 1743), Lampugnani (Venice, 1747 and revivals in at least three other cities: Cremona, Brescia, and Pistoia), Piccinni (Turin, 1761), and several other composers. Venice seems to have been particularly fond of Tigrane, putting it on the stage in 1741 (Arena), 1747 (Lampugnani), 1755 (composer unknown), and 1762 (Antonio Tozzi).
The libretto printed for the production of Carcani’s Il Tigrane [fig. 5] has been attributed to Goldoni.[6] But it differs enough from the libretto that Arena set to music to suggest that it was derived at least in part from the versions performed in Rome and Naples in the 1720s; this filiation is implied also by a dedicatory message from the Associati--the Milanese noblemen who organized opera at the Regio Ducal Teatro--to Count Ferdinand Bonaventura Harrach, Austrian governor of Lombardy from 1747 to 1750.[7] In it the Associati refer to Harrach's father, who had earlier served as Austrian viceroy in Naples, and to a version of Tigrane that had been performed there in 1729: “Quel Tigrane che da quattro scorsi lustri fu rappresentato in Napoli sotto gli auspici del vostro gran padre, che allora con universale amore e ben meritata gloria quel vasto regno reggeva, ecco presentemente in Milano sotto l'autorevole patrocinio dell'Eccellenza Vostra farsi dal medesimo nuova e fastosa comparsa” (The Tigrane portrayed in Naples twenty years ago under the auspices of your great father, who was then ruling that vast kingdom with universal love and well deserved fame: behold him now in Milan, under the powerful patronage of Your Excellence, given a new and splendid appearance by the same [patronage]).
A Scene from Carcani’s Il Tigrane?
Below the sonnet addressed to Violante, a woman whose train two children hold stands at the front of a stage. To her left and right, flats that protrude from the wings depict trees; behind her is an elaborate architectural confection--much of which is probably painted on a backdrop--with fountains and stairs leading to a garden on the upper level, where one can make out a statue of Diana and two arbors shown in perspective. These are normal parts of what eighteenth-century librettists and scenographers referred to as a deliziosa—a pleasant, shady spot in a garden. More unusual are the animal cages on both sides of the stage—what scenographers called a "serraglio di fiere"--a menagerie, with a lion visible on the left, and another wild beast, possibly a bear, on the right. Is this a scene from Carcani's Tigrane, the opera in which Violante sang, "con applauso e universale agradimento," during Carnival 1750?
From the libretto printed for the production of Tigrane in Milan in 1750 we know that in act 2, Tigrane, Mitridate, Cleopatra, and Oronte leave the stage one by one, until Apamia stands alone in a “Giardino di Fiori, Fontane, Grottesche, e Sedili di Verdura.” First in recitative, then in an aria, she expresses the torment of conflicting emotions:
Sì, sì, tutto si tenti
Per giungere a regnar, ed un germano
Per rendere felice;
Ma questo core intanto
Fra le smanie d'amore arde e si strugge;
E per maggior mia pena
Devo seguir chi mi disprezza e fugge.
Che farai in tanto affanno
O mio core disprezzato!
Sol languir, penar, morire...
Io morir per un'ingrato?
Ah, si lasci quel tiranno,
Che penare ogn'or mi fa.
In si barbaro tormento
Ah mancare ognor mi sento;
E consiglio - in tal periglio
L'alma mia trovar non sa.
Eleven years after designing the sets for Carcani's opera in Milan, Fabrizio and Bernardino Galliari made scenic designs for Piccinni's setting of the same libretto at the Teatro Regio in Turin.[8] Fabrizio's proposal for a “Deliziosa de’ giardini reali” in act 2 of Piccinni’s opera resembles the scenery in Dal Re's engraving: both sets represent gardens on two levels, with steps leading up to the higher level, where trellised allés diverging to the left and right. These similarities suggest that the scenery depcited by Dal Re would have been perfectly appropriate for Violante's big scena in Carcani’s Il Tigrane.
