Gaetano Crivelli

Who was Gaetano Crivelli?

Gaetano Crivelli was a famous Italian tenor.

Although he was born not actually in Bergamo but in neighbouring Brescia, Crivelli can be regarded as one of the founders of that remarkable Bergamo tenor school which, beginning with Giacomo David and proceeding through such singers as Giovanni David, Andrea Nozzari, Domenico Donzelli and Marco Bordogni, culminated in the great Giovanni Battista Rubini.

Crivelli, a baritonal tenor in the eighteenth century’s Italian manner, made his first public appearance rather late, aged 28, in his native town. He sang in several other Italian theatres before his début at Milan’s La Scala in 1805, in the première of Mayr’s opera Eraldo ed Emma. He appeared in the Italian première of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito at Naples's Teatro di San Carlo, in 1809. Crivelli then moved to Paris, where, at the Théâtre des Italiens in 1811, he performed what was probably his best-suited opera, Pirro by Giovanni Paisiello: he afterwards performed it with lesser success in London. Despite this lack of success he gave England an important legacy in the form of his son Domenico, who settled permanently there, first as a singer and later as a singing teacher, a prominent figure in English musical life of that period.