Michael Kelly (tenor)
Michael Kelly, born on the 25th of December 1762 in Dublin, holds a peculiar distinction in music history: he was present at the very first rehearsal of The Marriage of Figaro, and Mozart himself argued with him about how to play the role. Kelly won the argument. He stuttered on stage despite Mozart's objections, and carried it off to the composer's great satisfaction. That moment captures something essential about Kelly's life -- a life spent at the center of the musical world, rubbing shoulders with Mozart, Paisiello, Salieri, and Haydn, yet always slightly eccentric, always a little suspect. The primary source for his life is his own published Reminiscences, and one scholar put it plainly: any statement of Kelly's is immediately suspect. So who was this Irish tenor who sang for kings and emperors, fled a theatre in mid-performance, and died running a wine shop? The answer stretches from Dublin Castle to the court of Emperor Joseph II, and from the streets of Naples to the stage of Drury Lane.
Thomas Kelly, Michael's father, was no ordinary wine merchant. He held the position of Master of Ceremonies at Dublin Castle, the seat of British government in Ireland, which placed the family at the heart of civic life. That social standing opened musical doors. Michael's first teachers were Italian: a singer from Bologna named Passerini, and Niccolo Peretti, a male contralto who had performed at Covent Garden in the original production of Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes. Kelly studied with Peretti an air composed specifically for the singer -- "In infancy our hopes and fears" -- and remembered decades later that Peretti possessed the true portamento, which Kelly believed was little understood by the 1820s. He also took keyboard lessons from Michael Arne, the composer's son.
The Kellys' house drew remarkable visitors. The violinist Johann Peter Salomon, the cellist John Crosdill, and François-Hippolyte Barthélemon were among those who came through. The surgeon-violinist John Neale, a constant family visitor, tutored the boy in an aria from Vento's opera Demofoonte. Piano lessons came from Philip Cogan, and further singing from a signor St Giorgio at the Rotunda. In 1778, the male soprano Venanzio Rauzzini arrived in Dublin. Rauzzini (1746-1810), a friend of Haydn and Charles Burney, had settled in England around 1774 after periods in Vienna and Munich, and was already known as the teacher of the young Nancy Storace. He took Kelly under his wing and taught him several songs, including his own "Fuggiamo di questo loco", a piece that Thomas Linley would later insert into The Duenna with words by Sheridan. Rauzzini's verdict was direct: the boy should be sent to a conservatory in Rome or Naples. His father began making plans.
Before he left, Kelly made his stage debut at the Smock Alley Theatre when a promoter named Pedro Martini brought an Italian company to perform comic opera. A singer named Sig. Savoy fell ill before he could take the high soprano role of the Count in Piccinni's La buona figliuola, and Kelly -- still singing treble -- stepped in and made a great success. The company collapsed anyway when Martini failed to pay, but Kelly had tasted the stage. Michael Arne then had him play the role of Cymon for three nights at Crow Street Theatre, and he received a benefit performance as Master Lionel in Baldassare Galuppi's Lionel and Clarissa.
In May 1779, Kelly arrived in Naples under the patronage of Sir William Hamilton. Through Hamilton he enrolled at the Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto -- a school founded in 1537 -- studying with Fenaroli. Hamilton arranged a meeting with the King and Queen of Naples, for whom Kelly sang. He also witnessed, alongside Hamilton the vulcanologist, the eruption of Vesuvius in August 1779.
The pivotal training came the following spring. The male soprano Giuseppe Aprile (1732-1813), who had also taught Domenico Cimarosa, offered Kelly free tuition during a festival visit to Sicily. They went first to Gaeta, where Kelly sang a salve regina under Aprile's direction, and then to Palermo, where Kelly studied several hours a day as his voice dropped from its higher register to a full tenor. Aprile taught him not only repertoire -- including the tenor arias of Giacomo Davide and Giovanni Ansani -- but also the poetry of Metastasio and other Italian writers. At the close of their season, Aprile declared him ready to sing in any theatre in Europe and wrote letters of introduction to Andrea Campigli, impresario of the Florence Teatro La Pergola. He also gave Kelly his place on a ship to Livorno, with a farewell observation that Kelly clearly cherished: "Under his care and patronage, you cannot fail of success because you have the peculiar distinction of being the only public scholar I ever taught."
