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Farinelli’s Dream: Theatrical Space, Audience and Political Function of Italian Court Opera 379 1740, writing to his friend the Count Sicinio Pepoli, he presented himself as a wealthy man, “the son of a good citizen and gentleman.”65 Ten years later, in September 1750, he was appointed knight of the prestigious military order of Calatrava, which was a great honour for a singer. His ideology was clearly aristocratic, coloured, on the one hand, by nostalgia for the old patronage system he had known in Vienna in the 1730s and, on the other hand, by a wary distance in the face of the expanding modern public sphere which he had experienced in the London theatres. This attitude is perfectly reflected in one of Farinelli’s most famous paintings, the portrait d’apparat by Corrado Giaquinto, which shows the singer proudly posing with the white habit of the order of Calatrava under the protective gaze of the Spanish monarchs.66 A  few months after his arrival in Spain, he wrote to the same Count Pepoli, the thoughtful words “I had already de- cided from next year not to sing any more in theatres, as I can no longer stand neither the weariness nor the theatre nor the behaviour of the populace.”67 Farinelli’s ideal of an opera theatre thus emerges so as the opposite of the cheering and stomping public typical of the London stage from which he had been literally snatched by the Spanish monarchy in 1737.68 Rather than the noisy Buen Retiro theatre of the 1730s, the empty stalls and the exclusive audience suggested by the 1755 seating-plan are indeed much closer to his experiences during his sojourn in Vienna in 1732. There, admired by con- noisseurs and wealthy patrons, he had sung privately for the Emperor Charles VI and visited the salons of the most select Imperial nobility, a world, of course, which would deeply change in 1740, at the emperor’s death. The same enlightened shift took place in Vienna as happened in Spain some time later, a shift due as much to economical as to ideological factors: the cost of court opera eventually became too great a financial burden even for a state monarchy as the Spanish, especially as the political function of opera seria as absolutist trope declined, and was subjected to growing dissidence bility of the minor nobility of the reign of Philip V, see Felices de la Fuente 2016. On the resistence of the established nobility to recognizing the privileges earned by singers such as Farinelli, see Rosselli 1993, pp.  63–64. 65 “figlio di buon citadino e galantuomo” (Letter from San Ildefonso dated 8  September 1740, Broschi 2000, p.  164). 66 On this particular painting, see Bianconi  /  Pedrielli 2018, pp.  111–115. Bianconi rightly points out the unusual character of this image of an 18th-century musician (“un pezzo senza eguali nell iconografia dei musicisti del suo secolo,” p.  111) and argues for a political reading of the portrait, which would show the singer around 1755 exclusively devoted to his musical responsabilities and aloof from any charge of corruption which involved Ensenada’s fall the year before. On the complex and rich Farinelli iconogra- phy, see Joncus 2005. 67 “l’anno prossimo avevo di già fissato il non cantar più in Teatri, non potendo ne più soffrire né le fatiche né il Teatro, né il costume della turba.” (Letter from El Pardo dated 16  February 1738, Broschi 2000, p.  143). On retirement strategies of castrati from the opera business, see Rosselli 1993, pp.  64–65. 68 McGeary 1998.