Anna Maria Strada, Prima Donna of G. F. Handel

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.

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 librettist Paolo Rolli remarked that Strada had a penetrating and delightful voice and stated that Handel thought ‘she sings better than the two previous ones’, meaning that the special skills of the two former divas, Francesca Cuzzoni’s expressiveness and Faustina Bordoni’s dramatism and vocal agility, became united in her voice.⁵ The musical material written for Strada shows an increase in lyric movements connected with demanding coloratura and a weightier dramatism. This indicates an exceptional vocal production entirely di petto ‒ as described by Pier Francesco Tosi and Giambattista Mancini,⁶ the very ←14 | 15→type of full-body singing that was in fact the main characteristic of the castrato style that became an essential characteristic of nineteenth-century bel canto.

Strada’s comprehensive range and flexibility, as well as her twofold lyric-dramatic talent, were most probably due to an unusual innate ability. She may have been a so-called natural soprano (or to use a Romantic expression, an early soprano sfogato or voce assoluta), who, having a strong upper register, sang with a chest-like vocal production in the head range as well, powerfully and sonorously. As Ellen T. Harris has pointed out, evidence for this can be seen in the arias written especially for her, where high notes as dynamic and musical climaxes are often textually and rhythmically accented,⁷ which was contrary to the general practice of the era and to Handel’s way of composing for Cuzzoni and La Francesina (Élisabeth Duparc), the sopranos preceding and succeeding Strada, respectively.⁸ My conclusions about Strada’s singing and sound features rest on three main pillars: (a) the musical sources, which focus on the original roles and arias created especially for her; (b) the surviving descriptions of her singing, and the period treatises – all of which is complimented with (c) my own practical experiences as a classical singer. The musical material per se can be misleading when it comes to the quality of singing, especially without the opinions of contemporary listeners who heard her voice and verify that Strada’s skills met all the technical, acoustic, musical, and expressive requirements these works imposed. Only after this foundation has been laid can the compositions, coupled with contemporary accounts of her singing, be interpreted as a sort of eighteenth-century ‘sound recordings’, preserving traces of her vocal personality. Setting Strada’s vocal profile, therefore, was like putting together remaining pieces of a puzzle or mosaic. This is what the cover of this book, my own painting, metaphorically illustrates.

The method I used is the same applied by Charles Burney, for example, who in the case of the soprano castrato Valeriano Pellegrini (1663‒1746) suggested certain abilities that the score might indicate concerning Mirtillo’s first aria, ←15 | 16→‘Fato crudo, Amor severo’ in Il pastor fido (1712).⁹ In the end, however, he classified the singer according to the general quality of singing, meaning that the requirements of the aria could have been accomplished by Valeriano, but neither easily nor excellently (the singer was nearly fifty years of age at that time):

The first air for a soprano, lets us know what kind of voice the Cavalier Valeriano possessed of; and the pathetic style of the first part of his song, as well as the agility necessary to the execution of the second, seem to imply abilities in that performer, of no mean kind. This air and many other airs in the opera, are only accompanied by a violoncello, in the old cantata style; but Handel always contrives to make this single accompaniment interesting without overwhelming the voice-part, or depriving it of attention. […] Valeriano was only of second class;¹⁰

Since Strada’s beauty of voice and manner of singing always drew admiration, and never received a negative review even from malicious critics ‒ she was rather criticised for her ‘frightfull mouths’ and unfavourable looks¹¹ ‒ one can conclude that the ideal audible parameters of the arias inspired by and dedicated to her did reflect her actual vocal characteristics.

Anna Maria Strada was born in 1703, and died in Naples on 20 July 1775.¹² Francesco Saverio Quadrio (1744), in his list of the ‘female singers of dramatic poems’, notes her as a native of Bergamo.¹³ Her father might have been the bass Giuseppe Maria Strada, a member of the chapel choir of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo between 1709 and 1711,¹⁴ who also sang in Milan, Parma, Casale Monferrato, Verona, Ferrara, Novara, and Brescia.¹⁵ Previously, Giuseppe received a monthly grant of three doppie from the Court of Mantova ←17 | 18→from 1 February 1696 onwards.¹⁶ It is probable that Anna Strada’s mother was Andriana Strada, also a singer, who appeared in various productions in Lombard cities like Crema and at the Gonzaga court in Mantua.¹⁷