Kelly, Michael
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- Kelly, Michael
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(1762 - 1826), singer and composer, b. Dublin; in Vienna 1783 - 7; London 1787.
1779 - 83 [dep. Dublin 1 May 1779] Naples (30 May - 26 Dec. 1779), Rome (28 Dec. 1779 - Jan. 1780), Naples, Palermo (Jul. 1780), Florence (by May - Aug. 1781), Lucca, Venice [Gratz, autumn] Padua, Brescia (1782), Treviso (summer), Parma (1782) [Vienna 1783]
At the age of sixteen, and already a gifted tenor, Michael Kelly arrived in Naples on 30 May 1779. He was to spend some four years in Italy, subsequently recalled in his Reminiscences [1826], a rambling account in which justifiable self-advertisement outweighs chronology (so that his exact itinerary remains elusive).1
He came to Naples with introductions to Father Dolphin and Sir William Hamilton, and he was met by Fleming and Plunket, cadets in the Irish brigade. There were three conservatories in Naples, and Kelly chose to study under the composer Fedele Fenaroli at S.Maria di Loreto, lodging in his house. He found some three or four hundred other boys there [a considerable exaggeration], studying composition, singing and various instruments. Kelly described the Neapolitan theatres: the splendid S.Carlo for grand serious opera, the Teatro dei Fiorentini and the less good Teatro Nuovo for comic opera. He met Cimarosa (who had been Fenaroli's pupil) and William Hamilton introduced him to the King (who enquired whether he was a Christian). In August he witnessed the great eruption of Vesuvius. On 26 December he went to Rome for the Carnival as the guest of a Mr Stewart, his wife and sister [possibly John Stewart of Allanbank]. He described the theatres of Rome: the Alibert and the Argentina for serious opera and the Capranica and the Valle for comic opera, and mentioned the Abb?s as the severest critics, sitting 'in the first row of the pit, each armed with a lighted wax taper in one hand, and a book of the opera in the other'. Father McMahon, an Irish Capuchin, acted as his cicerone.
On his return to Naples he accepted an offer of further voice training in Palermo from Giuseppe Aprile. Kelly was in Palermo until after July 1780. He then sailed back to Leghorn, a voyage of six days, and went on to Florence, where Aprile had recommended him to Andrea Campigli, 'a rich jeweller, who was also manager of the Pergola theatre'. Kelly met Anna and Stephen Storace and was patronised by the merchants George and John Darby, and 'two Scots families, the Grants and Frazers'. He heard the aged Pietro Nardini play in the house of Lord Cowper (to whom Horace Mann had introduced him in a letter of 4 May 1781).2 After Easter 1781 Campigli 'procured him an engagement at the Teatro degl'Intrepidi in Pasquale Anfossi's Il Controgenio and got him rooms with Francesco Cecchi, his stage manager; the Young Pretender attended, but slept throughout the performance. From Florence Kelly made an excursion to Lucca, where he spent two days, and Pisa, where he met the tenor Giuseppe Viganoni.
In June 1781 Kelly accepted an engagement in the Teatro S.Moise, Venice, but he stayed on in Florence during July and August and he mentioned spending three days in Siena at this time. He went to Venice via Bologna and Ferrara which, he said, was 'so thinly peopled that the grass actually grew in many of the [fine wide streets]'. At Venice he found the manager of his engagement had left, being unable to pay the necessary security. Kelly was rescued by the offer of an engagement at Gratz, where he appeared in the autumn of 1781 in Francesco Zannetti's Le Cognate in Contesa.
After suffering a voice infection he returned to Venice and Padua and was engaged to sing in Cimarosa's Il Convito at Brescia. Following a contretemps he escaped to Verona, and performed in Cimarosa's Il pittor parigino at Treviso in the summer of 1782. He was afterwards in Modena, where the Archduchess heard him sing (and beat him 'hollow' at billiards). Kelly finally left Italy to join the newly-revived Italian opera in Vienna in 1783, by which time he would have been in his twentieth year.
1. See Kelly, Reminiscences, 1:23 - 197. 2. Herts RO,d/ep f310/82. E. Gibson, Music and Letters, 68[1987]:236.