England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [76]
Anxious that the Palazzo Sessa regain the reputation for musical excellence it had enjoyed when Catherine Hamilton was alive, Sir William encouraged Emma to sing and play on the harpsichord and guitar. She took classes with the queen's dancing master three times a week. The expensive Signor Gallucci coached her at eight, one, and before supper with scales, exercises, and music he had written. Sir William soon engaged him as her exclusive tutor and Gallucci brought his musicians to play the guitar and harpsichord and singers to blend with her soprano. Her many songbooks, painstakingly designed and colored by Gallucci's assistants, filled the shelves at the palazzo. When she went to dinner with English visitors and Neapolitan grandees, she was nearly always asked to sing. By August, Emma received "great offers to be first whoman in the Italian opera at Madrid where I was to have six thousand pounds for three years" and heard that she might be offered £2,000 to sing at the London opera house and at the Hanover Square concert rooms.
Sir William delighted in his makeover of his mistress. As he sighed, "Who can scarcely believe she has only learnt 5 months."
I find my house comfortable in the evening with Emma's society. You can have no idea of the improvement she makes daily in every respect— manners, language, & musick particularly. She has now applied closely to singing 5 months, & I have her master (an excellent one) in the house, so that she takes 3 lessons a day; her voice is remarkably fine, & she begins now to have a command over it. She has much expression… there is no saying what she may be in a year or two; I believe [her] myself of the first rate, & so do the best judges here.
Their relationship had become even closer. Emma was now living in his apartments, leaving Mrs. Cadogan downstairs in the first-floor rooms. She could not attend court, but Sir William took her to every other meeting, party, assembly, and outing. Neapolitans and English tourists alike were willing to socialize with her—a testament to Sir William's popularity and her efforts to make herself cultured and elegant. "He goes no whare without me, he [h]as no diners, but what I can be of the party, no body comes with out the[y] are civil to me; we have allways good company," she wrote to Greville. Moreover, she pointedly added, Sir William "is in raptures with me; he spares neither expence nor pain in any thing."
Sir William and Emma spent every spare moment together. Emma had never been a tourist in her life, and Sir William felt as if he was rediscovering his home city. Emma applied herself to learning from her new and scholarly lover; he, in his turn, was melted by her maternal fussing over him, and her playful sense of fun lightened his previous seriousness. She had never been happier: she had a lover who adored her and a secure, stable home for her and her mother. Her only struggle was hiding her sadness when she thought of her daughter, little Emma, growing up without her in Manchester.
Emma kept the local painters in work. "The house is full of painters painting me…. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me that Sir Wm. as fitted up the room that is calld the painting room," she boasted to Greville. By mid-1787, Sir William had nine new paintings of Emma by various painters and two more under way, as well as a wax model, a clay sculpture, and various cameos. He invited dozens of guests to watch her model. Wilhelm Tischbein was so captivated by Emma's beauty that her likeness recurred in his paintings for the rest of his life. Other nobles commissioned portraits of her, and soon a painting of Mrs. Hart on the wall was a marker that its owner was absolutely up with the fashion. Emma claimed to Greville that one painting of her was even to be sent to the Empress of Russia. She