Francesco Mazzoleni

Born into an Italian family in Dalmatia (where there lived a large Italian minority until World War I), Mazzoleni studied law, following into the footsteps of his father, a lawyer. He studied first in Dubrovnik, then in Vienna (Dalmatia being Austrian throughout the 19th century). When he sang with a few student friends, he was by chance heard by two famous singers who were in Vienna at that moment, Achille De Bassini and Giovanni Basadonna; they strongly advised him to have his voice trained, and one of the two (presumably De Bassini, although source differ) became his teacher in Milano. After just five months of vocal studies, Mazzoleni made started his career in 1851 in Reggio Calabria, as Pollione and Foresto.

He soon made a good career all over Italy (Palermo, Naples, Bari, Ancona, La Scala, La Fenice), enjoying particular success in Trieste. He made guest appearances in Spain, and at some point was hired by the Paris Opéra, where he was utterly unsuccessful, though. His highly individual style of both singing and acting, which was noted also elsewhere, was perceived as screaming and as ridiculous stage behavior in Paris, and he had obviously failed to learn French at any faintly acceptable level. He left Paris long before the time, either because he was sent packing or because he broke his contract, here again sources differ; but the most mysterious question is when that Paris disaster happened at all: it's common sense that it was between 1854 and 1856, but the French-language New York newspaper "Courrier des États-Unis" reported it as an actuality in 1868 – so either the common sense must be wrong, or it happened even twice!!

He was, however, successful in South America, where he spent one year (it would seem in the mid-1850s), primarily in Rio de Janeiro; and in 1863, he joined the troupe of the conductor-impresario Max Maretzek, and appeared with them first in Havana, then at the Academy of Music in Brookly, where he enjoyed considerable success and stayed through 1867. He sang into the late 1880s.

He was an uncle of soprano Ester Mazzoleni.

Reference 1: Kutsch & Riemens; reference 2: www.artlyriquefr.fr (defunct); reference 3: Courrier des États-Unis, 22 January & 8 June 1868; reference 4