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Artist
Antoine Albanese
1+ albums
Classical18th centuryitalianMusique Francaise
about
Antoine Albanese was an Italian-born castrato singer and composer who made his career in France in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, and who is especially associated with Parisian musical life. The principal French authority record identifies him as a composer and performer of Italian origin who lived in Paris from 1747 and is documented in musical sources under the French form “Antoine Albanese,” with variant fuller forms of his name also attested in cataloguing practice. His reputation rests less on large-scale dramatic composition than on the kinds of salon- and theatre-adjacent vocal repertory that circulated widely in print in the period—airs, romances, and related vocal items—often designed for social performance and domestic music-making as much as for formal stage contexts. A modern narrative account places him among the Italian singers active in Parisian institutions, including the royal chapel and the Concert Spirituel during the 1750s and early 1760s, and it emphasises that he was connected with the king’s music for an extended period; these details align in general contour with the authority note that he settled in Paris early and worked in French musical circles for decades. There is, however, a material identity-detail uncertainty that should be stated plainly: the BnF and IdRef authority records give Albanese’s life dates as 1729–1800, while the French Wikipedia biography presents a different chronology (including birth in 1728 and death in 1803 at Versail