The Baglioni Line

The line begins with Francesco Baglioni, called "Carnace" (documented on stage 1729-1762) - a bass and impresario of Roman origin, later based in Bologna, and the capostipite, the progenitor, of the theatrical Baglioni family. No ancestors before him have been identified; as with the Cavos line and its dancer, the dynasty begins, as far as history can say, with a performer.

His landmark Rome seasons of 1738 introduced Gaetano Latilla's La finta cameriera and Madama Ciana and Rinaldo da Capua's La commedia in commedia - premieres that scholarship identifies as pivotal in the development of comic opera, which Francesco then disseminated across northern Italy. From 1749 he worked closely with the playwright Carlo Goldoni at the Teatro Sant'Angelo in Venice, in Girolamo Medebach's troupe, and musicologists credit him as one of the singers whose acting-driven style pushed the aria beyond its rigid da capo conventions in the 1750s.

He toured Italy with a company built around his own five daughters - all of them professional sopranos.

Giovanna, Clementina, Costanza, Rosa, and Vincenza Baglioni sang in Venice, Turin, Milan, Parma, Naples, Vienna, and Paris. Mozart composed the role of Rosina in La finta semplice (1768) for Giovanna, though the Vienna production collapsed amid theatre intrigues and she never sang it. Costanza, the most celebrated of the five, sang for Piccinni's company at the Academie Royale de Musique in Paris (1778-1779) and created roles for Salieri in Vienna; the historian Charles Burney, hearing her in Milan in 1770, judged a few of her slow, sustained notes worth more than another singer's most elaborate aria.

Rosa, the second-youngest, debuted around 1764 and sang with her sisters in Venice and Vienna. On the circumstantial evidence assembled by the Mozart scholar John A. Rice, she is the most likely mother of the third generation's two decisive figures: Antonio and Camilla, who bore their mother's name.

Antonio Baglioni (c. 1760s - after 1797) was the tenor for whom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote the role of Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, premiered in Prague on October 29, 1787, and the title role of Tito in La clemenza di Tito, premiered there on September 6, 1791. The aria Il mio tesoro intanto was composed for his particular voice - pure, clear, and educated, with exceptional breath control rather than raw power.

He served as leading tenor of Domenico Guardasoni's opera troupe from 1787 to about 1796, singing in Prague, Leipzig, and Warsaw, then in Vienna in 1796-1797, where he created Ramiro in Salieri's Il moro. After his last documented appearance in March 1797 he settled in Venice as a renowned singing teacher and published vocal exercises - the family trade, passed on once more.

Antonio's sister Camilla Baglioni (1773-1832) was a coloratura soprano at the Teatro La Fenice - the theater whose director in those same years was the dancer Alberto Giovanni Cavos. Opera was in her blood: three of her sisters and two of her brothers sang professionally. She married the director's son, the composer Catterino Cavos, and followed him to St. Petersburg, where she died in 1832.

With that marriage the Baglioni line dissolves into the dynasty - and its instinct for the stage becomes hereditary. Camilla's son Alberto Cavos rebuilt the Bolshoi and built the Mariinsky; her descendants Alexandre Benois and Nikolai Benois designed for the Ballets Russes and La Scala; Zinaida Serebriakova painted dancers backstage at the Mariinsky; and Tatiana Serebriakova carried the thread into scenography at the Moscow Art Theatre. From Carnace's comic troupe to the Soviet stage, the family never really left the theater.