page_title: Adelina Patti
section_title: Vocal development
hierarchical_section_title: Adelina Patti / Biography / Vocal development
context_page_description: Adelina Patti was an Italian 19th-century opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique.
  The composer Giuseppe Verdi, writing in 1877, described her as being perhaps the finest singer who had ever lived and a "stupendous artist". Verdi's admiration for Patti's talent was shared by numerous music critics and social commentators of her era.
context_section_description: Adelina Patti made her operatic debut at age 16 on 24 November 1859 in the title role of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at the Academy of Music, New York. On 24 August 1860, she and Emma Albani were soloists in the world premiere of Charles Wugk Sabatier's Cantata in Montreal which was performed in honour of the visit of the Prince of Wales. In 1861, at the age of 18, she was invited to Covent Garden, to execute the role of Amina in Bellini's La sonnambula. She had such remarkable success at Covent Garden that season, she bought a house in Clapham and, using London as a base, went on to conquer the European continent, performing Amina in Paris and Vienna in subsequent years with equal success.
  During an 1862 American tour, she sang John Howard Payne's Home, Sweet Home at the White House for the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his wife, Mary Lincoln. The Lincolns were mourning their son Willie, who had died of typhoid. Moved to tears, the Lincolns requested an encore of the song. Henceforth, it would become associated with Adelina Patti, and she performed it many times as a bonus item at the end of recitals and concerts.
  Patti's career was one of success after success. She sang not only in England and the United States, but also as far afield in mainland Europe as Russia, and in South America as well, inspiring audience frenzy and critical superlatives wherever she went. Her girlish good looks gave her an appealing stage presence, which added to her celebrity status.
  In 1869-1870 she engaged in tours through the Europe and Russia. Concerts in Moscow and Saint-Petersbourg were very successful and Patti repeated her Russian trips throughout the 1870s. In Russia she made some highly prolific friendships with the first persons of Russian aristocracy and first range musicians & artsmen such P. Tchaikovsky, A. Rubinstein, A. Serov and V. Stasov. In Petersbourg, during seasons 1874-75s, Patti met Ernesto Nicolini (in future her second husband) for the first time. At that time she also became acquainted with prominent Russian historian Dmitry Ilovayski and with his family. This friendship was to last for decades and Ilovaisky's, with cousin - Stepan, the stalmeister of the Tzar of Russias - even travelled to Wales to meet Adelina during the first half of the 1880s. Patti also was a teacher for Ilovayski daughter Varvara.
  During the 1860s, Patti possessed a sweet, high-lying voice of birdlike purity and remarkable flexibility which was ideal for such parts as Zerlina, Lucia and Amina; but, as Verdi noted in 1878, her lower notes gained fullness and beauty when she grew older, enabling her to excel in weightier fare. Patti, however, turned into a conservative singer in the final phase of her operatic and concert career. She knew what suited her aging voice to perfection and she stuck to it. Typically, her recital programmes during the 1890s featured an array of familiar, often sentimental, not-too-demanding popular tunes of the day, which were sure to appeal to her adoring fans.
  But during her mature prime in the 1870s and '80s, Patti had been a more enterprising singer, proving to be an effective actress in those lyric roles that required the summoning forth of deep emotions, such as Gilda in Rigoletto, Leonora in Il trovatore, the title part in Semiramide, Zerlina in Don Giovanni and Violetta in La traviata. She also had been prepared to tackle quite dramatic parts in operas like L'Africaine, Les Huguenots and even Aida. She never attempted to sing any verismo parts, however, because these became popular only in the twilight of her career, during the final decade of the 19th century.
  Many years earlier, Patti had experienced an amusing encounter in Paris with the bel canto-opera composer Gioachino Rossini, who was a staunch upholder of traditional Italian singing values. It is related that when Patti's mentor (and brother-in-law), Strakosch, presented her to Rossini at one of his fashionable receptions during the 1860s, she was prevailed upon to sing "Una voce poco fa", from Rossini's The Barber of Seville—w
caption: Portrait by Franz Winterhalter (1862)
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