(b Venice; fl 1730–50). Italian bass. In 1730 he sang at Rome and in 1731 at Turin in operas by Porpora, who is said to have been his teacher. He was a member of Handel's company at the King's Theatre, 1731–3, and may have made his début as Leo in Tamerlano. During the 1731–2 season he sang in revivals of Poro, Admeto, Flavio and Giulio Cesare, in first productions of Ezio (Varus) and Sosarme (Altomaro), and in Ariosti's Coriolano and the pasticcio Lucio Papirio dittatore. The following season he was in Leo's Catone, revivals of Handel's Alessandro, Tolomeo and probably Floridante, and the first production of Orlando (Zoroastro). He sang Haman in Esther and Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea during Handel's first London oratorio season (May and June 1732), and Abinoam and the Chief Priest of Israel in the first performance of Deborah (17 March 1733). Handel composed the part of Abner in Athalia for him and cast him as Emireno in a planned revival of Ottone, but in the early summer he left the company with Senesino and Bertolli to join the Opera of the Nobility. The anonymous pamphlet Harmony in an Uproar, published in February 1734, implies that he broke a formal contract to do so. He sang with the Opera of the Nobility throughout its four London seasons (1733–7) in at least 15 operas at Lincoln's Inn Fields and the King's Theatre, including Porpora's Arianna in Nasso, Enea nel Lazio, Polifemo, Ifigenia in Aulide and Mitridate, Hasse's Artaserse and Siroe, Veracini's Adriano and La clemenza di Tito, Giovanni Bononcini's Astarto and Handel's Ottone. In 1737–8 he was a member of Heidegger's company at the King's, appearing in two pasticcios, Pescetti's La conquista del vello d'oro, Veracini's Partenio and two new Handel operas, Faramondo and Serse, as Gustavo and Ariodates. For ten years from 1740 he was attached to the royal chapel at Madrid, where he sang in many operas and cantatas.
When
he arrived in London Montagnana was a remarkable singer, a genuine bass with
powerful low notes, considerable agility and a compass of more than two octaves
(E to f'), as seen in the music composed for him by Handel, who
regularly expanded the parts he sang in revivals. But by 1738 his powers were
on the wane and in his last two Handel parts his compass had shrunk to G
to e
'. Burney,
refering to the earlier period, singled out his voice's ‘depth, power,
mellowness and peculiar accuracy of intonation in hitting distant intervals’.
In Orlando a listener reported that he sang ‘with a voice like a Canon’
– presumably ballistic rather than clerical. (SartoriL)
WINTON DEAN