Women's shoes in the 18th century were made for both fashion and function. Working class women had to wear shoes that were more durable as well as comfortable because of the amount of time each day that was spent on their feet. For the noble and/or wealthy woman, shoes were as much of a fashion statement as any other aspect of their clothing, and were not primarily for function or comfort as much as aesthetics. Dancing shoes, of course, had to be comfortable as well as fashionable.
Women’s shoes in the 18th Century were divided into three categories: mules, or backless slippers, shoes, or closed foot gear, and pattens, outdoor shoe coverings which protected delicately made shoes. They had sharply pointed toes and high curved heels. Buckles were also a central attraction on women’s shoes. They were almost unchanging in shape (only narrowing the curved heels) from 1700 to 1780, when shoes took a dive to low heeled slippers. By the late 1790’s, heels disappeared entirely and the soft, flat, square toed slipper which dominated the next 50 years of women’s shoes had appeared.
There are several scenes in So Faithful a Heart where social dancing takes center stage. Both Mozart and Nancy Storace were known as excellent dancers and were often seen at the balls and dances which were held in Vienna's many dance halls and court ballrooms.
"In the late eighteenth century there was a departure from the complicated and often technically difficult danses à deux and a movement toward larger group dances, specifically figure dances called contredanses (also spelled contredances). Usually, but not always, these dances were designed for four couples facing in a square. Feuillet notation, which so beautifully aided dancers in learning the early Baroque dance repertory, was not efficient for notating the larger group dances.
Execution of the contredanse (known throughout France as the contredanse francaise) involved dancing a specific sequence of figures. Additional figures, called changes, usually twelve in number, alternated with the main figure of the dance--and the dance concluded when all the changes had been performed. These figure dances, called cotillon in England and the United States, were often performed with two- or four-bar step combinations, as were contredanses.
When Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris as queen to Louis XIV in 1774, she brought Viennese dances, including the contredanse allemande. It was performed in much the same manner as the contredanse francaise, except that at least one figure required partners to turn while changing arm positions. Both forms of contredanse were performed in France until the Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century (1789-1799)."
The following is a dance sequence taken from Chapter 13 of So Faithful a Heart.
When they arrived at the palace, they were announced as they entered the ballroom, and greeted by the Emperor and his guests of honor. Mozart puffed up with pride as His Majesty complemented both of them, once again, on the successful opening of Figaro, and then he escorted his lovely Susanna to the middle of the floor to begin the allemande.
The ballroom at Laxenburg was decorated in typical ornate Baroque fashion, the walls lined with white Corinthian columns sporting gold sconces with heavy lead crystals hanging from each globe. The wall panels were ornately gilded on the edges and painted with lush, pastoral scenes in soft pastels, of lovely young men and women dancing and playing flutes and guitars. The ceilings were frescoed with pastel pink and blue skies and puffy white clouds with fat cherubs perched upon them, peering down to gaze upon the dancers on the floor below. Two enormous and ornate crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings, illuminating the entire room with the bright but soft glow of the hundreds of candles contained in each of them.
All eyes were on Mozart and his pretty partner as they bowed and curtseyed to each another, and began to dance. As they fell into two lines, the ladies on one side and the gentlemen on the other, they turned shoulder to shoulder and stepped forward in sync several steps, before facing one another as the gentlemen took their partners by the hand and twirled them gracefully until they ended up on the opposite side. Then they all stepped to one side, the gentlemen to the right and the ladies to the left and, extending their hands across the divide, they took the hand of the lady or gentleman in front of them and made a skip-hop step to the right. Then the left-over lady and gentleman on the opposite ends skipped into the divide and took one another’s hands and faced forward to promenade down the middle of the two lines, each couple following suit until they were back in their original places with their original partners. Each time Nancy returned to Mozart, she beamed with delight.
Dance scenes from the 2005 film, Pride and Prejudice.
The Teatro San Samuele, Venice was one of opera 's most prestigious among those active in the canal city (seven in all), during the eighteenth century . It was built in 1656 on commission from the Grimani family and was primarily intended for dramatic productions, and later, during the following century, operas and ballet.
