Chapter Five: The Composer’s Faithful Soprano
A multi-faceted vocal personality
Chapter Six: The Prima Donna of Oratorios
Appendix: Strada’s London Season Schedules
←8 | 9→
Abbreviations
| GHM 4 | Burney, Charles, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, vol. iv (London: Payne and Son, 1789). |
| GMO | Grove Music Online, ed. Deane Root, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic. |
| HCD 2 | Burrows, Donald/Coffey, Helen/Greenacombe, John/Hicks, Anthony (eds), George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents Volume 2, 1725‒1734 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). |
| HCD 3 | ___, George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents Volume 3, 1734‒1742 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). |
←9 | 10→
←10 | 11→
Acknowledgements
I am enormously indebted to Dr Reinhard Strohm for the consistent support and encouragement he has provided in the form of advice, comments, and corrections. I am also especially grateful to Dr Ellen T. Harris, whose conclusions about Anna Maria Strada’s singing initially piqued my interest and planted the idea of this book in my mind.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to Dr Matthew Werley and Gavin Kibble for the general linguistic revisions, as well as to those musicians, whose inspirations proved essential to me.
My deepest gratitude belongs to my loved ones for their precious and indispensable aid – I am beyond words for their devotional love.
Special thanks to the Hungarian Handel Society, together with several private individuals, whose generous donations have made this publication possible.
←11 | 12→
←12 | 13→
Prelude
In the second act of Karel Čapek’s comedy, The Makropulos Case (Prague, 1922) ‒ and likewise in Leoš Janaček’s opera of the same title (Brno, 1926) ‒ Vítek, the clerk, congratulates the 337-year-old prima donna, Emilia Marty/Elina Makropulos, after her fabulous performance that night and compares her to Anna Maria Strada del Pò, referring to history books which recorded her superb vocal artistry:
Emilia: Were you in the theatre? Did you like any performance?
Vítek: I should just think I did. Why, it was as good as Strada.
Emilia: Have you heard Strada sing? Let me tell you that Strada had no voice—she just made whistling noises.
Vítek: Why, Strada died a hundred years ago.
Emilia: So much the worse. You ought to have heard her. Strada! What do you mean by talking about Strada?
Vítek: I’m sorry, madam, but I—I—of course, I’ve never heard her. Only according to what the history books say—
Emilia: Let me tell you that the history-books are full of lies. I’ll tell you something: Strada made whistling noises and Corrona had a plum in her throat. Agujari was a goose and Faustina breathed like a pair of bellows. So much for your history-books.1
Emilia denigrates Strada’s voice, together that of two other singers in Janaček’s opera, and three additional ones from Čapek’s original play: Corona Schröter, a Kammersängerin in Weimar during the time of Goethe and Schiller, whose strength lay in her pure vocal sound; Lucrezia Agujari, who according to Leopold Mozart possessed an extraordinary agility and a range of three and a half octaves up to c′′′′ (and as testified by Fanny Burney had a beautiful voice with mellowness and sweetness); and the mezzo-soprano Faustina Bordoni, the most celebrated female singer of the Baroque era, with a big and penetrating voice.2 Thus, Emilia’s mockeries address these singers’ main vocal characteristics, by asserting their opposites.
←13 | 14→
Among George Frideric Handel’s leading singers, Strada was the soprano with whom he had the longest period of continuous collaboration (1729‒1737) as well as the one who ʻseems to have pleased him most’.3 Charles Burney considered her an artist formed by the composer himself.4 I have chosen to investigate her vocal activities in connection with the music written for her not only by Handel, but also by Antonio Vivaldi, Leonardo Leo, Leonardo Vinci, Domenico Sarro, and others. Until now, this singer has yet to be the subject of study, either in Handel research or in the studies on eighteenth-century vocality. Aside from the scarcity of contemporary descriptions of her singing and private life, the scholarly neglect is mainly due to the popularity of her star-contemporaries, such as Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, as well as the castrati such as Senesino, Farinelli, and Carestini. Nevertheless, very important remarks were made about her singing, for example, by Ellen T. Harris, Reinhard Strohm, Rodolfo Celletti, Winton Dean, J. Merrill Knapp, Panja Mücke, and Donald Burrows. As suggested by her reference in The Makropulos Case, however, Strada must have still been remembered as a great musician with a strong vocal production as late as the nineteenth century. That Čapek as playwright of the Vinohrady Theatre chose Strada’s art to make a compliment to a 337-year-old singer, who in her career brought every segment of her art to perfection, refers to her long-lasting and wide-spread appreciation within professional circles.
The
