she could make herself agreeable, and called her "perhaps the first actress who acted well while singing badly". Sources generally agree in extolling Tesi's acting skills above her singing qualities. According to the majority, however, the latter too were far from bad and poor. Charles Burney reported "she had in her youth been very superior to all her contemporaries in both capacities of singer and actress." Later, relying almost literally upon the opinions expressed by Johann Joachim Quantz, a direct witness of the singer's early performances, he added: "Vittoria Tesi had by nature a masculine, strong, contralto voice. In 1719 she generally sung, at Dresden all'ottava, such airs as are made for base [sic] voice. The compass of her voice was so extraordinary, that neither to sing high or low, gave her trouble. She was not remarkable for her performance of rapid and difficult passages". Singing master Giovanni Battista Mancini, who, in his youth, had happened to perform on stage alongside Tesi and Farinelli, reported she naturally possessed "most perfect intonation" and had gained, by studying, full mastery of the art of singing. Notwithstanding, it was in fact as a 'singer-actress' — to put it in modern terms — that she went down in history: "the first 'divina' in the contralto clef", as she has been recently called. According to Stefano Arteaga and the aforementioned Mancini, in particular, who both wrote around the time of her death, she was the century's greatest operatic actress, and her theatrical skills, either natural or acquired through hard study and training, were such that no other actress could ever emerge on the opera stage to surpass or even just equal her. Notes References Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces ... (second edition, corrected), London, Becket, Robson, Robinson, 1775 (2 vols) Gerhard Croll, Tesi (Tramontini), Vittoria, in Laura Macy (ed), The Grove Book of Opera Singers, New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 491–492, (also: ) Francesco Lora, "Tesi, Vittoria, detta la Fiorentina o la Moretta", in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani - Volume 95, 2019 Michael Lorenz. "The Will of Vittoria Tesi Tramontini" (Vienna, 2016) Giambatista (Giovanni Battista) Mancini, Pensieri e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato, Vienna, Ghelen, 1774 (accessible online at IMSLP, Google Books and Internet Archive) Further reading Edward Joseph Dent, Italian Opera in the Eighteenth Century, and Its Influence on the Music of