Regina Mingotti: Diva and Impresario at the King's Theatre, London

Michael Burden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351551700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Regina Mingotti was the first female impresario to run London's opera house. Born in Naples in 1722, she was the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and had worked at Dresden under Hasse from 1747. Mingotti left Germany in 1752, and travelled to Madrid to sing at the Spanish court, where the opera was directed by the great castrato, Farinelli. It is not known quite how Francesco Vanneschi, the opera promoter, came to hire Mingotti, but in 1754 (travelling to England via Paris), she was announced as being engaged for the opera in London 'having been admired at Naples and other parts of Italy, by all the Connoisseurs, as much for the elegance of her voice as that of her features'. Michael Burden offers the first considered survey of Mingotti's London years, including material on Mingotti's publication activities, and the identification of the characters in the key satirical print 'The Idol'. Burden makes a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of eighteenth-century singers' careers and status, and discusses the management, the finance, the choice of repertory, and the pasticcio practice at The King's Theatre, Haymarket during the middle of the eighteenth century. Burden also argues that Mingotti's years with Farinelli influenced her understanding of drama, fed her appreciation of Metastasio, and were partly responsible for London labelling her a 'female Garrick'. The book includes the important publication of the complete texts of both of Mingotti's Appeals to the Publick, accounts of the squabble between Mingotti and Vanneschi, which shed light on the role a singer could play in the replacement of arias.

1
London Opera: Buildings, Impresarios, Repertories, Finances

The London opera world into which Mingotti sailed was, according to Charles Burney, in a state of ‘poverty and disgrace’, and indeed, the seasons immediately prior to her arrival were both mediocre and problematic. Such was the extent of the disaster that Burney thought that the singers could not ‘keep the manager out of debt, or hardly out of jail’, and that Mingotti’s arrival ‘revived the favour of our lyric theatre, with considerable splendour’.¹ As Burney would have recognised, many of these difficulties arose from the administrative structure of the London opera scene.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the performance of all-sung Italian opera in London was focused in the King’s Theatre, sited on the corner of the Haymarket and Pall Mall, on what was then the very outer edge of London’s West End, but an edge nearest to the mansions of opera’s wealthy patrons. The theatre, built to the design of John Vanbrugh, was opened as the Queen’s Theatre in 1705, and although intended also for the performance of plays, was ultimately licensed only for the performance of Italian opera (Illustration 1.1). Its name changed to the King’s Theatre on the accession of George I in 1714 and would become Her Majesty’s on that of Queen Victoria in 1837. It would remain London’s première venue for ‘high end’ opera and dance, until Covent Garden was remodelled specifically for the 1847 Royal Italian Opera. Vanbrugh’s building was reputedly acoustically ‘difficult’, and probably because of this, the auditorium underwent a refit in 1709, but then remained substantially unchanged until the alterations of 1778. It would be altered further on a number of occasions before its destruction by fire in 1789.² By the time Mingotti arrived in London in 1754, the interior of the building was one known to performers and composers such as Farinelli, Senesino, Bordoni, Porpora, Gluck and Handel, and while it appears not to have been as grand as some of the shorter-lived theatre buildings on the Continent, the King’s Theatre served all-sung opera in London well for over eighty years.

Illustration 1.1 Coupe prise sur la longueur du Théâtre de l’Opéra de Londres. The King’s Theatre, Haymarket, as Mingotti knew it as singer and impresario. The engraving dates from 1764, and is believed to show the theatre after the alterations of 1709.

The operation of the opera company that inhabited the building did not, however, enjoy similar stability. After a number of early arrangements, it had functioned under a 21-year patent granted to the Royal Academy of Music, one that had expired on 27 July 1740. Thereafter, permission to operate in the theatre was via an annual licence granted by the Lord Chamberlain. Whilst the licence was granted every season as a matter of custom – at least, between the years 1741 and 1764, the period that concerns us here – there was always the possibility that it would be withheld, one which made long-term planning difficult. In contrast, London’s two other main theatres – for much of the century, the Theatres Royal of Drury Lane and Covent Garden – operated under Royal patents, granted by Charles II.

