🇵🇹 Luísa Todi

She was born Luísa Rosa de Aguiar on 9 January 1753 in Setúbal, a fishing and salt port south of Lisbon. Her family was of modest means; in 1765 they moved to Lisbon, where her father found work connected to the Theatre of Bairro Alto. The capital had at that time essentially a single theatre, the Teatro da Rua dos Condes, and it was there, around 1767 or 1768, that the teenage Luísa first appeared on stage — as an actress, in a Portuguese production of Molière's Tartuffe.

In 1769 she married Francesco Saverio Todi, an Italian violinist working in Lisbon. It was on his advice that she turned seriously to singing, taking lessons from Davide Perez, the Italian composer who served as music master of the Portuguese Royal Chapel. In 1770 she made her debut as a singer in Giuseppe Scolari's comic opera Il Viaggiatore Ridicolo at the Theatre of Bairro Alto. The instrument was extraordinary — a mezzo-soprano of unusual range, power and dramatic expressiveness.

Her international career began in the winter of 1777, when, aged twenty-four, she sang at the King's Theatre in London. The following year she appeared at the celebrated Concerts Spirituels in Paris and caused a sensation, hailed as the finest foreign singer France had ever heard. She became a central figure in one of the great musical rivalries of the age, set against the soprano Gertrud Elisabeth Mara — Paris divided into "Todistes" and "Maratistes," much as it had once divided over Gluck and Piccinni.

In 1784 she travelled with her husband and children to Russia, arriving in St Petersburg that June. Catherine the Great was so taken with her that, after one concert, the Empress presented her with two diamond bracelets — the first of a stream of jewels of, as contemporaries put it, incalculable value. Todi stayed four years in Russia, serving as singing teacher to the royal princesses and a fixture of the imperial court.

Leaving Russia in 1788, she embarked in 1790 on a triumphant tour through the German lands. In Bonn she performed before the young Ludwig van Beethoven. That same year came the Venetian season of 1790–1791 that the city named after her — "l'anno della Todi" — the high point of a career that had already gathered every honour the eighteenth-century operatic world could offer.

Todi's art belonged to the world of opera seria and the grand concert, sung before kings, empresses and the most demanding audiences of the Enlightenment. Composers wrote for her; theorists analysed her phrasing. Antoine Reicha, in his Traité de mélodie, immortalised her with the phrase that she was "the Singer of all Centuries" — a remarkable verdict on a performer from a country then considered peripheral to European musical life.

Her later years were marked by hardship. Her eyesight had long troubled her, and by 1823 she had become completely blind. She had also outlived her husband and several of her children. She lived quietly, far from the courts that had once showered her with diamonds.

Luísa Todi died on 1 October 1833 in Lisbon, after suffering a stroke the previous July, at the age of eighty. She remains the first Portuguese performer to achieve genuine pan-European stardom — a singer whose name, in her lifetime, could name an entire opera season in Venice, and whose career proved that a voice from Setúbal could command the great stages of the world.