ABSTRACT
This chapter contextualises the growing anxieties surrounding the private singing lesson. These building concerns were fuelled by press-driven gossip that provided overly detailed accounts of clandestine love affairs between music masters and their female students. Even legitimate love-matches, for example, the relationship between Hester Thrale (1741–1821), a wealthy widow, and her daughter’s Italian music teacher Gabriel Mario Piozzi (1740–1809), were scandalised in the newspapers. Plays and novels often romanticised clandestine relationships, typically depicting the music master as an Italian, whose charm and skills would easily bend a weak-willed woman. It should come as no surprise then that an attractive and popular singer such as Rauzzini would also be accused of just such a scandal. He was named in a highly publicised divorce, accused of having an affair with his amateur student, who in turn published an account of their relationship in An Appeal to the Public On the Conduct of Mrs. Gooch (1788) and again in her later memoirs The Life of Mrs Gooch (1792). Though Rauzzini would never publicly discuss the scandal and Gooch always maintained their relationship was platonic, the publication almost certainly benefitted from the inclusion of his name.
