When Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, castrato and celebrity, eloped with his teenage pupil, the tale of their scandalous marriage gripped Georgian society, as did the tragedy of where it all began: the castration of a boy in a remote hill town in Tuscany. Tenducci’s story throws light on eighteenth-century society: its artistic elite; its opera (both Mozart and Bach wrote for Tenducci); and the meaning of sex and marriage.