I am delighted to welcome Elaine back to All Things Georgian who previously wrote about Marylebone Gardens and the Trusler Family and today’s article is a follow on from that, so enjoy:
Ann Selina Storace, known as Nancy Storace, was one of the most famous opera singers of her time. She was born in London in 1765. Her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of John Trusler, a pastry cook who ran the pleasure gardens at Marylebone. Nancy’s father, Stefano Storace, was an Italian musician, a double bass player who performed in the orchestra of the King’s Theatre and acted as director of music at Marylebone during the summer months.
Storace married Elizabeth Trusler in 1761. Their two children, Stephen and Nancy, were both precociously talented musicians. Stephen, an aspiring composer, was sent to Naples as a boy, to study at the San Onofrio conservatory, where his father had trained in his own youth. Nancy made her first public appearance in 1773 at the age of seven, singing in a concert at ‘Mr Martin’s Long Rooms’ in Southampton. The next year, she made her London debut in a concert held at the Haymarket Theatre.
In 1778, Nancy and her parents travelled to Italy, to join Stephen in Naples. She made her operatic debut in Florence in 1779 and spent the next three years singing in opera houses across Italy. It quickly became clear that comic opera (known as opera buffa in Italy) was her forte – she was a good actress with a fine soprano voice and a lively stage presence. In 1783 she was invited to Vienna to join a new Italian opera buffa troupe that was being created at the court of the Emperor Joseph II.
Vienna was a vibrant cultural centre: Salieri had moved there from his native Italy in 1766, while Mozart was a more recent arrival. Musicians from all over Europe were drawn to the city. Nancy quickly became a celebrity: the leading opera composers of the day – Paisiello, Martin y Soler, Salieri and Sarti – wrote parts specially for her. Most importantly, she created the role of the vivacious maidservant Susanna in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
Nancy’s stage career was flourishing, but she was less lucky in her personal life. In March 1784, she married the English violinist and composer John Abraham Fisher, a widower twice her age, who was resident in Vienna. The marriage surprised her friends, who found it inexplicable. She may have been looking for a father figure: Stefano Storace had died around 1781.
Nancy regretted the rash marriage almost immediately. Fisher was an unpleasant character who was unkind to her, and there were persistent rumours that he beat her. The Emperor – who admired Nancy as a singer – was so concerned for her safety that he banished Fisher from Austria. Nancy had a daughter as a result of the brief marriage, but the child died when only a few weeks old.
Nancy left Vienna in 1786 to return to England. Mozart, who had become a friend, composed an aria for her farewell concert. Nancy is popularly supposed to have been Mozart’s mistress – romantic novels have been written about their supposed affair – but there is no real evidence that she was anything more to the composer than a friend and a musical inspiration.
By 1790, Stephen and Nancy Storace were working together at Drury Lane. Stephen was composing light operas in the English language, which appealed to the London audiences. His first work for Drury Lane, The Haunted Tower, caused a sensation and sold out for fifty nights running. Nancy took the leading roles in her brother’s operas, cementing both her popularity and her finances – she was highly paid, earning ten guineas a night.
In 1796, Nancy’s personal life took a turn for the better when she met a young tenor, John Braham. Braham’s precise origins remain obscure, although it seems most likely that he was born around 1774 into a Jewish family in London. As a boy, he sang in the choir of the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place. He was trained by the Jewish tenor Leoni, and later by the castrato Rauzzini.
Stephen Storace was impressed by Braham’s voice and offered him the lead role in his new opera, Mahmoud, singing alongside Nancy. Braham was an instant success with both audience and critics, but the occasion was also a tragic one, as the premiere, in April 1796, took place just a month after Stephen’s sudden death from a fever at the age of thirty-three. He had left Mahmoud unfinished. Nancy and a friend, the tenor Michael Kelly, oversaw the completion of the work. It must have been an emotional and difficult time for her.
Braham and Nancy quickly became both singing partners and lovers. In 1797, the couple left Britain for the continent. They spent nearly a year in Paris, where they performed for the Empress Josephine and met Napoleon’s brother Jerome, then moved on to northern Italy, where they spent three years touring, singing in all the major opera houses. In 1801, they returned to England.
Both singers were at the peak of their powers, and at the top of their profession. Their personal life was happy, and although Braham encountered some prejudice – the essayist Charles Lamb habitually referred to him as ‘the little Jew’ – they were accepted in high society. Their friends included the Duke of Sussex (a brother of the Prince of Wales), the architect Sir John Soane, Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Their son, Spencer, was born in May 1802 – he took his father’s surname.
Was this a ‘happy ever after’ ending for Nancy? Sadly not. Her voice roughened in the early 1800s – perhaps the long-term consequence of singing professionally from a very early age. She had always been a little plump, but she had grown stouter over the years, and the newspapers commented unkindly on her appearance; the Examiner described her as an ‘unwieldy matron’. She left the stage in 1808.
After her retirement, Nancy’s relationship with Braham deteriorated. Although Fisher had died in 1806, leaving her free, they had not married and Braham, nearly a decade younger than Nancy, appears to have had some sort of mid-life crisis as he turned forty. In 1815 he ran off with Sophie Wright, the wife of a friend. The relationship did not last long, but Mr Wright took Braham to court, and in July 1816 was awarded £1,000 damages.
Just four months after this public scandal, Braham married a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Frances Bolton. Nancy was devastated. It was a sad and humiliating end to a twenty-year relationship. Sir John Soane, a good friend to Nancy, mediated between them in the ensuing bitter disputes over their properties.
Braham continued to move in high society. The scandals in his private life were soon forgotten as he settled down with his young wife. The couple had three sons and three daughters, one of whom, as Lady Waldegrave, became a well-known Victorian political hostess. John Braham sang professionally into his eighties, and is remembered as a great tenor, and the first English male singer to gain international fame.
Nancy lived for less than a year after Braham’s marriage. In the summer of 1817 she had two strokes and died on 24 August at the age of fifty-two. It must have been a sudden collapse, as the only will that could be found after her death was twenty years old, and did not mention her son Spencer, who had not been born when it had been drawn up. It did however include a large bequest of £2,000 to Braham, who transferred the inheritance to Spencer.
Spencer Braham – who changed his surname to Meadows in later life – became an Anglican clergyman, and a minor canon of Canterbury Cathedral. He had been fifteen when his parents had parted, and he maintained that his mother had died of a broken heart after Braham’s desertion. It was undoubtedly a traumatic event but should not overshadow the fact that Nancy Storace was a strong woman who had carved out a career for herself, earned her own fortune, and whose talents and character were admired by composers of the stature of Mozart and Haydn.
Sources
Jane Girdham ‘The Last of the Storaces’ Musical Times, vol 129, January 1988
Michael Kelly, Reminiscences, 1826
Philip H. Highfill Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A biographical dictionary of actors, actresses, musicians, dancers, managers & other stage personnel in London, 1660-1800, vols 2 and 14.
Betty Matthews, ‘The Childhood of Nancy Storace’, The Musical Times, vol 110, July 1969
Betty Matthews, ‘Nancy Storace and the Royal Society of Musicians’, The Musical Times, vol 128, June 1987
Mollie Sands, ‘John Braham, Singer’, Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England), vol 20, 1959-61
National Archives, PROB 11/1597/149 (will of Nancy Storace)
The Examiner
Hampshire Chronicle
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