But of course there were many garden scenes—many deliziose—in eighteenth-century serious opera. What other evidence might allow us to connect this particular deliziosa with Tigrane’s opera and with Vestri’s sonnet?
An aria by Carcani?
The music the putti hold aloft in Dal Re’s print is not entirely legible, and not everything that is legible makes musical sense [figs. 9 & 10]. The banner contains part of an aria in F major (vocal line and bass only) that begins with the words "Che farai in tanto affanno." After the word “Apiano” (a garbling of the name Apamia?), the music begins with an Andante in cut time and continues with a passage in C major and 2/4 meter. This aria's text is precisely the one that Apamia sang in the garden scene in Carcani's opera. I have found this aria text in no version of Tigrane other than the one set by Carcani.[9] No score of Carcani’s Il Tigrane apparently exists,[10] making it impossible to confirm that the aria that Dal Re's putti hold up is by Carcani. But it seems quite likely that it is. The banner in the print is not only a crucial link between the print and Carcani's Il Tigrane but also preserves traces of an opera that is otherwise almost entirely lost.
The Orchestra and the Audience
In 1747 the Regio Ducal Teatro assembled an orchestra of forty-six: twenty-two violins, six violas, two cellos, five double basses, two oboes, two bassoons, and five trumpets and horns, and two harpsichords.[11] Twenty-three years later Leopold Mozart wrote, of the orchestra that accompanied his son’s Mitridate in the same theater, that it contained “fourteen first and fourteen second violins, twenty-eight violins in all, two claviers, six double basses, two cellos, two bassoons, six violas, two oboes and two flutes (who, if there are no flutes, always play as four oboes), four horns, and two trumpets, etc., sixty players in all.”[12]
The orchestra that Dal Re depicted, with a charm worthy of Pier Leone Ghezzi, is not nearly so large as those two; it consists of about thirty-six musicians [figs. 11 & 12]. Perhaps this orchestra is not that of the Regio Ducal Teatro; or perhaps the artist omitted some of the players for the sake of clarity or simply left out of his print musicians on the far left and right (as he obviously left out one of the harpsichord players).
One of the two harpsichords on the left side of the orchestra forms part of a continuo group completed by a double bass and a cello. Strange that one of the harpsichords is not at the other end of the orchestra, together with the other double bass/cello pair, as one would expect in the “two-continuo system” normal in opera orchestras of eighteenth-century Italy.[13] The famous painting often attributed to Pietro Domenico Olivero of the performance of an opera seria in the Teatro Regio, Turin, clearly shows the more normal placement of harpsichords at opposite ends of the orchestra.
Four horn players lift their bells proudly with one hand and hold their music with the other. In showing them this way, Dal Re probably sacrificed musical accuracy to visual effect. Horn players raised their bells only for fanfares and the loudest tutti passages. They are unlikely to have done so to accompany an aria d'affetto like “Che farai in tanto affanno.”
The rest of the players sit in three parallel rows, one facing the stage and two facing the audience. There appear to be twenty-six musicians in the three rows. Their instruments cannot all be identified; but we might plausibly divide them into eighteen violins, four violas, two oboes, and two flutes. (There is no sign of bassoons anywhere. In the Turin painting one bassoonist stands at the far left and another at the far right. If they occupied similar positions in the orchestra depicted by Dal Re, they would have been beyond the print's borders.) A prompter faces the stage with a libretto in his hand [fig. 14]. The absence of an orchestra pit, invented in the nineteenth century, puts the singer in close visual contact with most of the instrumentalists and makes the orchestra clearly and fully audible to the singer and the audience alike.
Dal Re depicted an audience sitting on five rows of benches. Soldiers with pikes stand guard at the front of the two aisles. In keeping with the spirit of the Carnival season, some members of the audience wear masks. The masqueraders tend to pay more attention to one another than to the opera. Some people chat, gesturing and pointing in various directions. Four people have turned almost completely around, to see or to speak with those behind them, or in one case to shake hands in greeting. Several people follow the opera with librettos; three of them hold little candles to illuminate their books (Fig. 16).
