Giorgio Ronconi

Ronconi was born in Milan and had been taught to sing by his father, Domenico Ronconi, who was a leading tenor. He married soprano Elguerra Giannoni on 8 October 1837 in Naples, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. By some accounts, Giannoni had sung with some success at the Lyceum Theatre and at the King's Theatre in London. However, Harold Rosenthal has written: "This lady, who failed on virtually every opera stage in Europe, was considered a good concert-room singer only, but so indispensable was her husband to any Italian company that willy-nilly she had to be engaged as well." In his later years, Ronconi founded a school of singing at Granada in Spain and also accepted a professorial post at the Madrid Royal Conservatory. Ronconi died in Madrid, aged 79.

He made his operatic debut at Pavia in 1831, as Valdeburgo in Bellini's La straniera, and went on to sing at the Teatro alla Scala and elsewhere in Italy. In the 1830s and 1840s, he appeared in the first performances of seven operas by Donizetti: • 1833, as Cardenio in Il furioso all'isola di San Domingo; • 1833, in the title role in Torquato Tasso; • 1836, as Enrico in Il campanello; • 1837, as Nello Dello Pietra in Pia de' Tolomei; • 1838, as Corrado Waldorf in Maria de Rudenz; • 1841, as Don Pedro in Maria Padilla; and • 1843, as Enrico, Duke of Chevreuse, in Maria di Rohan. In 1842, Ronconi appeared for the first time in London, at Her Majesty's Theatre, performing the part of Henry Ashton in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. Ronconi's success with audiences outside Italy was immediate, and he continued to be one of the most popular and influential operatic artists in Europe until the early 1870s, when he retired. For instance, from 1847 until 1866, he appeared at London's Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in the second and third of the three theatres on that site (now known as the Royal Opera House). Vienna heard him in 1843, and he sang in St Petersburg between 1850 and 1860 and in New York City from 1866 to 1872.