Mozart and Nancy Storace

by BORIS GOLDOVSKY

1

LIKE most musicians, I worship at Mozart’s shrine. In the last twenty years I have played and produced a sizable portion of Mozart’s work and have studied diligently the growing literature on the composer. It was natural that along the way I should have encountered several rather fascinating mysteries which have goaded me into further investigation. Of these, the one surrounding the creation of The Marriage of Figaro is the most exasperating. This opera is probably Mozart’s most popular, and it is therefore all the more surprising that the story of its genesis should have been treated so gingerly by scholars.

To outline the situation briefly, it has been known for some time that the autograph full score and the published versions disagree in many important particulars. No satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy has ever been offered, and to complicate things further, a third and substantially different version of the first two acts was located in the theater library of the small German town of Donaueschingen by the noted English musicologist, Edward Dent. Particularly surprising in this version is the treatment of the role of Susanna, which is here set for a much lower voice. Not only are all the higher notes of the solo sections marked down, but Susanna is made to sing the lowest (instead of the highest) female line in all the ensembles. Since the newly found manuscript was not in Mozart’s handwriting, it attracted little attention until Siegfried Anheisser compared it with the original libretto (the only extant specimen of which is preserved in the Library of Congress), and demonstrated most convincingly that this seemingly mutilated version was a true copy of the original and presumably lost autograph score used in Vienna for the world première on May 1, 1786.

Since it is equally beyond doubt that on the occasion of that première the role of Susanna was entrusted to the well-known soprano, Nancy Storace, we are confronted with the seemingly impossible proposition that Mozart had written a contralto part for a soprano. The answer to this mystery could only be found, I felt, in the personality of the young lady and in the circumstances surrounding the creation of the opera.

Should later study prove that my conjectures are incorrect, I shall still have experienced the thrill of pursuing the life career of a charming singer of whom the late Alfred Einstein wrote that she was “the only woman of whom Constanze Mozart would really have had a right to be jealous.”

Nancy Storace arrived in Vienna in the spring of 1783, traveling in grand style, surrounded by mountains of luggage and attended by her mother and older brother. She was the daughter of the Italian bass player, Stefano Sorace, who had settled in England around the middle of the century, married a girl from Bath, and inserted a t after the initial letter of his last name. At the time of her arrival in Vienna, Nancy — or Anna Selina as she was christened — was still very young. Even if we accept the least chivalrous of estimates, she was just twenty-two years old when she joined Emperor Joseph’s newly assembled Italian opera troupe.

Young as she was, she could look back on several brilliantly successful years in Italy. In Vienna, in the days when top fees were paid only to the famous castrati, she commanded 3250 gulden per year, a salary unheard of for female sopranos. On top of that, she was given a luxurious apartment, free transportation to and from rehearsals, and a generous supply of fuel, as well as candles — which were such an important item in the eighteenthcentury budget.

Her voice was not spectacular. She had neither the stratospheric range of Aloysia Lange nor the fluent larynx of Caterina Cavalieri, but as a singing actress — as the first buffa—she was unexcelled. AH reports on her, whether German, French, or English, are agreed on that. A leading Viennese musical magazine remembers her as “having combined, as no singer of the time and few since, every gift of nature, education, and skill which could be desired for the Italian comic opera.” A French article says that “she sang like an angel.”From England we hear that “in her own particular line on the stage she was unrivaled, being an excellent actress as well as a masterly singer.”

It did not take Nancy Storace long to evaluate the musical situation in Vienna, and it was promptly arranged that her brother, the gifted and versatile Stephen Storace, would study composition with Mozart. Soon the Storaces and the Mozarts became close friends. According to Michael Kelly, the Irish tenor whose career roughly parallels that of Storace, Nancy was the Emperor’s favorite, and the strength of her position at court can be judged from the fact that her brother, who was at that time, musically speaking, a totally unknown quantity, was commissioned to write two operas for the Italian company. In the intrigueladen atmosphere of the opera house, where nonItalians were regarded with definite suspicion, Nancy’s influence with the Emperor was clearly an enormous asset .

