Arias for Nancy Storace, Mozart's First Susanna (review)

Ann Selina (Nancy) Storace (1765-1817) was a popular eighteenth-century opera star, often remembered as the soprano for whom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart created the role of Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. Her father Stefano, a professional musician, nurtured her precocious vocal abilities by providing an excellent musical education—although he may have helped shorten her career by encouraging her to sing difficult arias in public before she reached maturity. As a child, Storace studied voice with the Italian castrato and composer Venanzio Rauzzini (1746-1810) in London and, at the age of eleven, sang a small role in one of his operas, L'ali d'amore. In 1778, she and her parents joined her brother Stephen in Italy, where she began building a successful operatic career; by 1782, at the age of seventeen, she had sung in most of the major opera houses in Italy and was firmly established as a star. In 1783, Emperor Joseph II initiated a new Italian opera company in Vienna and recruited several top Italian singers, including Nancy Storace. Her early vocal training, captivating personality, and dramatic skills inspired some of the major Italian opera composers of the day, including Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Giovanni Paisiello, and Vicente Martín y Soler, to create roles specifically designed for her voice and acting talents. During this period, arguably the high point of her career, she increasingly moved toward the comic opera roles that were so well suited to her abilities. In 1787, Storace left Vienna for London, where she performed Italian opera at the King's Theatre, and English opera, including several operas written by her brother Stephen, at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. By the time she and tenor John Braham left for a tour of Europe in 1797, Storace's voice was beginning to fade, although she kept singing until her retirement in 1808. She died in 1817 in Herne Hill, Dulwich, after a brief illness.

In order to "establish a basis for creating a vocal profile for Nancy Storace" and to "allow aspiring Susannas to sing their way into the role with comparable repertory" (p. vii), Dorothea Link has assembled fifteen of Storace's most popular arias, eleven composed specifically for her, and presented them as vocal scores in a beautifully printed and carefully edited volume in the A-R Editions series Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era. The selections, prepared in most cases from eighteenth-century vocal scores, and presented chronologically in the order of Storace's first performances of them, provide a revealing overview of her career.

Most accounts of the composition of Le nozze di Figaro note that Mozart substituted Susanna's simpler, though very effective, fourth-act aria "Deh vieni, non tardar" (no. 9 in the edition, with opening recitative "Giunse alfin il momento"), for the partially completed dramatic showcase rondò "Non tardar amato bene," and that Mozart may have initially needed to convince Storace that his new conception merited forfeiting the opportunity to display her talents. Whether or not the story is true, Link's selection of "Deh vieni, non tardar" to represent Storace's role as the first Susanna seems appropriate. In addition to Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart wrote two other works for Storace: "Nacqui all'aura triofale" for the unfinished 1784 opera Lo sposo deluso, and the concert aria Ch'io mi scordi di te . . . Non temer, amato bene, K. 505, for her farewell recital in Vienna on 23 February 1787 (with Mozart playing the piano obbligato part). The latter aria's absence from the anthology is intuitively puzzling (Mozart noted "für Mad.^selle Storace und mich" for the work's entry in his...