Giovanni Matteo Mario

Sir Giovanni Matteo De Candia, photographed in the 1860s.

Giovanni Matteo "Mario" (October 18, 1810, Cagliari, Sardinia – December 11, 1883, Rome) was an Italian opera singer. The most celebrated tenor of his era, he was lionized by audiences in Paris and London.

Early life

Mario's real name was Giovanni Matteo De Candia, and his hereditary title was Cavaliere ("knight") - Don ("Sir") in the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdoms of Italy.
Sir Giovanni Matteo De Candia was born in Cagliari on October 17th, 1810. He came from an aristocratic family that belonged to Sardinia's social elite, part of the Kingdom of Savoy-Sardinia. ^[1] His relatives were members of the Royal Court of Turin, while his father held the rank of general and was aide-de-camp to King Charles Felix of Sardinia Savoy.^[2]

In order to free himself from the burdensome ancestral traditions which he had inherited, and mitigate his father's opposition to a member of the high-born De Candia family pursuing a 'lowly' musical career, the budding singer adopted the one-word stage name of "Mario" when he made his debut on November 30th 1838.^[2] (Sometimes, however, he is referred to in print by the fuller appellation of "Giovanni Mario" and in many portraits in the Bibliothéque Nationale de Paris he is also called "Mario De Candia".)

Mario's decision to become a professional singer arose from accidental circumstances. He was 12 years old when he moved from Cagliari to Turin, where he studied at the Northern Italian city's military academy. Among his fellow students at the academy was the future Prime Minister of Italy, Camillo Cavour. While serving as a second-lieutenant in the King of Sardinia's Guards in Turin, he expressed liberal political ideas. He was required to leave Piedmont because of this, and travelled to Paris. The fugitive nobleman was made to feel welcome in Parisian salons and in the city's radical milieu. For a time he earned his living by giving fencing and riding lessons.

Operatic career, marriage & death

Because he possessed an exceptionally fine natural voice, Mario was encouraged by the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer to become a singer. He took singing lessons from two teachers, a Frenchman named Ponchard and the former Italian tenor Marco Bordogni, and proved so gifted that he was swiftly offered an engagement with the Opéra. The young tenor made his debut there in 1838 as the hero of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable.^[2]

Despite scoring an immediate success, owing to the splendid quality of his singing and a dashing stage presence, he did not choose to stay long at the Paris Opéra. In 1839 he joined the Théâtre Italien, where such illustrious singers as Maria Malibran, Henriette Sontag, Fanny Tacchinardi Persiani, Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Battista Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, and Luigi Lablache regularly performed. His first appearance there was as Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore. In the same year he was first heard in London, achieving instant success.^[3]

The acclaim that Mario received in Italian opera surpassed even that which he had won in French opera, and he soon acquired a Europe-wide reputation for the beauty of his singing and the elegance of his bearing. He possessed a handsome face and a lithe figure (he liked to show off his legs in tights), and his lyrical voice, though less dazzling than that of the older, virtuoso tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini nor so powerful as that of his younger rival Enrico Tamberlik, was described as having a gracefulness and a beguiling, velvety softness that made it unique.^{[citation needed]} The music critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was born in 1856 and therefore could not have heard Mario in his prime, said his singing featured a marked vibrato.

Mario created few operatic parts, the most notable being that of Ernesto in Donizetti's Don Pasquale (1843). He sang, however, in the première of Rossini's "Stabat Mater" and Verdi wrote for him a new cabaletta for the main tenor aria in I due Foscari for a production in Paris. In established roles, Mario's very greatest performances were as Otello in Rossini's opera of the same name, Gennaro in Lucrezia Borgia, Almaviva in Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Fernando in La favorite, the Duke in Rigoletto, and Manrico in Il trovatore. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London and the Théâtre Italien in Paris were the scenes of most of his stage triumphs. He sang in London from 1847 until 1867 and again during 1871.

Mario also made occasional appearances elsewhere in England in oratorio, for example at the Birmingham Festival of 1849 and at the Hereford Festival of 1855. He undertook, too, a string of concert tours around the United Kingdom. In about 1849 he acquired the "Villa Salviati" in Florence and made Italy his home base once again. At his salon there he received many distinguished cultural figures and members of the European nobility.

In 1854 he toured America with the eminent Italian soprano Giulia Grisi, earning much money and much adulation during their trans-Atlantic jaunt. Since several years he and Grisi were lovers, and it's difficult they were afterwards married in London, if she obtained a divorce from her previous husband. She had even a soon witch father was Lord Castlereagh junior. Mario and Grisi had six daughters. One of his daughters was the writer Cecilia Maria de Candia, who married an Englishman, Godfrey Pearce, and left an account of her parents' careers.^[4]

Mario bade farewell to the London stage in 1871. His decision to retire followed the loss of his wife, the great Grisi, who had died in Berlin a few years earlier while returning from engagements in Russia. Mario brought his singing career to a close at the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. During this time, his daughters were put under the care of tutors assigned by their godmother, the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaievna, Duchess of Leuchtenberg and president of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.

Mario eventually returned to Italy from Russia and spent his last years ensconced in Rome, composing music and writing: but he never fully recovered from the death of his wife, or from the financial difficulties which now beset him owing to his habitual extravagance. It is said that he used to smoke cigars continually,^[5] even when taking a bath.

A benefit concert was mounted for Mario in London in 1880. He then withdrew to Italy to see out his days and died in Rome three years later in near-poverty.

A note on the De Candia's ancestral seat

The De Candia Palace in Sardinia, where Mario's Family (his mother and his brother Carlo) is situated at the bottom of Via dei Genovesi, in Cagliari's old town (Castello), where until the 16th century stood the Pisan town-walls between the Elephant and the Lion Towers. The façade was possibly designed in neoclassical style by the architect Gaetano Cima. On the first floor there are wide halls with some frescoes and a large terrace with scenic views of the gulf of Cagliari.^[6]. In 1847 Mario bought for his mother an other house in the vicinity, via Canelles (see the Land Register in the Archivio di Stato, Cagliari), that is now a part of a nuns' convent .

Notes

1. ^ In the baptismal register of Mario in Cagliari cathedral, Mario's father is called only "cavaliere", not a marquis or a count. On the origin and title of his family see also Francesco Floris and Antonio Serra, "Storia della Nobiltà in Sardegna" (della Torre, Cagliari 1986).
2. ^ ^{a b c} Cecilia Pearse De Candia, "The Romance of a Great Singer" (London 1910): Italian edition: "Il Romanzo di un celebre Tenore. Ricordi di Mario" (Le Monnier, Firenze 1913). This book, however, contains many factual errors.
3. ^ See Henry Pleasants,The Great Singers (Simon & Schuster, New York 1966), for an account of Mario's international career and the extent of the adulation accorded to him by audiences during the Victorian Era.
4. ^ Also spelt "Pearse".
5. ^ Mrs Pitt Byrne, Gossip of the Century (Downey, London 1899), II, 133-34, Read here
6. ^ Palazzo De Candia Today

• Forbes, Elizabeth (1992), 'Mario, Giovanni Matteo' in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London) ISBN 0-333-73432-7

Links

• The romance of a great singer; a memoir of Mario by Cecilia Maria de Candia Pearse and Frank Hird (1910) from the Internet Archive
• De Candia family tree (in Italian)
• House of Candia

Persondata
Name	Mario
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	October 18, 1810
Place of birth
Date of death	December 11, 1883
Place of death