2

DURING the three and a half years which she spent in Vienna, Nancy Storace had two serious mishaps: she got married and she lost her voice. Her marriage was short-lived and stormy. She met a certain John Abraham Fisher, an Englishman, a “doctor of music and player on the fiddle,” who according to Kelly was “an inordinate prattler” and “an ugly Christian.” By dint of entertaining mother Storace and drinking tea with her by the hour, he managed to endear himself to the daughter. Lord knows what possessed the charming and levelheaded Nancy to marry this man who was at least twice her age and who is described to us as a dried-up little fellow, reeking of perfume and affecting an enormous wig which made him appear as if his head were in the middle of his body. The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe, who led the bride to the altar, tells us that “the union was productive of so little happiness that a separation soon took place.” Kelly is more specific. According to him, the Emperor, upon being informed that Fisher maltreated his wife, promptly banished the fiddler from the Austrian Empire. Nancy Storace resumed her maiden name and kept her marriage secret after her return to England.

The loss of her voice occurred under highly dramatic circumstances. On June 1, 1785, on the momentous occasion when young Stephen was launching his first opera, sister Nancy was singing the female lead. Michael Kelly, who was entrusted with the tenor role in this ill-fated presentation, relates the incident: —

In the middle of the first act, Storace all at once lost her voice and could not utter a sound during the whole of the performance; this naturally threw a damp over the audience, as well as the performers. The loss of the first female singer, who was a great and deserved favourite, was to the composer, her brother, a severe blow. I never shall forget her despair and disappointment, but she was not then prepared for the extent of her misfortune, for she did not recover her voice sufficiently to appear on the stage for five months.

A temporary indisposition is quite common among singers, but it is rare for such an episode to persist for more than two weeks. A loss of voice lasting five months is a frightening experience implying the possibility of permanent disability and consequent cessation of the career.

As a matter of fact, there are indications that after her vocal collapse Nancy Storace was left with a weakened vocal apparatus. Why else would she on her recovery have left Vienna and turned to singing the much less taxing English operettas in London? At a much later date, an English critic describes her voice as one “soon to crack and get husky” — which suggests that she never completely recovered her vocal powers. It is quite possible that Nancy’s troubles began much earlier, near the outset of her career when she flouted the celebrated castrato, Marchesi, by imitating some of his vocal fireworks. Many a young voice has been strained by such premature exhibitionism.

It seems that Marchesi, who was the leading singer of the Leghorn Opera, had introduced a very involved and effective vocal cadenza culminating in a powerfully sustained high tone which became known as la bomba di Marchesi. Nancy Storace, who was then seconda donna in his company, copied the trick in one of her songs; and when the company manager asked her to stop such presumptuous displays, she declared that she had as good a right to show the power of her bomba as anybody else. She lost her job, but the story got around and materially helped to speed up her rise as a star. We do not know how long Nancy Storace continued to parade sustained high tones, but it is certain that by the time we meet her in Vienna she is no longer gambling in bombe.

Hoping against hope to crash the gates of the Vienna Opera House with an Italian opera, Mozart in 1784 began work on his Sposo Deluso. Although he never finished it, be composed several arias and wrote out a proposed casting wherein he allotted the role of Eugenia to Storace. Since Mozart prided himself on his ability to fashion an aria to a singer’s voice as carefully as a tailor fashions a suit of clothes, we can take it for granted that Eugenia’s aria is a trustworthy portrayal of Storace’s vocal powers in her early Viennese days. Significant in this aria are the simplicity of ornamentation, the generally moderate tessitura, and the careful treatment of high tones. We find here one lone high B flat, which is enclosed in parentheses to indicate that it is optional. Thus it is fairly certain that even in her pre-catastrophe days in Vienna, Nancy would not venture high tones unless she felt in particularly good voice. It appears, therefore, that long before the fateful June 1, 1785, there may have been warnings that not all was well with the vocal mechanism. The disastrous occurrence of that day would have passed without leaving a ripple on the sands of musical history except that a few months later, in the early fall of 1785, Mozart began The Marriage of Figaro.

