Antonio Bernacchi (1685-1756), virtuoso e maestro di canto bolognese

The historical and artistic importance of Antonio Bernacchi (Bologna, 21 June 1685 - Bologna, 16 March 1756), a castrated opera singer of international fame but deeply rooted in the cultural life of Bologna, has so far escaped an overall delineation. Rather than being limited to a mere biographical narrative, this study collects all the data we possess to reconstruct the social environments in which lived and worked the man, no less than the artist: the humble family of origin; the dynamic Italian theaters of the early eighteenth century in which the greatest musicians of the time paraded every evening; the Bavarian court whose ceremonial was studded with musical events; a London literally crazy for the Italian opera, which finds in the castrati the idols to be worshiped; the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna with its internal intrigues; a profoundly Catholic public morality that accepted however also "different" human realities, "extended" family ideas (cohabitation between the teacher and his pupils), forms of private education not necessarily managed and controlled by ecclesiastical exponents. Compared to what musicological or local history studies had to date highlighted on Bernacchi, this research sheds new light in particular on surviving archival documents (Italian, German, English, French), most of which for the first are traced and reproduced in complete form, thanks to which errors of assessment are corrected and are revealed new biographical aspects - human, psychological, social, artistic. New is the perspective in which a non-divo artist asserts his professionalism; quite unexpectedly emerges the dimension of anomalous "pater familias" with which he compensated for the impediment to that marriage and that paternity that his physical condition prevented him; against the current is the new definition of "Bolognese singing school" which here is proposed with respect to a phenomenon that is too often mythologized and misrepresented.