Girolamo Crescentini

Girolamo Crescentini (/ˌdʒɪrəˈlæmoʊ ˌkrɛʃənˈtiːni/; Urbania, 2 February 1762 – Naples 24 April 1846) was a noted Italian singer castrato (sopranista), a singing teacher and a composer.

He studied in Bologna with the noted teacher Lorenzo Gibelli and made his debut in 1783, quite advanced in years as a castrato. After an unlucky stay in London in 1785, where he did not win much approbation, on his getting back to Italy, he took part in Naples, very successfully, to a revival of Guglielmi’s opera Enea e Lavinia, together with the already famous tenor Giacomo Davide, who shared Crescentini’s artistic inclinations. Thenceforwards, his career made more and more headway, reaching the apex in the nineties, and specially in 1796, when he created two roles which would remain in repertoire for some decades and then famous until present times, in either case by his quasi-pupil Giuseppina Grassini’s side. For him, indeed, Nicola Zingarelli wrote the part of Romeo in his opera Giulietta e Romeo, staged at Milan’s La Scala on 30 January, while Domenico Cimarosa composed the role of Curiazio in Gli Orazi e i Curiazi, staged instead in northern Italy’s second greater theatre, Venice’s La Fenice, on 26 December. For Zingarelli’s opera, Crescentini composed himself an aria, “Ombra adorata aspetta”, which would remain famous as “la Preghiera di Romeo” (Romeo’s Prayer), and which was a greatest enduring success for the singer and a permanent painful grievance for the composer, who referred to it as “my opera’s misfortune” because of its lack of “common sense”. After spending four years in Lisbon, starting from 1797, as the director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, he got back to Italy and, after a sensational execution in Vienna of Romeo’s Prayer, out of which he was granted a crown on stage, Napoleon conferred upon him the Order of the Iron Crown of Lombardy and appointed him singing teacher of the Imperial Family. This new charge drove Crescentini to Paris from 1806 to 1812, when he finally got the leave to settle in his fatherland back again and was eventually free to retire from the stage. From 1814 he devoted himself to the teaching of singing at Bologna’s Liceo Musicale, whose direction he was entrusted in 1817, then also in Rome, and eventually at Naples’s Regio Collegio di Musica, where he had, among his pupils, Isabella Colbran and Raffaele Mirate. In 1811 he had already published a didactic essay with the title “Esercizi per la vocalizzazione”. Crescentini survived until 1846, when his artistic world was no more but a hazy faded recollection.

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