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Juan José Carreras 378 of royal magnificence. As in Madrid, the administration of the free admissions to the opera, here on a yearly basis, lay in the hands of the Lord Chief Butler (Oberhofmar- schall). From the theatre’s four floors of boxes, the exclusive first and second ranks were mainly reserved, as would be expected, for the royal family, courtiers of higher rank, ambassadors and government ministers. On the upper third and fourth floors, court servants, librarians, the liberal professions and theatre staff such as stagehands, tailors, carpenters and opera singers were present, suggesting a broader social range than in Madrid. The crucial difference is apparent in the crowded stalls, where more than four hundred spectators of lesser rank “from the court and the city” (“vom Hof und aus der Stadt”) were accommodated on benches and in galleries set up in the parterre.62 Fallen from heaven upon the earth However, opera in the reign of Ferdinand VI was unique among all other court operas for the presence of a great singer as its director. This occurred in absence of any official appointment detailing Farinelli’s new extraordinary capacities. Expressed in current terms, Farinelli’s position as head of the Buen Retiro opera joined simultaneously the responsibility of a theatre’s artistic director (with ample financial powers) and that of a stage director (with important musical prerogatives). Contemporaries were obviously well aware of Farinelli’s new position. Anna Maria Peruzzi, a famous Italian soprano ac- tive in Madrid in Farinelli’s time, refers to the castrato in a missive as “el Intendente de la Música,” a position he ostensibly never possessed but effectively fulfilled.63 Titles such as “Intendant des spectacles” or “Directeur des plaisirs” were current in courts from the late 17th century onwards as a result of the growing importance of opera as a princely entertainment. These posts were always given to a nobleman, since it would have been unthinkable in the strongly hierarchical world of an absolutist court that such an influ- ential post would have been held in other hands. Despite all the honours bestowed on Farinelli by the Spanish Crown, he was never a member of the higher court nobility.64 In 62 For an excellent discussion on the audience and spaces of the court opera in Dresden on the basis of exceptionally detailed documentation, see Mücke 2003, pp.  70–79; p.  73 reproduces the seating-plan (‘Arrangement’) for the year 1755. The author notes a clear progressive increase in non-noble specta- tors from the 1730s to the 1750s at the Saxon court opera (p.  74). The court opera of Dresden is named together with the German court operas of Vienna and Berlin in Farinelli’s Descripción, see Broschi 1991, p.  69. It is also interesting to note that the Spanish court tried to hire Johann Adolf Hasse and his wife Faustina Bordoni for the royal wedding celebrations of 1739, see the detailed memorandum by the marquis Annibale Scotti, published in Carreras 2002, p.  222. 63 Carreras 2002, p.  227. 64 As is well known, patronage was a recognized means of entering the lower ranks of nobility by artists and musicians pertaining to the personal sphere of the monarchs, see for instance Álvarez-Ossorio 2002, pp.  74–75; on the important research produced in recent years on the promotion and social mo-