Stephen Storace

Stephen John Seymour Storace (4 April 1762 – 19 March 1796)[1] was an English composer of the Classical era, known primarily for his operas.

Relatively little is known through direct records of his life, and most details are known second-hand through the memoirs of his contemporaries Michael Kelly, the actor John Bannister, and the oboist William Thomas Parke.

Mistrusting the quality of musical education available in England, Stefano Storace sent his son to Italy to study, at the Conservatorio di Sant' Onofrio, Naples.

Stephen was remembered – if at all – as an infant prodigy violinist at Vauxhall Gardens, and found it very hard to secure paying work without the cherubic charm of youth behind him, and moreover as an unknown composer.

This aria outlived the rest of Storace's output by decades, and was still being reprinted in parlour songbook anthologies for the amateur tenor a century later.

Storace was put to work producing an "English" version of André Grétry's Richard Cœur-de-Lion, with the unfortunate difficulty that John Bannister – the famous tragedian – was cast in the main role, and was tone-deaf.

Michael Kelly was now established as the audience's favourite star after Bannister, and was given a Benefit Night in 1790 – by tradition, he could choose whatever piece he believed would bring in the best receipts at the box-office.

Kelly broke with tradition and risked his income by announcing – to Sheridan's disapproval – that instead of a popular favourite, he would premiere a new afterpiece by Storace, called No song, no supper.

Nancy had appeared as a Guest Artist in The Haunted Tower – the success of No Song obliged Sheridan to take her "onto the books", and at last she secured a full-time engagement in Britain.

It seems likely that Storace had been working on an "English" version of Vicente Martín y Soler's (known as Martini) comedy Una cosa rara – an opera which had already been cited by Mozart in the final scene of Don Giovanni.

However, presumably at around the date of the No Song triumph, Storace abruptly discarded all of Martini's music in Acts II and III, and had librettist James Cobb produce an entirely new libretto, creating another "romantic" hit situated in the midst of the Ottoman-Austrian war of a few years earlier, The Siege of Belgrade (1791).

The Siege is remarkable for the extended ensemble numbers such as the Act I Trio for the Seraskier, Lilla and Ghita, "Your passions thus deceiving" – divided into allegro-andante-allegro sections.

The printed vocal score not only includes one of the famous "scenery" engravings, but cast a glove down to the King's Theatre – avoiding all euphemism the work is clearly described as "an Opera, in three acts".

The year 1792 saw Storace produce the boldest of his operatic projects, Dido, Queen of Carthage, with a libretto by Prince Hoare after Metastasio's Didone abbandonata.

The Pirates, also produced in 1792, was partly adapted from Gli Equivoci, and is remarkable as affording one of the earliest instances of the introduction of a grand finale into an English opera.

The work also introduced the public to the boy-treble star, "Master Walsh", whose coloratura talents must have been remarkable as his numbers are no less complex than Crouch's or Nancy Storace's.

In the light of the French Revolution, the work – about a faithful servant whose life is ruined by a vicious master – had gained considerable notoriety, and was produced under the title The Iron Chest, first performed on 12 March 1796.

Unfortunately we can only imagine the visual effect of numbers such as "Dicky's Walk", which must have accompanied some on-stage buffoonery of a greatly amusing nature.

Although Storace's English operas were popular in their time, their failure to endure in performance is in part due to the financial caution of his employer, Sheridan.

A legendarily shrewd man with money, Sheridan refused to allow any copies of the Storace's works to be circulated, for fear of pirate versions being performed from which no royalties would be paid.

In fact history shows that Sheridan's best attempts failed, and pirated versions of Storace's works were playing in New York by the end of the century.

In 1800, the French composer Madame Ronssecy arranged and published variations on Storace’s Lullaby (from his opera The Pirates) for harp.