Giusto Fernando Tenducci

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Giusto Fernando Tenducci, sometimes called "il Senesino" (ca. 1735/1736 – 25 January 1790), was a soprano (castrato) opera singer and composer, who passed his career partly in Italy but chiefly in Britain. Born in Siena in about 1735, Tenducci became a castrato, and he was trained at the Naples Conservatory. Castration was illegal in both Church and civil law, but the Roman Church employed castrati in many churches and in the Vatican until about 1902; and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the public paid large sums of money to listen to the spectacular voices of castrati in the opera houses. Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a license granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. In 1772, those marriages was later annulled on the grounds of non-consummation or impotence, which was one of the few grounds that women could use to sue for divorce. However, Giacomo Casanova claimed in his autobiography that Dorothea gave birth to two children. His subsequent biographer Helen Berry was unable to corroborate this claim and suggests that they may have been the children of Dorothea's second husband, Robert Long Kingsman. Two portraits of Tenducci were painted by Thomas Gainsborough – one is now in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in the University of Birmingham, the other was sold from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent. In 1753, when he was about seventeen, Tenducci made his p

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