Giovanni Gallini - Marriage Into The Aristocracy

Marriage Into The Aristocracy

While teaching dance, at which he was expert, he courted and married privately, on 23 February 1763 at St James's, Westminster, Lady Elizabeth Peregrine Bertie (d. 1804), the daughter of the third earl of Abingdon. She gave birth to twin sons Francis Cecil Gallini and John Gallini on 13 October 1766 and later to two daughters, Joyce Ann Gallini and Louise Gallini. Notwithstanding outrage in parts of the fashionable world, her family accepted the match. However, the marriage eventually broke down, and in later years the couple lived apart.

Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon, was a music patron and composer, as well as a political writer and his brother-in-law Gallini brought Bertie into contact with J.C. Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel, and he was subsequently very involved in their careers. Gallini was a friend of Haydn's, who may have encouraged Bertie to compose. Haydn went to Vienna, and there he was found by Johann Peter Salomon, the great German-born violinist and impresario who had settled in London, where he gave successful subscription concerts. Salomon had read of Prince Esterházy's death while recruiting singers in Cologne and had hastened to Vienna to engage Haydn, and if possible Mozart as well (but Mozart was already committed to composing Die Zauberflöte and was not free). Salomon was a brilliant businessman and his proposal to Haydn was so attractive that the composer could hardly refuse: 3000 gulden from the great impresario Gallini, director of the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, for a new opera and 100 gulden for each of twenty new instrumental or vocal pieces to be conducted by Haydn in Salomon's subscription concerts. As soon as Haydn set foot on English soil, 5000 gulden (£500 were then the equivalent of 4883 gulden) were to be deposited in Haydn's Viennese bank, Fries & Co.