Read on to discover all about the tragically short life of Georgian composer Elisabetta de Gambarini...
Who was Elisabetta de Gambarini?
Composer, instrumentalist, singer, impresario and art dealer, Elisabetta de Gambarini was a defiantly independent musician, working successfully in the deeply patriarchal world of 18th-century London. Yet the career of this highly talented young woman was to end in tragedy after she endured domestic violence, estrangement and a scandalous diplomatic cover-up.
Gambarini's early life... a wealthy beginning and singing for Handel
Her life had begun with many advantages. Born in the capital in 1731 to wealthy, well-connected Italian parents, Gambarini grew up in Mayfair. Her father, Count Carlo Gambarini, was counsellor to Frederick I of Sweden and a noted collector of fine art. Her mother, Giovanna Stradiotti, was an opera singer, keyboard player and teacher, who encouraged her daughter’s exceptional talents, enlisting the composer Francesco Geminiani to become one of her teachers.
Even at the tender age of 15, Gambarini’s mezzo-soprano voice was being noticed, not least by George Frideric Handel, who auditioned her at his Brook Street home, and between 1745 and ’48 cast her at Covent Garden and at the Haymarket Theatre in the Occasional Oratorio, Messiah, Semele and, perhaps most notably, in the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, where she created the substantial role of the Israelite Woman.
Elisabetta de Gambarini, the composer and entrepreneur
Then, quite suddenly, she stopped singing for Handel. We don’t know exactly why, but it would seem that her entrepreneurial career was taking off, not least as a composer who was about to become the first woman in England to publish her own keyboard music.
Newspaper advertisements of the time show her busy as an impresario, staging concerts of her music alongside works by her contemporaries. Handel remained a loyal supporter, becoming one of many prominent subscribers who attended her concerts and bought her manuscripts. Close family connections with members of the nobility guaranteed her a paying audience, and meant she could attract the day’s top performers to sing and play on the same platform. And she had novelty value as a talented young woman, leading from the front. Some of the advertisements describe her as ‘conductor’, but we can’t be sure that she conducted in the accepted sense, as conducting was still in its infancy. It might be more accurately seen as producing and staging. Whatever, she attracted large audiences.
Gambarini's first benefit concert
Gambarini produced her first benefit concert at London’s Haymarket Theatre on 28 March 1748, promising she would perform her new vocal works and play two new pieces she had composed for the organ. Top-price tickets were half a guinea, sold at her home address. Gallery seats were five shillings. The fact that the gallery doors would open at 4pm for an evening performance is perhaps a measure of her curiosity value and increasing popularity.
Elisabetta de Gambarini... her most famous compositions
All this was going on while she was preparing Opus 1, Six Sets of Lessons for the Harpsichord, for publication. She dedicated it to ‘Viscountess Howe of the Kingdom of Ireland’ – no doubt a wealthy subscriber to her concerts. It’s important to remember here that the term ‘lessons’ was often applied to published sets of sonatas or suites, so this is not an instruction manual. It is, however, plainly aimed at the lucrative market of domestic music-making – and therefore at women of a certain class for whom technical facility at the harpsichord was seen as an essential social accomplishment.
These pieces were quickly followed by Op. 2, a larger set entitled Lessons for the Harpsichord, Intermix’d with Italian and English Songs, Gambarini reaching higher this time with a dedication to Frederick, Prince of Wales.
A portrait of Gambarini
This edition is notable for several reasons beyond the music. For instance, it carries the only known portrait of Gambarini which, as the academic Alison DeSimone notes in her treatise on the composer, presents an image of a confident, wealthy young woman, pictured composing at a desk. In the background of the engraving we see a harpsichord and a stringed instrument, probably a viola di gamba. Framed canvasses hang on the wall behind her, quite possibly from her father’s large collection.
Under the portrait runs the motto ‘Virtute duce, comite Fortuna’ – ‘When virtue leads, fortune follows’. DeSimone says this is a phrase appropriate to understanding her biography: ‘Gambarini promoted her own feminine virtues as an 18th-century woman, but she was also a musical entrepreneur in a male-dominated world, well aware of what fortunes a successful professional life could bring.’
