Nancy Storace: The Voice Mozart Wrote For
At ten years old, in Florence, Nancy Storace reportedly outsang the castrato Luigi Marchesi so thoroughly that she was asked to leave the production. It was the first sign of a career built less on vocal purity than on nerve, wit, and an uncanny gift for making an audience love her — qualities that, a decade later, would lead Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to build one of opera's great comic roles around her voice and nobody else's.
A Child on the Stage
Ann Selina "Nancy" Storace was born in London on 27 October 1765, the daughter of Stefano Storace, an Italian double-bass player who had settled in England, and Elizabeth Trusler, whose family ran the Marylebone Gardens pleasure resort. Her elder brother, Stephen, would become a celebrated composer in his own right, and the two remained artistic collaborators and confidants for life. Nancy was performing publicly by the age of seven, made her London debut at the Haymarket Theatre in 1774, and studied voice under the star castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, making her professional stage debut in his opera *L'ali d'amore* in 1776, not yet eleven years old. She then went to Italy for further training under the composer Antonio Sacchini, working her way through Florence, Naples, and other Italian houses, building a reputation as a natural comedienne whose voice, by her own contemporaries' account, was never quite beautiful — it reportedly carried "a sort of twang" — but whose vivacity on stage made audiences forget the fact.
Vienna and the Making of Susanna
In 1782, Emperor Joseph II recruited Storace, then only sixteen, for the Italian opera buffa troupe he was assembling in Vienna, and it was there that her career reached its height. Over the next several years she was welded, alongside singers like the tenor Michael Kelly, into what contemporaries called the finest opera buffa ensemble in Europe, taking parts that ranged from the Countess in Salieri's *La scuola de' gelosi* to Angelica in Martín y Soler's *Il burbero di buon cuore* — roughly twenty operas across her Vienna years. Her personal life was harder: in March 1784 she married the English violinist-composer John Abraham Fisher, a man forty years old to her eighteen, in a union that quickly turned abusive. Their infant daughter, born in January 1785, died within six months, and the Emperor himself eventually intervened to order Fisher out of Vienna.
It was against this backdrop that Mozart, who had grown close to both Storace siblings — chamber evenings at the Storace house reportedly saw Mozart on viola, Haydn and Dittersdorf on violins, and Vanhal on cello — composed *Le nozze di Figaro* with Storace's specific voice and stagecraft in mind. When the opera premiered on 1 May 1786, she created the role of Susanna, and by every account that has survived, the character's gaiety, quick wit, and refusal to be cowed were not incidental to Storace's own personality; they were drawn from it. Contemporary sources go further, noting that a catastrophic loss of voice she suffered a year earlier, during a performance of her brother's opera *Gli sposi malcontenti* in June 1785 — an episode that kept her offstage for five months and from which she never fully recovered vocal power — meant that Mozart and Salieri were, by 1786, already writing passages lower and lighter to accommodate a singer whose instrument was fading even as her stagecraft was not.
Mozart's Farewell Gift
When Storace prepared to leave Vienna for London in February 1787, Mozart marked the occasion by composing the concert scena "Ch'io mi scordi di te? ... Non temer, amato bene" for her farewell concert, a work unusual for placing an obbligato piano part — which Mozart himself played — alongside the soprano, a gesture of collaboration rather than mere accompaniment. Later biographers, including the historian Piero Melograni, have floated the possibility of a romantic attachment between the two, though nothing in the surviving record confirms it, and most scholars treat the piece as evidence of a deep professional friendship rather than an affair. What is not in dispute is that Storace was, in the assessment of music historians, probably the first performer to bring Mozart's music before English audiences, carrying his reputation across the Channel years before it was secure there.
Return to London
Back in England from 1787, Storace became a fixture at the King's Theatre and a central figure in her brother Stephen's own operatic ventures, including *The Haunted Tower* and *The Siege of Belgrade*, effectively becoming his leading interpreter until his early death in 1796. She sang at the 1791 Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey and, when Haydn arrived in London that same year, resumed her old Vienna friendship with him, appearing across several seasons of Johann Peter Salomon's concert series that showcased his new symphonies. Her personal life settled, unconventionally for the period, into a long domestic partnership with the tenor John Braham, begun around 1796 and lasting until an acrimonious separation in 1815; the couple had a son, William Spencer Harris Braham, born in 1802, who later became an Anglican clergyman. Storace retired from the stage by 1808.
Why Nancy Is Called a Genius
"Genius" is not the word her own era reached for first — that word attached more readily to Mozart, who wrote for her, than to Storace herself. What the sources support is narrower and more interesting: a performer's genius, located in stagecraft rather than pure vocal instrument. Her voice, by contemporaries' own account, was imperfect and grew more limited after her 1785 collapse; what carried her — and what carried Susanna into being one of opera's most fully realized comic heroines — was a theatrical intelligence: comic timing, physical wit, and an ability to inhabit a character so persuasively that a composer of Mozart's stature shaped a role's psychology around her personal temperament rather than the reverse. That is a real and specific skill, closer to what we would now call actorly genius than to vocal genius, and it is worth being honest that it is a different claim than "great singer." The counter-case is equally clear from the record: she was, by her era's own critics, not the finest voice in Vienna, and her reputation rested on charisma and craft compensating for vocal limitation rather than transcending it.
Legacy
Storace died on 24 August 1817, having styled herself a "spinster" in her will despite her legal status as Fisher's widow, and left an estate of some £50,000 to her family. She was buried at St Mary-at-Lambeth, now London's Garden Museum, where a plaque still marks her grave. Her lasting claim on musical history is singular and secure: she is remembered, before anything else, as Mozart's first Susanna, the performer whose particular gifts helped fix the shape of one of opera's most enduring characters.