The King’s Theatre opera season usually began in November, and performed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. In Mingotti’s year at the helm, the House opened on 11 December 1756 with Alessandro nell’Indie, and closed with Rosmira on 18 June 1757, for a total of 49 performances. In contrast, Drury Lane opened with The Busy Body on 18 September, and performed 183 nights, while Covent Garden began with The Merry Wives of Windsor on 20 September, and gave a total of 181 nights, plus 11 oratorios. These figures obviously varied from season to season, and there are, on occasion, exceptional circumstances to be taken into account, but the proportions were not atypical for the years between 1741 and 1764. The only point of real competition came in 1754, when Giuseppe Giordani (fl. 1745–1764) brought the family burletta company to London to perform:

We abound in diversions, which flourish exceedingly on the demise of politics. There are no less than five operas every week, three of which are burlettas … We had a good set four years ago which did not take at all; but these being at the playhouse and at play prices, the people instead of resenting it as was expected, are transported with them, call them their own operas, and I will not swear that they do not take them for English operas.³

The ‘good set four years ago’ were those performed by Giovanni Francesco Crosa (c. 1700 to after January 1771) and his troupe, and were clearly not forgotten, at least by Walpole. Giordani’s company performed four works – Gioacchino Cocchi’s Gli amanti gelosi; Lo studente alla moda, attributed erroneously to Giovanni Pergolesi; Leonardo Leo’s L’amor costante; and Baldassare Galuppi’s and Vincenzio Campi’s L’arcadia in Brenta.⁴ Each of these operas proved popular, with performances in multiples not usually found in the staging of most opera seria. Walpole’s reception was muted – ‘a very bad company, except the Niccolina, who beats all the actors and actresses I ever saw for vivacity and variety’⁵ – but the ‘bad company’ does not seem to have stopped the public enjoying the ‘burlettas’ to the full.⁶

As outlined by Price, Hume and Milhous, the King’s Theatre opera company was managed in a variety of ways; by the impresario, the board of directors, partner-impresarios or the noble patron.⁷ For much of the 1740s, the noble patron was Lord Middlesex, whose presence (the records suggest) waxed and waned. John James Heidegger (1666– 1749), Vanneschi and possibly the set designer Antonio Jolli (c. 1700–77),⁸ appear to have acted as impresarios, while Mingotti and Felice Giardini (1716–96), and Colomba Mattei (fl. 1743–78) and her husband Signor Trombetta, appear to have been partner-impresarios.

The case of Crosa and his burletta troupe appears to offer a fifth model, one in which the manager, Vanneschi, bought in a working company, apparently in the hope that this would shift the financial burden to the outside impresario. As the season progressed, it became clear to Crosa that Vanneschi expected him to meet the company’s running costs, including those of the dance troupe.⁹ This ambiguity probably caused – or hastened – Crosa’s insolvency, although whether it was really an ‘ambiguity’ is doubtful: Vanneschi was capable of deliberately leaving this matter vague, and taking advantage of the loophole at a later date. The two men also quarrelled over payments to Vanneschi, who, it seems, was attempting to double-dip by receiving a royalty of three per cent per night on the drama, as well as being paid as the ‘poet’ for the new libretto.¹⁰

What did it take to be an impresario in London? Vanneschi’s own career, as erratic as it seems to have been, gives us some idea, suggesting both what type of behavior Mingotti had to deal with as a singer, and in turn, what skills she needed as an impresario. Many impresarios had a talent of their own to bring to the table, which, in Vanneschi’s case, was his apparent ability as a librettist. He is recorded as the author of the texts of two operas performed at the Cocomero Theatre in Florence in the autumn of 1731, La commedia in commedia and La vanità delusa, both set by Giovanni Chinzer (fl. 1710–49). Thereafter, operas with Vanneschi librettos had first performances in London, Lucca, Rome and Venice. It is, however, difficult to judge his work as a whole: Robert Weaver views his work as ‘an important bridge between the seventeenth-century Tuscan classic librettos of Moniglia and Villifranchi and the more sentimental Leopoldine ones of Cassori, Collectini, Somigli and Tassi’.¹¹ However, librettos ascribed to Vanneschi all appear to be adaptations of others’ work – for example, his Fetonte is an adaptation of Quinault’s Phaeton – and his alterations expedient, and not the result of sustained aesthetic notions or poetic input.

An impresario was also required to be an operator, a skill Vanneschi possessed in spades. We learn from Horace Mann that his connection with Lord Middlesex was established some time in the late 1730s: ‘You have heard how he cheated Lord Middle[sex] and Raymond in their consular triumph and after in their opera at Lucca.’¹² The ‘consular triumph’ refers possibly to the Florence ‘masque superbe’ of Middlesex, Lord Robert Raymond (1717–1756), 2nd Baron Raymond, and William Barrington (1717–93), 2nd Viscount Barrington, an event described by William Bristow on 10 March 1737, in which a Roman consul arrived in triumph on a horse.¹³ ‘After in their opera at Lucca’ is probably a reference to Alessandro in Persia, a setting of Vanneschi’s own text by Domenico Paradies (1707–91), which was premièred at Lucca in 1738.¹⁴ The performances – the first recorded of Paradies’s music – were not a great suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note and Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘The Mingotti’ – a Diva in the Making
• 1 London Opera: Buildings, Impresarios, Repertories, Finances
• 2 Mingotti in London, 1754–57
• 3 London Opera between 1757 and 1763
• 4 Mingotti Redux, 1763–64
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Index