Later Career
Nonetheless, Cuzzoni was still a force to be reckoned with. After the collapse of the Nobility Opera, she returned to the continent, singing in Florence in 1737-38, and at Turin the following year, when, for one carnival season, she received the huge fee of 8,000 lire. Later that year she sang at Vienna, and seems to have made her last operatic appearances in Hamburg in 1740. On 17 September 1741 the "London Daily Post" reported that Cuzzoni was to be beheaded for poisoning her husband, but, though they had separated by 1742, he did not die until 1748. She sang concerts in Amsterdam in 1742, and by December 1745 had become a court singer in Stuttgart. In debt, a condition she frequently suffered in her later life, she absconded from there to Bologna in 1748. Still needing to perform to pay her creditors, she was again in London in 1750, where Burney heard her "thin cracked voice" in a concert on 18 May. On 2 August of that year Horace Walpole wrote that "old Cuzzoni" had been arrested for a debt of £30, and bailed by the Prince of Wales. On 20 May 1751, the "General Advertiser" gave notice of a final benefit concert for Cuzzoni, accompanied by a letter from the singer in which she wrote: "I am so extremely sensible of the many Obligations I have already received from the Nobility and Gentry of this Kingdom ... that nothing but extreme necessity and a desire of doing justice, could induce me to trouble them again, but being unhappily involved in a few Debts, am extremely desirous of attempting every Thing in my Power to pay them, before I quit England ..."
Of her last years, little is known, save that she returned once more to the continent, and lived a poverty-stricken existence, eking out a living, it is said, making buttons. She died in Bologna. Of the two children she seems to have had by Sandoni, nothing is known - they may have died in infancy.
Read more about this topic: Francesca Cuzzoni
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