At Livorno, Kelly first encountered Stephen and Nancy Storace. Nancy, then fifteen, was already prima donna of the comic opera there. Stephen helped Kelly mount a concert, and with those funds Kelly pressed on to Florence, where Campigli gave him a spring season as first comic tenor at the Teatro Nuovo. He made a successful debut in Il francese in Italia, coached by the actor-tenor Filippo Laschi, and performed opposite a soprano known as Signora Lortinella -- whom everyone called Ortabella.
The Italian years were not without disaster. Offered a five-year contract from Thomas Linley for Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, arranged by Stephen Storace, Kelly found the offer blocked by his own father. After Florence, Campigli offered six months as primo tenore in Venice, but that project collapsed before it started. Touring to Graz with a singer and actress named Benini, Kelly appeared in operas by Anfossi and Grétry. Back in Venice, he rehearsed a Cimarosa production opposite Ortabella -- but the jealous sponsor-manager turned murderous, and Kelly escaped to Verona by slipping out of the theatre during a live performance. A benefit concert at Verona steadied him. At Treviso he met Teresa de Petris, described as the greatest reputed dilettante singer in Europe, and her consort Count Vidiman hired Kelly for four months, sending him first to Parma and Colorno to sing before the Archduchess. Through Countess Rosenberg, both Kelly and Nancy Storace received an invitation to join an Italian opera company being assembled for a permanent residency at the court of Emperor Joseph II in Vienna.
Kelly arrived in Vienna and presented himself to the court composer Antonio Salieri, whose La scuola de' gelosi was the company's first production. The theatre sat within the palace itself, and the Emperor attended not only performances but many rehearsals. Kelly became friendly with Salieri and with the actors Friedrich Ludwig Schröder. He traveled to Eisenstadt for three days to visit Haydn. He also met the composers Wanhal and Dittersdorf. But the friendship that defined this period began at a dinner where Kelly found himself seated between Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart.
He dined with Mozart often and, by his own account, invariably lost at billiards to him. He grew close to Mozart's young English pupil Thomas Attwood. In 1785, Kelly and Storace were performing Stephen Storace's opera Gli sposi malcontenti. After Storace temporarily lost her voice, Kelly sang in three operas with other sopranos, and won particular notice by humorously modelling a character on the mannerisms of the librettist da Ponte -- in performances that da Ponte himself witnessed. Kelly and a colleague named Calvasi played the two Antipholus roles in Storace's Gli equivoci, based on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
When Paisiello came to the court, Kelly witnessed his meeting with Mozart. The poet Giovanni Battista Casti arrived as well, and in 1784 Paisiello produced the new opera Il re Teodoro in Venezia, with a cast that included Mandini, Francesco Benucci, Laschi, Storace, Viganoni, and Kelly himself, who took the buffo role of Gaforio -- a nickname that stuck with him.
The year 1786 brought the triple rehearsals of operas by Righini, Salieri, and Mozart, whose The Marriage of Figaro was to be staged. Kelly took on his most celebrated premiere role: Don Curzio, the stuttering lawyer, and also Don Basilio. Storace sang Susanna. Kelly was present when Mozart played through the duet "Crudel, perche finora?" -- ink still wet on the page. The disagreement between the two men over the stutter in the concerted ensembles became part of Kelly's legacy: he insisted on the stutter, threatened to walk out, and Mozart was ultimately delighted. When Kelly finally left Vienna in February 1787 -- after staying far beyond his planned departure to tend to his ailing mother -- he and Mozart parted in tears. The journey back to London included stops in Munich, Augsburg, and Stuttgart, where Kelly climbed to the top of a spire with Ignace Pleyel, and a stretch in Paris witnessing some of the greatest theatrical artists of the day.
Kelly and Stephen Storace arrived in London and met immediately with Thomas Linley and his daughters. Kelly's Drury Lane debut came in Dibdin's Lionel and Clarissa, introducing an original duet that Storace orchestrated. He followed as Young Meadows in Arne's Love in a Village, and began a long stage partnership with Mrs Crouch. Over the summers of 1787 and 1788, the pair toured extensively -- Dublin, York, Liverpool, Chester, Manchester, Worcester, Birmingham -- performing Sheridan's The Duenna, Arnold's Maid of the Mill, and Love in a Village in cities from Leeds to Wakefield.
