Ex. 6-3: Caro mio ben

This song was first published in London in 1782. For a long time it was credited to Giuseppe Giordani (1751–1798), but today it is known to be by Tommaso Giordani: his signed receipt of April 1782, selling the song to his London publisher, still exists. It has even been credited to Handel. It was originally written for voice and strings, not piano. The piano version sung today comes from a collection of old Italian songs published in Milan in the 1880s.

Tommaso Giordani was born in Naples around 1733, the son of a singer who ran a small opera company with his family. The family toured Europe and reached London in 1753, where they performed comic operas at Covent Garden. He worked for many years at the King's Theatre, London's opera house, and in 1783 he moved to Dublin, where he stayed for the rest of his life. In Dublin he opened his own opera house, but it went bankrupt within a year, and he had to flee to England to escape his creditors. He soon returned and became a leading figure in Dublin's musical life as a composer and teacher. One of his pupils was the young John Field, who later created the piano nocturne, a form that Chopin made famous. He died in Dublin in 1806.

From the album Cecilia Bartoli: A Portrait by Cecilia Bartoli and György Fischer (1995)
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