The Castrato and His Wife
No sooner had the career of the soprano castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci (c.1735–90) genuinely taken off than he fell in love with a wealthy and powerful Anglo-Irish jurist’s teenaged daughter. Fleeing her father’s choice of a husband for her, Dorothea Maunsell eloped with Tenducci, marrying him in a clandestine Catholic ceremony in Ireland and an Anglican ritual in England. The couple absconded to the continent before reconciling with Maunsell père, then followed the singer’s engagements in Britain and Italy until Dorothea ditched Tenducci for the father of her first child. She married her new mate (also twice) and, via a suit her papa funded, had her previous wedlock annulled. The whole affair was an enormous contretemps, thanks to what would now be called a media feeding frenzy, to which Dorothea contributed her own, novelistic True and Genuine Narrative (1768). Writing clearly, judiciously, and sympathetically about all the dramatis personae, especially the heroic but improvident Tenducci, who retained his professional stature throughout, historian of the family Berry rescues an eighteenth-century scandal from oblivion. Utterly enthralling. --Ray Olson