Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 1737 the most famous and highest-paid singer in the world, Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, thirty-two years old, at the peak of a career that had sent Naples, Vienna and London into delirium, did something no star has dared since: he vanished. He accepted the invitation of the Queen of Spain, Elisabeth Farnese, and moved to Madrid with an unprecedented assignment: to sing for the king, and for the king alone.
The king was Philip V, and he was ill with what we would today call severe depression: weeks without washing or dressing, delusional convictions, the government of half the world left to drift. The queen had heard that only music reached him. The experiment worked beyond all hope: Farinelli’s voice drew the king out of the dark like no physician. And so the greatest virtuoso of the century became a court therapy: every night, for years, he sang for the sovereign in his rooms. Tradition, reported by memoirists, holds that the repertoire had shrunk to a very few arias, always the same, among them two by his teacher Porpora and Hasse’s Pallido il sole, repeated night after night for almost a decade: legend says the same four, and the serious sources at any rate confirm a tiny and unchanging canon. The most demanding audience in history was one man, ill, who never applauded.
Farinelli stayed in Spain for twenty-two years, serving Philip’s successor, Ferdinand VI, as well, and became far more than a singer: he organised the court opera, directed royal festivities, diverted rivers for water spectacles, received honours worthy of a grandee of Spain and never sang in public again. When a new king dismissed him, he retired to Bologna, to a villa full of harpsichords named after painters, where he was visited by the fourteen-year-old Mozart, Burney, who collected stories, and Casanova, who collected everything.
What remains is the question that makes the story vertiginous: what does it mean to be the greatest if no one hears you? Farinelli’s answer, to judge by his life, was serene: the voice that had enchanted the theatres of Europe was worth more where it healed one lonely man. In an age that measures singing in streams, the idea of a supreme artist with an audience of one is almost inconceivable. Perhaps that is why we must keep telling it.