Destroyed by fire in September 1747, it was rebuilt by the Grimani family who moved serious opera productions to the new and more elegant Teatro San Benedetto (St. Benét), and reserved the San Samuele stage for the productions of the new, and more fashionable opera buffa (Italian comic opera). The theater was rebuilt in record time and reopened in May of 1748. The stages were reduced from six to five orders but the original structure remained unchanged.
In the fall of 1782, Nancy Storace arrived in Venice, where she performed primarily in opera buffa productions on the San Samuele stage. It was while she was engaged there, that she was discovered by an emissary of His Majesty, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, and was hired as the prima buffa (first comedienne), of the Hofburg Theater stage (The Burgtheater), in Vienna. Nancy's last appearance in Venice was in Antonio Salieri's La scuola de'golsi, in which she appeared as the Contessa, during Carnival of 1783. It was shortly after, that she arrived in Vienna, and premiered on the Burgtheater stage in another production of Salieri's La scuola de'golsi, directed by Salieri, himself. By this point she was regarded as the most popular and highest-paid performer of her kind in all of Europe.
The following is a list of productions in which Nancy starred during tenure at Teatro San Samuele.
La pescatrice fedele by Pasquale Anfossi at Teatro San Samuele, Venice during Winter 1782-Spring 1783 I puntighi by Felice Alessandri at Teatro San Samuele, Venice during Winter 1782-Spring 1783 Il filosofo immaginari by Giovanni Paisiello at Teatro San Samuele, Venice during Winter 1782-Spring 1783 Le vendemie by Giuseppi Gazzaniga at Teatro San Samuele, Venice during Winter 1782-Spring 1783 La scuola de'golsi by Antonio Salieri, starring as La Contessa at Teatro San Samuele, Venice during Carnival 1783
Ah sia gia de' miei sospiri - La scuola de' gelosi - By Antonio Salieri, Sung by Mezzo Soprano, Cecilia Bartoli
In one very tender scene from So Faithful a Heart, Nancy's brother walks in on her to find her playing her guitar and singing a very popular tune of the time. It was composed in 1780 by Jean Paul Égide Martini, (with whom Mozart studied for a short time when he was 14 years old while he and his father were touring in Italy), entitled Plasir d'amour (The Joys of Love). In the 20th century it was recorded by several pop ballad artists including Joan Baez in 1961, and Nana Mouskouri in 1997.
I listened to several recordings of the piece and I was never able to find one that I liked altogether, so I settled on the Mouskouri recording, which incorporates a more modern orchestration, but captures the mood and the spirit of the piece better than any other recording I could find. She sings it in the original French, so I have provided the English translation below.
The pleasure of love lasts only a moment
The pain of love lasts a lifetime.
I gave up everything for ungrateful Sylvia,
She is leaving me for another lover.
The pleasure of love lasts only a moment,
The pain of love lasts a lifetime.
"As long as this water will run gently
Towards this brook which borders the meadow,
I will love you", Sylvia told me repeatedly.
The water still runs, but she has changed.
The pleasure of love lasts only a moment,
The pain of love lasts a lifetime.
Both Nancy and Stephen found temporary work at the King's Theatre in London, but they found the atmosphere there inhospitable to them due to a group of native Italian musicians who were already well-established there. Nancy had returned to London with what she believed to be a secure agreement with Emperor Joseph to return to Vienna for the 1788/89 season, with the opportunity, perhaps, to extend her contract there for another four years. However, due to the escalations with Austria's war with Turkey, the contract fell through over a cut in her salary. She was offered half the salary she had been making when she left Vienna, so she politely refused. They both finally moved in 1789 to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which at this time was under the management of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They were also heavily involved in working towards a commission for Mozart to come to London to compose and direct some Italian comic operas, as Mozart had expressed a strong desire to come with them to England when they returned in early 1787. His plans to return with them were thwarted, however, due to a series of tragic and unfortunate events, including the death of one child, as well as his father's refusal to care for his older, remaining son, Karl. And although they were eventually successful in obtaining a commission for Mozart, which was delivered to him in late 1790, he was unable to accept it. He died only a year later.
