Not heaven but women and eunuchs
Bring misfortunes to mankind.
Wives and those without balls
Bleat with similar voices.
These ancient verses inscribed in the Book of Odes, the classic collection of Chinese poetry dating in part from 1000 bc, might have been echoed by Thomas Maunsell, a wealthy Dublin barrister, when he discovered that his youngest daughter Dorothea had eloped with her music teacher, the Italian castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, in 1766. The capricious behaviour of a woman (or a 15-year-old girl to be precise) and a man ‘without balls’ threatened to turn the world of the eminently respectable and well-connected Maunsells upside down. That the reckless love birds had married according to Romish rites was a further insult not only to the family’s reputation but to the Protestant Ascendancy of 18th-century Ireland. With uncompromising fury Maunsell waged war on the castrato and set about restoring the fundamental principles of patriarchy.
While centuries of misogyny and intolerance form an inevitable backdrop to Helen Berry’s study, her book is told from the vantage point of ‘the castrato and his wife’ and the protagonists do not bleat. Dorothea’s voice, recorded in a remarkable 68-page booklet, The True and Genuine Narrative of Mr and Mrs Tenducci (1768), was a strong and persuasive one. Her elopement suggests at once an extraordinary contempt for conformity and a determination to control her own fate. For Dorothea’s clandestine union was motivated not simply by passion but by the desperate need to escape from an unwanted marriage planned by her father. By marrying Tenducci she gained time and acquired legitimacy for her son (born in 1768 of uncertain paternity). To cap it all she was eventually able to wed her English lover, William Long Kingsman, having sued for annulment of her marriage with the castrato on the grounds of his sexual incapacity.
Tenducci’s voice, meanwhile, was ethereal. Scarcely any evidence remains to record his side of the story but Berry’s painstaking reconstruction of his life, through his musical engagements and his public profile, leaves us in no doubt as to the sensation that he created whenever he sang. The presses of 18th-century London were responsible for catapulting Tenducci into the stratosphere of celebrity. ‘Divine! This is heaven! Encore!,’ the crowds were reported to have shouted. An unfinished portrait by Gainsborough reveals an absorbed and seductive singer, his lips parted (a sensual pose that is justified by the sitter’s profession). While his soft skin and rounded cheeks hint at his physical peculiarity, his broad shoulders and refined clothes are unequivocal indicators of a highly attractive Georgian male.
For lovers of the 18th century, The Castrato and his Wife will prove an exhilarating read. Indeed, following Tenducci’s story from the Tuscan hill town of Monte San Savino, to Naples, London, Dublin, Edinburgh and back to Florence, the armchair traveller enjoys something of a grand tour in reverse. Berry evokes these different scenes with cinematic clarity. But beware: this study often juxtaposes the beautiful with the disturbing. Recurrent spells in debtors’ prison for both Tenducci and Kingsman provide dark bass notes that puncture the arias of theatres, spas and pleasure gardens. The ‘red velvet purse’ that contained Tenducci’s excised testicles and which he kept dangling inside his trousers upsets the serenity of Gainsborough’s image. Most unsettling of all, Berry’s fresh look at shifting attitudes to sex, marriage, childhood and the family confounds many of our assumptions about the Enlightenment. This deeply intelligent and sympathetic account of Giusto and Dorothea demonstrates the power of micro-history to cast new light on periods that we thought we knew and understood.
