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The Operas of Stephen Storace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1959

Roger Fiske
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Extract

It is almost a tradition that Musica Britannica editors come before you to tell you of the music they have unearthed. But tonight I shall not talk to you about No Song, No Supper as it has already had three broadcasts and for some of you may have lost its novelty. It is the only English opera by Storace that survives in full score, but delightful though it is, it is not really typical of Storace's work as a whole. So I propose to limit myself to Storace's full-length operas (No Song is a short opera, an afterpiece), and I hope to show you that he aimed to write a type of opera much more akin to Il Seraglio than to any ballad opera, that he introduced the Viennese classical style into our theatres, that he introduced the ensemble with action and the extended finale into our operas, and that he had more sense of the theatre than any other English opera composer of the eighteenth century.

Type
Articles
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 86 , 1959 , pp. 29 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1959

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References

1 This date is given in all reference books. After I had read this paper, Mr. R. A. Lynex informed me that he had found Storace's name in the register of baptisms at St. James's, Westminster, and that he was born on 4th April, 1762. He has kindly allowed me to publish this discovery. It does not alter Storace's age at death.Google Scholar

2 Letter preserved in the Sir John Soane Museum, Lincoln's Inn Fields.Google Scholar

3 Mr. Lynex has discovered that she was born on 27th October, 1765, and not in 1766, the date given in all reference books. Thus she was probably a year older than I have indicated in what follows.Google Scholar

4 Reminiscences of Michael Kelly, dictated to Theodore Hook, 2 vols., London, 1826, I. 243–4.Google Scholar

5 The author would like to thank Mr. H. C. Robbins Landon for this information.Google Scholar

6 Mozart in Retrospect, London, 1955, p. 224.Google Scholar

7 British Museum, shelf-mark 2306. c. 15.Google Scholar