Violante Vestri(s) and Her Lovers
Despite the splendor of this visual and poetic tribute, the singer to whom it is dedicated spent much of her career singing secondary roles. She attained only briefly the status of prima donna. Shortly after singing in Il Tigrane she abandoned the Italian stage in favor of the concert halls of Paris.
Gaston Capon, in his study of the Vestris family of dancers and singers, identified Maria Caterina Violante Vestris (she spelled her last name this way outside of Italy) as a younger sister of the famous dancer and choreographer Gaetano Vestris.[14] Capon placed her birth around 1732, deriving this date from a statement made at the time of her death (on 23 April 1791) that she died at age of “fifty-eight or thereabouts.”[15] But that cannot be correct, since she was already singing comic opera in Naples in 1742 and 1743, and she appeared in two serious operas in Ferrara in 1744.[16]
In Naples she earned the admiration and attention of young King Charles III—the first in a series of rich and powerful men with whom she had close relations. During a period of about two decades she enjoyed the protection of at least fourteen men, exhaustively catalogued by Capon with the help of police dossiers. Which ones she actually slept with we have no way of knowing; but she seems to have been a very successful courtesan, operating at the very highest levels of mid eighteenth-century European society.
From Naples and King Charles, Vestri went to Vienna and Emperor Francis, according to her police file in Paris:
Our informer asserts that the present emperor [Franz I] fell in love with Violante on account of her black hair [and] eyebrows—a color to which he is especially attracted in women. This made such a commotion at court that the queen of Hungary [Empress Maria Theresa] learned about it, and she saw to it that Violante was ordered not to appear except in powdered hair. Finally she ordered that the entire family be exiled.[17]
Vestri returned to Italy, and during Carnival 1749 she sang as prima donna in operas by Giovanni Battista Lampugnani and Giuseppe Scarlatti at the Teatro Regio in Turin. Lampugnani was music director at Milan's Regio Ducal Teatro, so it may have been under his auspices that Vestri appeared a year later in the capital of Lombardy—but not as prima donna. In Lampugnani’s Artaserse she sang Semira while Catterina Visconti sang the more important role of Mandane; in Carcani’s Il Tigrane she portrayed Apamia while Visconti took the more important role of Cleopatra.[18]
Despite her apparent inability to maintain a place among the very best female singers of her time, Vestri had lost none of her fascination for powerful men. In Milan she entranced Gian Luca Pallavicini, governor-general of Lombardy from 1746 to 1747 and from 1750 to 1754.19
Vestri performed ably enough in Artaserse and Il Tigrane to be invited to sing again in Milan during the following Carnival of 1751, but again only in secondary parts. She portrayed Onoria and Sabina in settings by David Perez and Antonio Pampani of Metastasio's Ezio and Adriano in Siria.
In 1751 Vestri left Italy again—and this time apparently for good. Perhaps her inability to maintain the rank of prima donna discouraged her; or perhaps Empress Maria Theresa, having expelled her from Vienna, made it impossible for her to pursue her career in Italy as well. She made a good impression before the French royal court at Fontainebleau, according to the Mercure de France (December 1751, p. 159): "La signora Violanté Vestri de Florence a chanté le 9 Novembre, plusieurs ariettes italiennes, en presence de Monseigneur le Dauphin & de Madame la Dauphine, qui en ont paru extêmement satisfaits, ainsi que toute la Cour, qui a beaucoup applaudi à ses talens."