3

AS IS the case with most great works of art, we are prone to imagine that The Marriage of Figaro was a classic from the moment it was born. It certainly is not easy to think of it in terms of a controversial novelty. We regard it with undiluted admiration and affection; we follow Cherubino’s and Count Almaviva’s amorous pursuits of Barbarina, Susanna, and the Countess; we savor the musical subtleties of the manifold seductions, jealousies, and raptures; we observe these three women and Marcellina revealing every aspect of feminine instinct, slyness, and charm; and we marvel anew at the miracle of this man who at the age of thirty combined the world’s most spectacular musical genius with a truly uncanny psychological insight.

At the time of its composition, however, The Marriage of Figaro was regarded as a difficult and unconventional work — and so far as the management of the opera house was concerned, as a most annoyingly difficult and unconventional one: an opera buffa in four (instead of the customary two) acts, with a cast of eleven characters (rather than the usual maximum of seven) and with a plot of unheard-of complication featuring at least three major and two minor intrigues! No wonder that the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, felt impelled to apologize and explain.

In the preface to the original libretto he prepares the audience for the shock of novelty, and one is forced to admire the neat twist by which he forestalls objections and turns the tables on his would-be critics. In deference to the accepted convention, so he explains, it seemed necessary to reduce the sixteen characters of the original play to eleven and also to omit one complete act as well as several other episodes. The author and the composer have striven diligently to be concise and brief; but in spite of their efforts, the opera is not among the shortest that have been seen on the Imperial stage. It was, however, the desire of the authors to offer a somewhat new kind of work to an audience of such refined taste and such judicious discrimination. Little did even Da Ponte dream just how new a genus of spectacle his co-author had created!

Michael Kelly, writing some forty years after the event, gives us an eyewitness account of the first performance. Filled with pride at having sung on that memorable first of May, 1786, he speaks of the première as superb and unexcelled! In certain respects it was just that, since it had been prepared, coached, staged, and conducted by Mozart. But in certain other respects it must have been far from superb, and from the composer’s point of view it could have been little more than a compromise solution necessitated by a lack of artistic resources and some rather spectacular bad luck.

The opera was long and difficult, but the principal singers were clever and well-trained, and Mozart knew exactly what he wanted in the action as well as in the music. The immediate problem was the casting of eleven roles with only seven members in the company. Operas were given only three times a week, the other nights being reserved for German plays; so it was deemed unnecessary to employ a larger number of expensive Italian singers. The main roles were designed for Storace and Laschi as Susanna and the Countess, and for Benucci and Mandini as Figaro and the Count. Mandini’s wife was given the role of Marcellina, while the stage manager, Bussani, who was a good comic basso, drew Dr. Bartolo, and Kelly was entrusted with the role of Basilio. That still left two feminine and two masculine roles — Cherubino, Barbarina, Antonio, and Don Curzio. Since the half-witted judge, Curzio, appeared only in the third act, it was decided from the beginning to leave Basilio out of that act so that Kelly could handle both characters.

The doubling of Dr. Bartolo and Antonio was a trickier assignment, but Bussani was willing to negotiate the quick costume changes; and they were quick — indeed, in the second act there is just about a minute and a half in which to exchange wig and coat and to transform the tipsy gardener into the pompous doctor. There still remained the two female roles, Barbarina and Cherubino, and since no doubling arrangement was possible it looked rather hopeless. The ladies of the German wing were completely unsuitable. Neither Teyber, Cavalieri, nor Lange could possibly have been entrusted with the role of an adolescent boy, and it was equally impossible to request them to perform anything as fragmentary as Barbarina.

The Barbarina problem was eventually solved by Mozart himself, who smuggled in the thirteenyear-old Nannina Gottlieb. She was German, but he trained her himself, and since the role was not really worthy of anyone’s attention there were no objections. The child, who five years later sang the first Pamina in The Magic Flute, had a sweet voice, and she must have been ideally cast as the innocent little angel who so expertly blackmails Count Almaviva into forgiving her beloved Cherubino. Since there was not a single singer available for the role of the amorous boy, it was decided to try an actress—namely, Bussani’s wife, Sardy. That this rapturous musical revelation of budding puberty should have been entrusted to a vocally and musically untrained performer is a staggering thought. No wonder that Cherubino sings so little ensemble music. Even so, the role was obviously too taxing for Mme. Bussani, and it is a sad reflection on the “unexcelled ” quality of the première that the first. Cherubino aria, the gem of the opening act, was omitted, undoubtedly because it was too difficult. Da Ponte, in his memoirs, mentions Cherubino’s mugging and horseplay — an infallible sign of artistic incompetence.

