The primary focus of the biographical register is musical personnel first active before the end of , with a secondary focus on members of their circles - families, pupils, colleagues, and other important contacts - first active after Beyond that, there has been no systematic attempt to deal with musical personnel first active after , and the coverage is selective. A major upgrade of the contents of this page was completed in December , and newly added documentation including genealogical data and Trove tagging now brings the page content up to the end of close to completion.
Only such biographical information as can be confirmed from standard national databases or original documentation presented is entered at the head of each person entry in this page. Where no certain evidence of a person's birth year has yet been identified, the assumption is that we do not and cannot yet know with sufficient certainty to propose one.
Years of birth or death, and sometimes also names and spellings of names, thus sourced and presented here, will often differ more or less substantially from those given but often merely hazarded in standard Australian and international bibliographic and biographical records. The texts given in gold aim for the most part to be diplomatic transcriptions, wherever practical retaining unaltered the original orthography, and spellings and mis -spellings, of the printed or manuscript sources.
Occasionally, however, some spellings are silently corrected for instance, of unusual music titles and composers, to assist identification , and some orthography, punctuation and paragraphing, and very occasionally also syntax, editorially altered or standardised in the interests of consistency, clarity, and readability. Born Naples, Italy, c. Nicholson and Ascherberg, Sydney. Signor A. Pagnotti played with much sweetness the flute obligato to Miss Sherwin's rendering of "Lo, hear the gentle lark.
Alfonzo Pagnotti, the well-known flautist, passed away on Friday last, after a long illness at his home at Enmore, and was buried at Rookwood. The mourners included his widow Mrs. Annie Pagnotti , and other relatives, Miss Elvy, and Dr. Pagnotti was a thorough musician, educated at a leading conservatorio in Italy, and came to Australia many years ago for Italian opera, and settled in Sydney. When Madame Amy Sherwin made her operatic debut in "Lucia" at the old Victoria Theatre, Pitt-street, in , Pagnotti beautifully rendered the obbligato in the Mad Scene, and he accompanied the Tasmanian Nightingale on some of her subsequent girlish tours before she settled in Europe, where she became a celebrity.