Vestri spent most of the rest of her life in Paris, where she continued to enjoy at the attention of many male admirers. Capon names eleven of her Parisian protectors, including the great musical patron Le Riche de la Pouplinière and the Austrian ambassador Count Kaunitz.[20] She made her debut at the Concert Spirituel on 15 August 1752 under the name Mlle. Violantina de Vestris, singing two Italian arias.[21]
Later that year she visited London, where she won the admiration of the young nobleman Philip Stanhope. His father, the famous Lord Chesterfield, teased him in a letter of 15 January 1753: "Your virtuosa, la Signora Vestri, sung here the other day, with great applause: I presume you are INTIMATELY acquainted with her merit. Good night to you, whoever you pass it with." A few months later Vestri married Felice Giardini, the violinist and impresario who played an important role in London's musical life for much of the second half of the century.[22] But he did so mostly without his wife, who returned to Paris and from 1755 to 1758 participated regularly in the Concert Spirituel, now calling herself Mme. Vestris de Giardini. She sang mostly Italian arias but on at least one occasion took the soprano part in Pergolesi's Stabat Mater.[23] She returned briefly to the operatic stage in 1763, singing in Niccolò Jommelli's Il trionfo d’amore at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart.
It is the combination of the fascination that Violante aroused in rich and powerful men on the one hand and her less than stellar success on the operatic stage on the other that accounts for the odd combination of the lavishness of Dal Re’s print—out of all proportion to Violante's success on the stage—and the defensiveness of its poetry. Praising his beautiful protegée in the face of “contraria offesa,” one of Violante’s admirers played a role analogous to that of Charles Foster Kane (as portrayed by Orson Wells), applauding Susan Alexander’s operatic debut long after the rest of the audience had fallen silent.
This leads to the question of who might have commissioned and paid for the print, which in its size and detailed workmanship must have cost a great deal of money. One of Violante's lovers, Giovanni Luca Pallavicini, ruled Lombardy as governor-general during periods before and shortly after her appearance in Carcani's Il Tigrane. Pallavicini was not only close to her emotionally, but he was close to the production of Il Tigrane in time and place. Of all the men associated with Violante, Pallavicini is mostly likely to have sponsored Dal Re’s print.
In the audience that Dal Re depicted, several people (including one of those who is looking backwards) applaud the singer: a visual affirmation of the poetic applause proclaimed in the sonnet for which this print serves as a frame. With this magnificent frame Dal Re added to the applause for Violante Vestri. She may not have been a great singer, but she was certainly one of the most captivating women of the mid eighteenth century. This print is a direct response to her irresistable allure.
Notes
[1] Two copies of the engraving, of which one is reproduced here, are preserved in the Raccolta delle Stampe Bertarelli, Milan. My thanks to Mercedes Viale Ferrero for telling me of the location of these copies, and to Laurence L. Bongie, Bruce Alan Brown, Margaret Butler, Paul Corneilson, Daniel Heartz, Lowell Lindgren, Louise Rice, and Neal Zaslaw for valuable advice and insights.
[2] Robert Haas, Aufführungspraxis der Musik (Potsdam: Athenaion, 1931); Mariangela Donà, "Milan," in New Grove Dictionary of Music, 1st edn. (London: Macmillan, 1980), and 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 2001); Mariangela Donà, “Milan,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992). All three Grove articles identify the opera depicted in the print as Hasse's Tigrane.
[3] Gazzetta universale veneta, 1790, 752 (Padua, 21 November).
[4] On the libretto’s history see Francesco Piovano, “Un opéra inconnu de Gluck,” Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft IX (1907-8), 231-81, and, identifying for the first time the central importance of the Bernardoni’s Tigrane re d'Armenia of 1710, Reinhard Strohm, The Operas of Antonio Vivaldi (Firenze: Olschki, 2008).
[5] Piero Weiss, “Goldoni, Carlo,” New Grove, 2nd edn., accepts this attribution. The version of Tigrane set to music by Arena can be consulted on-line in a digital edition of Goldoni's librettos: www.carlogoldoni.it/carlogoldoni/libretti/tigrane1.jsp
[6] Francesco Bussi, “Carcani, Giuseppe,” New Grove, 2nd edn.
[7] My thanks to Lorenzo della Chà for sending me a photocopy of the copy of this libretto in the Biblioteca Braidense, Milan.
[8] Mercedes Viale Ferrero, La scenografia del ‘700 e i fratelli Galliari (Torino: Fratelli Pozzo, 1963), 159, 198-99.