But all this was as nothing compared with the major headache — namely, Nancy Storace’s precarious vocal condition. Judging by the Donaueschingen manuscript, she could not rely at all on the upper part of her voice and, as a matter of fact, must have had grave doubts as to how long her voice would last even in the lower registers. That is undoubtedly why the duet with Marcellina was omitted, even though Mozart first, wrote it with Marcellina carrying the top line.

All the cuts indicated in the original libretto are explainable either by Mme. Bussani’s musical incompetence or by Storace’s vocal troubles. But that was not all. Since Storace was known as a soprano, one had to protect her also by not permitting comparisons with the high notes of other sopranos. This, in my opinion, is the reason for the unusually low tessitura of all the female lines in the opera. The highest note that the Countess sings in the whole opera is an A. The runs in the trio of the second act rightfully belong to the Countess, but the one final high C is an alternate version of later vintage. It is almost unbelievable that, even in the published version, the breathlessly exciting ending of the second act is handled without the use of a single high B flat.

By dint of this sort of coöperation, cleverness, and endless patience, Mozart pulled Nancy Storace through the first performance of The Marriage of Figaro. After the première, Emperor Joseph forbade the singing of encores. This was done ostensibly because the show was too long, but it is interesting to speculate whether it might not have been done rather at the request of Nancy Storace, whose voice could not stand such prolonged activity. At any rate, the considerable success of the première must have cheered up the ailing soprano, and it is certain that she soon began to experiment with a few higher tones.

Nancy Storace participated in nine performances of The Marriage of Figaro. The month of May saw four of them, but the rest were spaced far aparton July 4, August 28, September 22, November 15, and December 18.

We can only guess as to the number of versions Mozart had to provide before coaxing Storace’s voice into a complete recovery. Transforming Susanna into the top soprano of the opera was by no means A simple task. It also meant the rewriting and restudying of large portions of the roles of the Countess and Marcellina. It is not likely that major revisions were undertaken in May while the performers were still being grooved into a smooth ensemble. On the other hand, these alterations could not have been delayed too long, for the new version had to be readied for Prague, where the work was given in December of that year.

At some point during that summer or early fall, Mozart had to prepare a completely new orchestral score incorporating all the changes. We have no direct information concerning the exact chronology of these events; but in studying Mozart’s own, carefully dated, catalogue of his compositions, we observe that he did not write a single new work between the twelfth of September and the fourth of November, 1786. This unusually long period of creative idleness seems to point to some urgent and tedious task such as writing down the new version for the Prague conductor, Strobach.

Be that as it may, Storace certainly sang her last two performances of The Marriage of Figaro as a full-fledged soprano. We know that her voice was completely restored by Christmas. On the twentysixth of December, just before she left Vienna to return to London, she appeared in one of Mozart’s “academies.” For this occasion Mozart wrote A special piece for Storace and himself which bears the dedication: dal suo servo ed amieo — “from her servant and friend.” It is a duet for soprano and piano, with orchestra, which is unique in musical literature. In the opening sentences the soprano intones the question “How can you ask me to leave and to forget you?” and one wonders how much personal meaning might be concealed behind the official poetic sentiment.

In describing this piece, the eminent Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein goes into superlatives. He CALLS it “a declaration of love in music . . . a transfiguration of a relation that could not be realized except in this ideal sphere.” In another place he says, “We have the impression that Mozart wanted to preserve the memory of this voice, no brilliant soprano and not suited to display of virtuosity, but full of warmth and tenderness; and that he wanted to leave with her in the piano part a souvenir of the taste and depth of his playing, and the depth of his feeling for her.”