His oratorio career opened alongside this stage work. In the May 1787 Handel commemoration at Westminster Abbey, Kelly sang among a large company. Engaged as principal tenor of the Ancient Concerts under Joah Bates, he performed Handel's "Deeper and deeper still" and brought fresh humor to "Haste thee, nymph", coached by Linley, before a royal audience. He later recalled his approach in plain terms: "In singing sacred music I was aware of its value, and fagged at the tenor songs of Handel with unremitting assiduity." He sang Messiah with the soprano Mme Mara at Norwich Festival in October 1788, and with her frequently performed the recitative "And Miriam the prophetess took a timbrel" from Israel in Egypt.
In April 1789, Kelly played Macheath for the first time, with Mrs Crouch as Polly and Marie Therese De Camp as Lucy. He scored a particular hit in Storace's The Haunted Tower, delivering what audiences remembered as a ringing top B in the song "Spirit of my sainted sire." In August 1790, Kelly and the Crouches traveled to Paris, where they saw Grétry's La Caravane and Raoul Barbe-bleu, works they would later bring to English audiences. The pair opened 1791 at Drury Lane with Stephen Storace's The Siege of Belgrade. On the 4th of June 1791, Kelly and his colleagues performed The Country Girl and Storace's No Song, No Supper for the very last night of the old Drury Lane Theatre before it was closed and demolished.
Kelly's later years carried the weight of ambition and bad timing in equal measure. By 1793, he had become acting manager of the King's Theatre, and he remained in high demand at concerts. His personal life drew notice too: his relationship with Anna Maria Crouch, whom he shared for a time with the Prince of Wales, added considerably to his public notoriety.
He combined his theatrical career with two commercial ventures -- a music shop and a wine shop -- and both ended in financial ruin. He published his Reminiscences in 1826, written with the assistance of Theodore Hook. The book is entertaining reading, but scholars have long questioned its reliability: one assessment put it that any statement of Kelly's is immediately suspect. He died that same year at Margate, aged 64. The Reminiscences remain the primary source for his account of life alongside Mozart, and the detail of that argument over the stutter in Figaro -- settled in Kelly's favor on the night of the opera's premiere in 1786 -- is among the most vivid firsthand glimpses of Mozart at work that survive.
Common questions
Who was Michael Kelly the tenor?
Michael Kelly (the 25th of December 1762 - the 9th of October 1826) was an Irish tenor, composer, and theatrical manager who built an international career in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He created roles in operas by Mozart, Paisiello, and Storace, and was one of the first tenors from Britain and Ireland to achieve fame in Italy and Austria.
What role did Michael Kelly sing in the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro?
Michael Kelly sang two roles in the 1786 premiere of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro: Don Curzio, the stuttering lawyer, and Don Basilio. He famously argued with Mozart over whether to stutter in the concerted ensembles, insisted on doing so, and Mozart was ultimately greatly satisfied with the result.
What was Michael Kelly's connection to Mozart?
Kelly was on close personal terms with Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart during his years in Vienna from 1783 to 1787. He dined with Mozart regularly, lost to him repeatedly at billiards, and was present when Mozart played through the duet "Crudel, perche finora?" with the ink still wet. The two parted in tears of friendship when Kelly left Vienna in February 1787.
Where did Michael Kelly train as a singer?
Kelly trained in Dublin under the Italian singers Passerini and Niccolo Peretti, and later under Michael Arne and Venanzio Rauzzini. In 1779, he enrolled at the Conservatorio Santa Maria di Loreto in Naples under Fenaroli, and received intensive private tuition from the male soprano Giuseppe Aprile (1732-1813) in Gaeta and Palermo, during which his voice settled into a tenor range.
What theatre was Michael Kelly most associated with in London?
Kelly was the principal English-language tenor at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane from his debut there in 1787. He performed there through the close of the old building on the 4th of June 1791, and continued at the venue and at the King's Theatre, where he became acting manager in 1793.
What are Michael Kelly's Reminiscences and are they reliable?
Kelly published his Reminiscences in 1826, written with the assistance of Theodore Hook, as the primary account of his life and career. Scholars have questioned the book's accuracy: one assessment states that any statement of Kelly's is immediately suspect. The Reminiscences remain the main firsthand source for his accounts of Mozart, Salieri, Paisiello, and others.
All sources
9 references cited across the entry
- 8webReminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King's theatre, and Theatre royal, Drury lane ed. by T.E. Hook.Michael Kelly — Colburn — 18 June 1826