The Castrato and His Wife
Helen Berry
The Castrato and His Wife
The story of the unusual marriage between Italian opera singer and castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and his Irish wife Dorothea Maunsell. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, this unconventional love story affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.
3.7 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Music, Stage & Screen, History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
September 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0199569816 |
| Publisher |
OUP |
| |
The story of the unusual marriage between Italian opera singer and castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and his Irish wife Dorothea Maunsell. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, this unconventional love story affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.
Reviews
The Daily Express
Duncan Fallowell
"[A] delightful and unusual book … Berry is fascinating on the gender ambivalence which made castrati such a draw for men and women."
30/09/2011
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The Sunday Times
Ian Kelly
"The Castrato and His Wife has at its core several absences — in the case of poor Tenducci, the absence of his testicles, which he kept, desperate to relate, in a small velvet pouch as a shrivelled talisman. There is also the apparent absence of evidence: the personal letters or memoirs that are the usual trouser-stuffing of biography. But Berry has used all this to her advantage, deconstructing Dorothea’s account of the affair, assessing the intriguing third-sex allure of the castrati, and deploying her considerable skills as a historian and writer to re-create with panache the world in which Dorothea and Tenducci both flourished and floundered."
18/09/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Susan Elkin
"… an entertaining glimpse into 18th-century showbusiness ... Although Berry's indignant judgments about 18th-century attitudes are a bit trite and revisionist in places, she makes some thoughtful links between the Catholic church's attitudes to sexuality in Tenducci's time and its stance today on, for example, gay marriage."
18/09/2011
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The Literary Review
Jonathan Keates
"The Castrato and His Wife presents this generally rather touching story with sensitivity both to its social and musical contexts and to wider issues of sexuality in eighteenthcentury Europe. Is Helen Berry a shade too indulgent to Dorothea Maunsell? From several aspects the Irish beauty looks little better than a calculating minx, adept at playing a long game with her family and with her two lovers."
01/09/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Philippa Stockley
"Berry was right to attempt this book, whose content is unique and effect unsettling and thought-provoking. And, since she does not claim it for a biography, it should not be judged as such."
02/10/2011
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The Financial Times
Virginia Rounding
"The book grew from a chance discovery Berry made in the London Metropolitan Archives of a bundle of documents relating to the case of “Kingsman, formerly Maunsell, falsely called Tenducci”, which came before the London Consistory Court in May 1775 … One can understand how such a cache was irresistible but it has been quite a challenge to base a whole book upon them, and at times the foundation feels too flimsy for the edifice Berry has built."
23/09/2011
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