Giuseppina Grassini was born at Varese in 1773, the daughter of a modest Lombard family and the possessor, very early, of an extraordinary voice. She made her debut while still a teenager and soon became one of the great dramatic contraltos of Europe: dark-voiced, beautiful and intense.

Her fame carried her through the chief Italian theatres, including La Scala, La Fenice and San Carlo. She sang Cimarosa, Zingarelli, Cherubini and Mayr, and belonged to that older world of serious Italian opera before Rossini changed everything. Her voice was not merely admired. It was considered dangerous—an instrument of seduction as much as art.

Napoleon thought so.  Grassini sang for him in 1800, then became his mistress for a time.  Keppel Craven had the very same reaction as the emperor, although unlike Bonaparte, he had to work for his triumph.  Still he succeeded in October 1805 when Madame Grassini was a guest of the Margravine of Anspach.  Craven’s journal records the occasion:  “I succeeded in my affair with Elmira, the details of which are curious.”  One wonders exactly what he meant!

Grassini later returned to Napoleon’s court, and after his fall, she was seen with his rival, the Duke of Wellington, making her the woman who had charmed both sides of Europe’s great war.

She died at Milan in 1850. She had been a singer, a beauty, a celebrity, a court ornament, a lover of powerful men, one of the last great figures of the pre-Rossinian stage…and probably the biggest feather in Keppel Craven’s cap.