Pier Francesco Tosi

His Opinoni de' cantori antichi e moderni... was the first full-length treatise on singing and provides a unique glimpse into the technical and social aspects of Baroque vocal music.

While it is not known where he received his rudimentary music training, he sang at a church in Rome from 1676 to 1677 and at the Milan cathedral from 1681 until 1685, when he was dismissed for “misconduct.” Thereafter, he made his one recorded appearance in opera at Reggio nell’Emilia in 1687 (in Varischino’s Odoacre) and was based for a time in Genoa.

Tosi stresses the need for a long period of student training in reading and composing music, singing and constructing ornamentation, as well as in grammar, diction, social decorum and acting.

During a period in which various methods of temperament were used by keyboards, strings and even singers, Tosi laments that “except in some few Professors, that modern Intonation is very bad.”[3] He speaks of a differing “Semitone Major and Minor” (or a larger and a smaller semitone) whose “[d]ifference cannot be known by an Organ or Harpsichord, if the Keys of the Instrument are not split.”[4] Consequentially, he warns that “if a Soprano was to sing D sharp, like E flat, a nice Ear will find he is out of Tune, because this last rises.”[5] Tosi's remedy to poor intonation is to begin the singer young on solfege, using the traditional gamut created by Guido.

Tosi spends a considerable amount of time in his treatise praising the “ancient” cantabile (or “Pathetick,” as the original translator put it) style of his generation, around the start of the 18th century.