Nancy Storace

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Pietro Bettelini : Nancy Storace (1788)
Signora Storace sings in No song, no supper (1795)
Benjamin Van der Gucht: Nancy Storace (around 1790)

Nancy Storace (actually Ann (a) Selina Storace , born October 27, 1765 in London ; died August 24, 1817 in Dulwich ) was an Italian-British soprano .

Life

Nancy Storace was the daughter of the Italian double bass player Stefano Storace (1725–1781), who directed the orchestra in Vauxhall Gardens . Her mother was an English flautist, her older brother Stephen Storace also became a musician.

Storace was a student of the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini and made her debut in 1776 in the opera Le ali d'amore composed by him . For further training she went to Venice to the school of Antonio Sacchini . In 1780 she performed at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence , in competition with the castrato Luigi Marchesi , in 1781 in Parma and in 1782 she sang the role of the maid in the premiere of the opera Fra i due litiganti il ​​terzo gode by Giuseppe Sarti at La Scala in Milan .

In 1783 Storace was so successful at the Teatro San Samuele in Venice that the Austrian ambassador Count Giacomo Durazzo , former Vienna stage manager, placed her at the Vienna court opera for an unusually high annual salary of a thousand ducats . She moved to Vienna with her mother, her brother followed and made a career as a composer there.

Storace made his debut in Vienna in the role of Countess in Antonio Salieri's opera La scuola de 'gelosi . In March 1784 she married the eccentric English violin virtuoso John Abraham Fisher (1744-1806), who proved to be a beating spouse, so that the marriage separated and Fisher was expelled from the country by the emperor. In April she was given an academy in her honor . After she had to refuse the role of Lisetta in Giovanni Paisiello's Il re Teodoro in Venezia , which Paisiello had originally written for her, due to an illness in 1784 , she was unable to play the main role written for her in Salieri's Il ricco d'un giorno due to ailments accept.

In 1785 she sang in the opera buffa Gli Sposi malcontenti , a work by her brother Stephen Storace. In 1786 she sang the role of Lilla in the world premiere of the opera Una cosa rara by Martín y Soler . She had already played the lead role of Angelica in Soler's Il burbero di buon cuore .

On February 7, 1786, she sang the role of Eleonora, in which she had to imitate the castrato Luigi Marchesi, at the side of Celeste Coltellini in Salieri's Prima la musica e poi le parole .

On May 1, 1786 she sang Susanna in the world premiere of Le nozze di Figaro by the Vienna Court Opera in the Burgtheater am Michaelerplatz under the direction of the composer.

Mozart's opera composition Il sposo deluso , in which Storace was supposed to sing Emilia, remained a fragment. When she was once ill, Mozart, Salieri and Cornetti (Cornetti is possibly a pseudonym of her brother) composed the cantata Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia together for her recovery. Mozart also composed the concert aria Ch'io mi scordi di te? For the singer, whom he greatly admired . , KV 505, possibly for her departure from Vienna.

Storace returned to London in 1787, she was accompanied by her brother and the composer Thomas Attwood and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly .

In London she appeared for the first time at the King's Theater in Giovanni Paisiello's Gli schiavi per amore . In 1789 she sang in the English premiere of the opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia by Giovanni Paisiello. From 1789 she played in the Drury Lane Theater , including in operas by her brother Stephen Storace.

After his death, she left the Drury Lane Theater in 1796 and went on concert tours with her new partner, the tenor John Braham , whom she could not marry because her husband was still alive. They had a son, William Spencer Harris Braham, born in 1802. In 1799 both took part in the world premiere of the opera Il Ritratto by Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli at La Scala in Milan . Around 1812 there was a complicated separation between the two.

Storace also earned a reputation as a concert and oratorio singer, singing at Westminster Abbey in 1791 and Hereford Cathedral in 1792 . From 1801 she was engaged at the Covent Garden Opera , where she said goodbye in 1808 with a performance in her brother's No Song, No Supper from 1790.

literature

  • KJ Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Saur, 2004, pp. 23429-23433, ISBN 3-89853-433-2
  • Christine Martin:  Storace, Nancy. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present . Second edition, personal section, volume 15 (Schoof - Stranz). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 2006, ISBN 3-7618-1135-7 , Sp. 1561–1562 ( online edition , subscription required for full access)
  • Betty Matthews: The Childhood of Nancy Storace . In: The Musical Times , 1969
  • Karl Geiringer ; Irene Geiringer: Nancy Storace in Vienna . Louisville, 1981
  • Storace, Nancy , in: Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, Edward A. Langhans: A biographical dictionary of actors, actresses, musicians, dancers, managers & other stage personnel in London, 1660-1800. Volume 14, Siddons to Thynne . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991 ISBN 978-0-585-03004-3 , pp. 294-305
  • Betty Matthews: Nancy Storace and the Royal Society of Musicians . In: The Musical Times , 1987
  • Patricia Lewy Gidwitz: Vocal Profiles of Four Mozart Sopranos . Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1991
  • Geoffrey Brace: Anna-Susanna: Anna Storace, Mozart's first Susanna: her life, times and family . Thames, London 1991
  • Gustav Gugitz (ed.): Memories of the Venetian Lorenzo da Ponte . Volume 1. Aretz, Dresden 1924

Fiction

  • Vivien Shotwell: The School of Lovers: Novel . Translation from the American by Andrea Stumpf and Gabriele Werbeck. Limes, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3809026266 . Historical background , p. 349f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fisher, John Abraham , in: Dictionary of National Biography
  2. ↑ Lorenzo Da Ponte: Memoirs , Volume 1, 1924, p. 379
  3. ↑ Lorenzo Da Ponte: Memoirs , Volume 1, 1924, p. 376
  4. ^ Christine Villinger: Mi vuoi tu corbellar: the Opere Buffe by Giovanni Paisiello: analyzes and interpretations . Schneider, Tutzing 2000, ISBN 3-7952-1020-8 , pp. 104 .
  5. ↑ Lorenzo Da Ponte: Memoirs , Volume 1, 1924, p. 209
  6. ↑ Lorenzo Da Ponte: Memoirs , Volume 1, 1924, p. 393
  7. ^ Isabelle Putnam Emerson: Five centuries of women singers . Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2005 ISBN 0-313-30810-1 , p. 104
personal data
SURNAME Storace, Nancy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Storace, Anna Selina; Storace, Ann Selina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-British soprano
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1765
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1817
Place of death London