page_title: Nancy Storace
section_title: England
hierarchical_section_title: Nancy Storace / England
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Nancy Storace, opera singer
context_page_description: Anna Selina Storace, known as Nancy Storace, was an English operatic soprano. The role of Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was written for and first performed by her.
  Born in London, her singing career as a child prodigy began in England by the age of 12. This led to further study in Italy and to a successful singing career there during the late 1770s. While in Monza in 1782, she was recruited to form part of Emperor Joseph II's new Italian opera company in Vienna, where the assembled singers who joined her "created in the two years leading up to the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, were welded into the finest buffa ensemble anywhere."
  In Vienna, she befriended both Mozart and Joseph Haydn. A sudden failure of her voice in 1785 caused her to withdraw from the stage for five months; though her career continued to be successful, she never fully recovered her former vocal prowess. After marrying in 1784, she left Vienna in 1787 and returned to London where she continued her career, notably singing in her brother Stephen Storace's operas. She remained in London, and by 1808, had retired from the stage. She died in 1817.
context_section_description: In 1787 she returned to England where she first appeared at the King's Theatre in London that year. In fact, she hoped to return to Vienna for the 1788 Easter season, but the Emperor's opera budget would no longer permit it, as he had embarked on an expensive war with Turkey.
  She contributed greatly to the success of her brother Stephen Storace's operas, including The Haunted Tower and The Siege of Belgrade, and she also appeared at the Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1791 and numerous concerts.
  In 1791, Joseph Haydn arrived in London on the first of his two visits there, during which he achieved wealth and fame and for which composed his twelve London symphonies. Storace resumed her friendship and collaboration with Haydn at this time. She appeared in the first two of the Salomon concerts that featured Haydn's music. She also sang in the ninth and eleventh concerts as well as in the benefit concert for Haydn, and in the concert that celebrated the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Haydn by the University of Oxford. She also performed in concerts with Haydn during his second visit in 1794/1795.
  In around 1796 Storace began a long liaison with the tenor John Braham, though they never married. Their break-up in 1815 was acrimonious and may have contributed to Storace's sudden death the following year; at any rate their son, William Spencer Harris Braham, certainly believed it had. Spencer, who had become an Anglican clergyman and a minor canon of Canterbury Cathedral, years later sought and obtained leave from Queen Victoria to change his family's name to Meadows, his petition having been received on the ground that his wife was the sole heir of her maternal grandfather of that name. In his mother's will, bequeathing property to the amount of £50,000, she styled herself a "spinster", though legally speaking she died a widow, predeceasing her widowed mother.
caption: Nancy Storace, c. 1790, by Benjamin van der Gucht (1753–1794)
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