We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
When taken in conjunction with the mid eighteenth-century Drummonds opera account and with other information recently compiled on salary levels, the newly discovered Hoare and Drummonds accounts allow us to establish what different types of singers earned in the 1770s. The following tables present annual salaries, excluding benefits. Salaries in square brackets are derived from information for the same singer from another year. Salaries followed by a question mark are derived from one or two of the winter, spring and summer instalments, as described above. It is worth repeating again the caution that these are notional figures; numerous factors may have led to salaries not being paid in full.
Manzuoli's £1,500 was quite exceptional. Over the period as a whole, the salary level of the primo uomo remained very stable at between £1,200 and £1,000. Salaries at the top end of this range went to singers with outstanding reputations (like Pacchierotti); at the lower end of the range Roncaglia, a performer who was regarded as no more than adequate, got the bare £1,000.
Pacchierotti was one of the outstanding singers of his age. As so much information survives about his salary in London in the late 1770s and early 1780s, it will be useful to present it as a case study of how a leading castrato at this period was paid.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