Turn the page and you find a list of subscribers. It’s a sort of Who’s Who of mid-18th-century London society, topped by a Prince Lobkowicz – possibly Ferdinand, sixth Prince Lobkowicz, the Bohemian nobleman credited with carrying printed editions of Handel’s oratorios back to Vienna. At least half of the names are nobles or politicians, including the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, William Pitt and Horace Walpole. Clearly, Gambarini was very successful in cultivating supporters who would add lustre to her name and to her music.
Gambarini the art dealer
Gambarini continued to compose keyboard and vocal works for her concerts, which she staged right up until 1764. After her father died in 1760, ever the entrepreneur she hit upon the idea of combining art sales with music. Count Gambarini had left her and her mother a sizeable collection of Renaissance and Baroque art – one advertisement lists pictures by, among others, Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Pietro da Cortona, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck.
For the next four years, she held concerts in her home, hoping to make sales to her patrons of these treasures, but as DeSimone discovered, she met with little success, and in an eventual auction after her death, prices fetched were so low it suggests that many were mere copies.
Elisabetta de Gambarini... victim of an abusive marriage
For more than 200 years, little was thought to be known about Gambarini’s life beyond her obvious talent for composition and performance. However, in 2018 DeSimone uncovered some disturbing papers in the National Archive at Kew. In 1764, just months after Gambarini had married Étienne Chazell, Master of the Horse to the French ambassador, her mother, who was living with them in the Strand, reported that she and her daughter had been violently assaulted by Chazell several times.
Court papers reveal that witnesses living nearby told of Gambarini’s distress. ‘It appears that her Husband, very soon after the Marriage, beat and treated his Wife in a very bad and brutal manner in so much that the Neighbourhood have been frequently alarmed with her cries of murder from the Windows of her Apartment on those Occasions.’ Gambarini’s mother also accused Chazell of trying to burn down the house while she and her daughter slept.
A miscarriage of justice
Gambarini, by now pregnant, was clearly in danger, and a warrant was issued for Chazell’s arrest. Robert Moylan, a constable, was dispatched with two assistants to find Chazell, but disaster struck. As the men apprehended Chazell at the ambassador’s house in Soho Square they were accosted by the ambassador’s servants and locked in a room, allowing Chazell to get away to France and never return. The law had blundered by making an arrest on what was effectively French soil. A diplomatic row ensued, with apologies to the ambassador from the arresting magistrate, and a shameful cover-up of the truth. Woefully, Gambarini’s appalling treatment never receives even a mention in the subsequent smoothing over of relations between Britain and France.
A tragic early death in child birth
It is likely that, even without contending with marital abuse, Gambarini would have had to forgo her career after her wedding, as was the convention at the time. Now, with her abusive husband gone, she might have returned to composing and the stage, but it was not be. Just a few months later, she died giving birth to Chazell’s baby daughter and London lost a pioneering, independent female voice.
Elisabetta de Gambarini's compositional style
Overture
Young Elisabetta de Gambarini, known first as a singer dubbed ‘The Italian Girl’, was adept at using her family connections to approach members of the nobility and prominent politicians for subscriptions to pay for the publication of her music and to attend her many concerts.
Allegro
She was a young woman in a hurry, publishing her first two sets of harpsichord sonatas at the age of 18, while at the same time building a career as an impresario.
Variations
Her sonatas can be seen as a bridge between Baroque and Classical styles, probably influenced by the Essercizi per gravicembalo byDomenico Scarlatti (pictured above), published in London in 1739.
Gavotte
Musical London was wild for all things Italian in this period and Gambarini would have known and learned from several masters who performed and published in the capital, among them Giovanni Battista Pescetti, Francesco Geminiani (one of her teachers), Domenico Alberti, Baldassare Galuppi and Pietro Domenico Paradies.