pupil of Porpora at
an early age. The great singing-master is said to have taught him in a
peculiar fashion. For five years he permitted him to sing nothing
but scales and exercises. In the sixth year Porpora instructed him in
declamation, pronunciation, and articulation. Caffarelli, at the end of
the sixth year, supposing he had just mastered the rudiments, began to
murmur, when he was amazed by Porpora's answer: "Young man, you may now
leave me; you are the greatest singer in the world, and you have nothing
more to learn from me." Hogarth discredits this story, on the ground
that "none but a plodding drudge without a spark of genius could have
submitted to a process which would have been too much for the patient
endurance even of a Russian serf; or if a single spark had existed at
first, it must have been extinguished by so barbarous a treatment."
Caffarelli did not rise to the height of his fame rapidly, and, when
he went to London to supply the place of Farinelli in 1738, he entirely
failed to please the English public, who had gone wild with enthusiasm
over his predecessor. Farinelli's retirement from the artistic world
about this period removed from Caffarelli's way the only rival who could
have snatched from him the laurels he soon acquired as the leading
male singer of the age. After Caffarelli's return from England, his
engagements in Turin, Genoa, Milan, and Florence were a triumphal
progress. At Turin he sang before the Prince and Princess of Sardinia,
the latter of whom had been a pupil of Farinelli, as she was a Spanish
princess. Caffarelli, on being told that the royal lady had a prejudice
in favor of her old master, said haughtily, "To-night she shall hear
two Farinellis in one," and exerted his faculties so successfully as
to produce acclamations of delight and astonishment. He always seems
to have had great jealousy of the fame of Farinelli, and the latter
entertained much curiosity about his successor in public esteem.
Metas-tasio, the friend of the retired artist, wrote to him in 1749 from
Vienna about Caffarelli's reception: "You will be curious to know
how Caffarelli has been received. The wonders related of him by his
adherents had excited expectations of something above humanity." After
summing up the judgments of the critics who were severe on Caffarelli's
faults, that his voice was "false, screaming, and disobedient," that
his singing was full of "antique and stale flourishes," that "in his
reci