Giovanni Battista Mancini

The Italian castrato Giovanni Battista Mancini produced essential contributions to musical culture through his publication Pensieri, e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato, a treatise on singing published in British in 1967 as Practical Reflections. His publication is normally interesting as an expansion of another treatise of your day by Pier Francesco Tosi. Mancini essentially fills in the facts of Tosi’s function, emphasizing that performers must teach rigorously for an extended period of your time. Mancini was one particular who backed the so-called “cult of agility.” For the reason that feeling, influential educators like him performed a considerable part in determining later on nineteenth-century efficiency practice, specifically by trying toward hitherto unknown degrees of virtuosity. His sights brought him right into a questionable struggle with another instructor, Vincenzo Manfredini. Among his educators had been Leonardo Leo, in Naples, and Antonio Bernacchi, in Bologna. Later on, he studied structure and counterpoint with G.B. Martini; collectively, they organized a efficiency in 1778 of Gluck’s opera Alceste. From age 16 onwards, he was used as a vocalist in Italy and Germany. Highly effective, if nearly a celebrity, he recognized himself sufficiently like a instructor to become summoned to Vienna, in 1757, from the Empress Maria Theresia, who needed him on her behalf daughters. It appears that it was the perfect post for Mancini; he remained on using the Austrians until his loss of life in 1800.