Nancy Storace (27 October 1766 in London – 24 August 1817 in London), (born Anna Selina Storace) (surname pronounced Sto-rá-chay), was an English operatic soprano. The role of Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was written for and first performed by her.
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Nancy Storace was born in London, the daughter of an Italian double-bass player Stefano Storace who had emigrated in the 1740s and Elizabeth Trusler, the daughter of the proprietor of Marylebone Gardens.[1]
She studied in Venice under Antonio Sacchini. Storace became a member of the Court opera in Vienna where she notably sang in two world premieres in 1786, Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Angelica in Vicente Martín y Soler's Il burbero di buon cuore. Soon afterward she returned to England and first appeared at the King's Theatre in London in 1787. She contributed greatly to the success of her brother Stephen Storace's operas, including The Haunted Tower, and she also appeared at the Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey in 1791. She retired from the stage in 1808, and died on 24 August 1817.
While in Italy, Storace met the Irish singer Michael Kelly, who mentions her frequently in his Reminiscences. On 29 March 1784[2] she married John Abraham Fisher, an English violinist and composer many years her senior; however his violent behaviour towards her meant that they soon separated.
When she was about to leave Vienna, Mozart wrote the concert recitative and aria "Ch'io mi scordi di te? [...] Non temer, amato bene" for her. The work, which is headed "Recitativo con Rondò. Composto per la Sigra: storace / dal suo servo ed amico W: A: Mozart. / viena li 26 / di decbr: 786", is a duet for soprano and piano with orchestra which, in view of Mozart's note in his own thematic catalogue ("Scena con Rondò mit klavierSolo. für Mad:selle storace und mich."), was very likely performed by her, with Mozart himself playing the piano part, at her farewell concert on Friday, the 23rd of February 1787. Earlier Mozart had collaborated with Antonio Salieri (in whose operas Storace also performed) and an unknown composer Cornetti on a short cantata "Per la ricuperata di Ophelia", celebrating her return to the stage after an illness of several months, although this cantata is now lost.
Storace was also a friend of Joseph Haydn. She sang in his oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia in March 1784, and he later wrote a cantata "for the voice of my dear Storace", thought to be Miseri noi, H. XXIVa:.[3]
In around 1794 Storace began a long liaison with the tenor John Braham, though they never married. Their breakup 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[4], years later sought and obtained leave from Queen Victoria to change his family's name to Meadowes, 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.