Pasquale Brignoli

Pasquale Brignoli (Pasquilino Brignoli) (b. Naples, Italy, 1824; d. New York City, 30 October 1884) was an Italian-born American tenor.

The son of a glove-maker, he received a fine musical education, and became a pianist of some ability. It is said that at the age of fifteen he wrote an opera, and, disgusted at the way in which the finest aria was sung, rushed upon the stage and sang it himself, to the delight of all. He paid little attention, however, to the cultivation of his voice until after he was twenty-one.

Little more is known about his early life because he was very reticent about it. During a civil hearing in New York in 1864 (Godfrey vs. Brignoli), he refused to divulge to the court what he had done before he became a singer. However, he told the court that he had started his singing career in 1850. When Clara Louise Kellogg once noticed that his ears were pierced, she speculated that he might have been a sailor at one time, but he never allowed anyone to discuss the matter with him.

It is said that his singing career began when Marietta Alboni heard him singing at a party and advised him to pursue a professional career. Success in the concert-room encouraged him to appear in opera in Paris and London. His operatic debut was in Paris in Rossini's Mosè in Egitto but he needed training and so he entered the Paris Conservatoire. After a period of study, he appeared in L'elisir d'amore in the role of Nemorino at the Theatre des Italiens. He is also recorded as having sung at the Paris Opera in 1854.

On the invitation of Ole Bull, he came to the United States with Maurice Strakosch in 1855, and soon attained a popularity that lasted almost to the end of his life. His American debut was as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor (12 March 1855) and soon thereafter he sang Manrico in the first American production of Il Trovatore (2 May 1855). Other permière American performances in which he appeared were La Traviata (1856), I vespri siciliani (1859) and Un ballo in maschera (1861), conducted by Brignoli's friend, Emanuele Muzio at the New York Academy of Music, as well as Luigi Arditi's La Spia (1855) and Betly (1861) at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Brignoli's first appearance in Boston was on May 25, 1855, as Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia.

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