Giusto Fernando Tenducci

Giusto Fernando Tenducci, sometimes called "il Senesino" (c.1735 Castration was illegal in both church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses.

In 1753, when he was about seventeen, Tenducci made his professional opera appearance in Venice, as Gasparo in Ferdinando Bertoni's Ginevra. In 1768, he returned to London from Edinburgh where he remained for most of the rest of his life, except for a period between 1771 and 1778 when he appeared in many roles in Italy, then traveled to Paris. He taught singing to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Paris in 1777–8. Impressed with his teacher's singing abilities, Mozart wrote a concert aria for him which is now lost (K. 315b).

He returned to Italy just months before his death in January 1790 in Genoa.

Marriage: 1766–1772 Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a licence granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore.

Two portraits of Tenducci were painted by Thomas Gainsborough. One is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, the other was sold from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent.

Appearance in literature In 1766, Tenducci sang the part of Arbaces in Arne's opera Artaxerxes in Dublin, delighting the public by "his exquisite singing of the air 'Water parted from the Sea'". A group known as the "frolicsome Dublin boys" sang a song about him: "Tenducci was a piper's son/ and he was in love when he was young,/ and all the tunes that he could play/ was Water parted from the say." James Joyce quoted and parodied that song in Finnegans Wake, II.3.

Tenducci is mentioned in Robert Fergusson's poem "The Canongate Playhouse in Ruins"; while in Edinburgh, Tenducci sang three songs with lyrics by Fergusson.

Tenducci is mentioned in Tobias Smollet's, "The Expedition of Humphry Clinker," (pub. 1771), Vol. I, in a letter of Lydia Melford, in which she describes his voice as "neither man's nor woman's but it is more melodious then either and warbled so divinely, that, while I listened, I really thought myself in paradise."

A "Dorothea Kingsman vs Ferdinando Tenducci" is also mentioned in a suit for libel in October 1775 in the 7th volume (p. 123-173) of the 1780 work "Trials for adultery or the history of divorces, being select trials at Doctors Commons", by a "civilian" (printed in London for S. Blason, 7 volumes in-8° in total, rare, only one edition in 1780). The case confirms and details that Dorothea Maunsell, her former music pupil and daughter of Counsellor Maunsell of Molesworth street, Dublin, sued for annulment of the marriage for impotency, F. Tenducci having undergone an "entire castration", which is discussed with witnesses in the case, along with the circumstances of the 1766 (catholic priest) and 1767 (Church of England minister) marriage ceremonies. The marriages were declared null and void.