Stephen found his first big success at Drury Lane with an operetta (in the style of the German Singspieler with music and spoken dialouge), in the new "romantic" style of ghost-stories, gothic horror, and romance entitled, The Haunted Tower. It was a box-office sensation, selling-out for 50 nights in succession. No little part of the success was the performance of Michael Kelly in the male lead role. Up to this time, high notes in the male parts in the theatre had been crooned falsetto by performers who were more actors than singers. Kelly's aria to the ghost of the Haunted Tower - "Spirit Of My Sainted Sire!" included a top Bb which he took in full voice in the Italian style, and proved such a success that at most performances it was encored in full. 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.
His next big success was with another operetta entitled No Song, no supper, which again, starred the Irish tenor, Michael Kelly, along with his sister, Nancy. No song became even more successful than The Haunted Tower, outselling it by almost double, and was the opera that closed both the careers of Michael Kelly and Nancy Storace on the same night in 1808.
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. This was the only all-sung opera Storace produced in English - all his other works had spoken dialogue between the musical numbers. His sister regarded it as Stephen's finest work. However, for whatever reason, the piece proved unpopular with the public, and was withdrawn after a short run. The music was not thought worth printing commercially, with the result that not a note of this opera now survives, nor were any solo numbers from it printed separately.
Storace's final work was Mahmoud, Prince of Persia, but he never saw the premiere. He caught cold at rehearsals for "The Iron Chest", and died on the 15th or 16th of March 1796. Nancy Storace organised that the unfinished work was completed (Kelly claims to have had a hand in doing so, but it is more likely that he paid other hands to do it, since he freely admitted he couldn't read the bass clef. Most likely the work was finished and orchestrated by the Orchestra Leader, John Shaw, who was Kelly's collaborator on all his later projects). The work was given as a Benefit Performance for Storace's widow. "Mahmoud" survives, but it is clear that the completed version was very makeshift.
Although Storace's works 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. However, it is assumed that the carefully-guarded scores and parts perished in the Drury Lane Theatre Fire. Only one opera survives complete in score and parts - "No Song, No Supper" (published in Musica Britannica editions, edited by Roger Fiske). The other works survive only in piano + voice vocal scores issued by Storace's publishers, Longman & Broderip. (A number of these scores were reprinted by Kalmus Edition in the 1970s in the USA, but all have been deleted and no details are available from Kalmus). The surviving vocal scores have clearly been prepared by an expert hand, and are extensively "cued" with the orchestral parts in smaller notes - it seems possible that Storace himself, or one of his closer assistants, must have prepared these vocal scores. There are, to date, no commercially-available recordings of any of Storace's operas. Storace is not known to have written any exclusively instrumental music, other than the overtures for his operas.
The character of Storace's music is preeminently English; but his early intercourse with Mozart gave him an immense advantage over his contemporaries in his management of the orchestra, while for the excellence of his writing for the voice he was no doubt indebted to the vocalization of his sister Ann (Nancy) Storace.
It is because of the works of Stephen Storace that we have what is known today as the Broadway Musical, for as the German Singspieler, made popular by Storace in England, gave way to the English operetta, greatly popularized by the late 19th century team of Gilbert & Sullivan, it made it's way to the United States, primarily to the New York Theater district where it evolved into the Broadway musical style.
The following is a soprano/tenor duet composed by Stephen Storace, most likely sung by his sister Nancy, and the Irish tenor Michael Kelly.
