Charles Incledon

Born in Cornwall in 1763, Charles Incledon was an English tenor. He was a chorister at Exeter Cathedral and was renowned as a boy soloist. In 1784 he made his stage début in Southampton and the next year moved to Bath, where he studied with Venanzio Rauzzini. He sang at Covent Garden between1790 and1815, establishing himself as a leading English stage tenor. His West Country accent and somewhat flashy personality limited his success as a concert artist, but he sang in several Covent Garden oratorio seasons and was a soloist in the first London performance of The Creation (1800). Haydn had heard him in 1791 and noted: ‘[Incledon] has a good voice and quite a good style, but he uses the falsetto to excess…’ For many of his contemporaries his impassioned performances of nautical and sentimental ballads exemplified true English singing. Robson (1846) remembered that ‘never was sound, so rich, so powerful, so sweet an English voice as Incledon’s’. He died in Worcester in 1826.