A Christmas Box for YOUNG LADIES, Being a valuable and Useful Collection of the most admired Little Pieces properly arranged for the Piano-Forte, With additions intended and calculated for their Improvement: Respectfully Inscribed to Miss Walond, by SIGNOR SAMPIERI. Printed for the Author. Price 2s. [London, [c.1805]. Engraved by J. Turnbull.]

(Containing: Whither my love / Harlequin amulet / Sicilian hymn / Allegro / Adeste fideles / Begone dull care / A favorite French air.)

A number of Christmas Boxes of miscellaneous pieces for differing combinations were published around the turn of the nineteenth century, the best known of these being those by James Hook (1746-1827), composer of ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’.

Little is known about Sampieri himself other than that he was a castrato who came to England in about 1780 and sang, composed and taught. In an advertisement in 1800 he is described as an “Italian Opera Singer, from the Opera House, and one of the principal Honorary Members and Composer of the Imperial and Philharmonic Society of Mantua ….” Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 13 October, 1800.

Thanks to a fascinating blog by Paul Sommerfeld of the Library of Congress, we know, among other things, that he was, according to the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (under the heading Programme-Music ), “an obscure but original-minded composer …. He appears to have been a pianoforte teacher who sought to make his compositions interesting to his pupils by means of programmes, and even by illustrations placed among the notes.”  We learn from the same blog that one contemporary writer, Susan Burney (fourth child of Dr Charles Burney), wrote that Sampieri’s singing was “insufferably out of tune”!