There were very few, if any men in Nancy's life with whom she was more close than with her brother, Stephen. Stephen was born in London in the parish of St. Marylebone on April 4th, 1762. His father, Stephano, who met the Mozarts when they traveled to England in 1764-65, was impressed with the manner in which Leopold Mozart was educating his two young musical prodigies, Wolfgang and Nannerl, and decided to educate Stephen (and later Nancy), in the same manner. He gave Stephen instruction in the violin, harmony, composition, and keyboard and then later, as he mistrusted the quality of musical instruction available in London, he sent Stephen to Naples, to study at his alma mater, the Conservatorio di Sant' Onofrio when Stephen was around twelve years old. While in Naples, Stephen met the Welsh artist/painter, Thomas Jones and neglected his musical studies to go on several expeditions with him throughout Italy. While traveling with Jones, Stephen got himself into some mischief that prompted Stephano to make the decision to travel back to Italy, along with then twelve-year-old Nancy (who was already an up-and-coming starlet on the musical stage), and his wife Elizabeth. He hoped to launch Nancy's stage career as well as bring his son back into line. It was while the entire Storace family was in Italy (sometime in 1780 or 1781), that Stephano Storace passed away and was buried in his hometown of Naples. Some months later, Stephen decided to return to England (most likely to settle his father's affairs there and perhaps to escape the nagging of his mother), and left his sister, Nancy, and mother in Italy to continue the promotion of Nancy's stage career.
In the fall of 1783, Nancy was summoned to Vienna, the capital of Austria, and the seat of the then Holy Roman Empire, by Emperor Joseph II, to serve as the prima buffa (first comedienne), of His Majesty's newly-formed Italian Opera company. Nancy arrived in Vienna with her mother, Elizabeth, in January of 1784 and was an immediate success. However, she ran into some personal turmoil when Elizabeth (most likely prompted by her desire to return home to England), arranged a marriage between Nancy and the English violinist/composer, John Abraham Fisher, who was in Vienna on sabbatical from Oxford University. Fisher was monstrously cruel to Nancy and beat her mercilessly, prompting the Emperor to banish Fisher from the city. Fisher left Vienna and returned to England sometime in the early fall of 1784 and Stephen, prompted by a commission from the Emperor for an opera in Italian (most likely obtained by Nancy), came to Vienna sometime in December of that same year. It was during this time that he may have begun to study with Mozart, who became a great influence on his musical composition, as well as a good friend, from that point on.
(The following is a large section that I rewrote and edited extensively for the Wikipedia article on Stephen Storace.)
Stephen produced his first opera, Gli Sposi malcontenti, at Vienna, on 1 June, 1785. The premiere, however, was marred by further scandal involving his sister, who was singing the prima buffa role - she collapsed on-stage in mid-aria, causing the performance to be abandoned. Nancy was pregnant during the premiere of the opera and gave birth to a baby girl a few weeks later. The child was given to a foundling home by Elizabeth Storace, who claimed that it belonged to Nancy's estranged husband, John Fisher, who had been banished by the Emperor some months earlier for beating Nancy. Elizabeth Storace claimed that they didn't care if the child lived or died. The child died in the foundling home a month after she was born. Nancy's return to the stage four months later, was marked by the performance of the Cantata per la ricuperata di Ophelia, composed specially for the occasion by a trio of composers - Mozart, Salieri, and the unknown "Cornetti" (which may have been a pen-name for Stephen). Sadly this rare example of a Mozart-Salieri collaboration has been entirely lost. In Vienna, the Storaces made the acquaintance of Mozart, in whose Le nozze di Figaro Nancy sang Susanna at the premiere, and Kelly sang Don Curzio. The "English circle" in Vienna also included the composer Thomas Attwood. In Vienna Stephen produced a second opera, Gli equivoci, founded on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
There is no clear explanation why the Storaces abandoned Vienna at the height of their success there. The reasons are suggested to be more personal than professional. Certainly the Emperor spoke of her with great admiration, even using her abilities as an arbitrary unit of currency - "I'd not give you a Storace for it!". Quite possibly Nancy was under pressure from Elizabeth, who was not at all happy in Vienna, and wished to return to England with both of her children in tow. Nancy left Vienna in February of 1787, along with her "entourage" of Michael Kelly, her brother, and Thomas Attwood. Buoyed-up by their success on the Viennese stage, the coach-party which left for London could not have imagined they would find themselves rejected and unwanted in there, where their names were quite forgotten after such a long absence. 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.
The following, from Stephen's opera The Doctor and the Apothecary, was composed for Nancy in the spring of 1787, shortly after their return from Vienna to London. It clearly shows a strong Mozart influence.