[9] Piccinni's Tigrane contains an aria with a closely related text: “Che farai fra tanto affanno / O mio core sventurato.” A manuscript of Piccinni’s aria, with the inscription “Torino, 1761,” is preserved at the University of California Berkeley, MS 104; see John A. Emerson, Catalog of Pre-1900 Vocal Manuscripts in the Music Library, University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 151. My thanks to Daniel Heartz for consulting this manuscript and sending me the aria text and musical incipit.
[10] The only surviving part of Carcani's opera that I know of is a single aria, Cleopatra’s “Veggo le lagrime, odo le voci,” preserved in a manuscript in the library of the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan.
[11] John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 145.
[12] Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch, and Joseph Heinz Eibl, 7 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1962-1975), I, 408.
[13] Spitzer and Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra, 149-50.
[14] Gaston Capon, Les Vestris: le “diou” de la danse et sa famille (1730-1808), d’après des rapports de police et des documents inédits, 3rd. edn. (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1908).
[15] Capon, Les Vestris, 6, 276.
[16] Vestri’s earliest known roles were those of Irene in Antonio Palella’s Il chimico (Naples, 1742), Virginia in Leonardo Leo’s Il fantastico (1743), Erissena in Niccolò Jommelli’s Alessandro nell’Indie (Ferrara, 1744), and Arpalice in Jommelli’s Ciro riconosciuto (Ferrara, 1744). Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, 7 vols., (Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1990-1994).
[17] On assure que l'Empereur daujourdhui devint amoureux de violente rapport a ses cheveux sourcils noirs couleur pour Laquelle est decidé ce prince, dans le sexe feminin cela fit tant de Bruit a la cour, que la Reine d'hongrie en fut instruitte fit ordonner a violante de ne paroitre qu'avec des cheveux poudrés, et enfin fit exiler toutte cette famille (Archives de la Bastille 10237, fol. 420r). Vestri's dismissal may have been part of a larger effort by Empress Maria Theresa to clean up Viennese theater and to distance her husband from the temptations offered by Italian opera, as recorded by Johann Joseph Khevenhüller in his diary in February 1747: “Bald auch nach Anfang der Fasten Zeit liessen I. M. ein und andere von der Opera Banda, weillen sie den Fasching hindurch sich zu frech augeführet, durch die n. oe. Regierung von hier abschaffen und sezten nachero eine Commission sub praesidio meines Schwagern (des Fürsten) qua Hoffmarschall darnider, um das Comicum dem dermahligen Impressario Selliers auf convenable Art abnehmen zu können.” Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias: Tagebuch des Fürsten Johann Josef Khevenhüller-Metsch, kaiserlichen Obersthofmeisters, 1742-1776, ed. Rudolf Graf Khevenhüller-Metsch and Hanns Schlitter, 8 vols. (Wien: Holzhausen, 1907-72), II, 145.
[18] In Turin Vestri portrayed Ermione in Lampugnani's Andromaca and Partenope in Scarlatti's Partenope (Sartori). That Violante's place in the cast hierarchy in Milan was far below that of Visconti is proved by their respective fees. For the 1750 Carnival season, Vestri earned 2,500 Lire di Milano while Visconti earned 7,500—three times as much (Bologna, Archivio di Stato, Fondo Pallavicini, Ser. III, Nr. 11).
19 According to the police files, "Violante a été entretenue par ce général [Pallavicini]" (Archives de la Bastille 10237, fol 420r).
[20] Copan, 17-136; see also Georges Cucuel, La Pouplinière et la musique de chambre au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fischbacher, 1913), 165-66.
[21] Constant Pierre, Histoire du Concert Spirituel 1725-1790 (Paris: Société Françoise de Musicologie, 1975), 263.
[22] Simon McVeigh, “Felice Giardini: A Violinist in Late Eighteenth-Century London,” Music & Letters LXIV (1983), 162-72. The wedding took place on 28 August 1753 in Bramham, Yorkshire (www.familysearch.org, accessed on 14 December 2008).
[23] Pierre, Histoire du Concert Spirituel, 269-75.