The soprano voice inspired some of Mozart’s most sublime music, including not only the familiar arias from the great operas, but many neglected treasures among the works we know as concert arias. Mozart wrote several of them as substitute numbers for his own operas; others were intended for insertion into another composer’s opera, or, just as the name implies, to be performed in concert.
Mozart often designed these Arias for singers he particularly liked, which is partly why most of the fifty-four concert arias in his catalog are for soprano. He composed eight for Aloysia Weber (before and after she became his sister-in-law).
In 1786 he wrote Ch’io mi scordi di te?, arguably the greatest of all, for Nancy Storace, who had recently created the role of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro.
Born in London of an Irish mother and an Italian father, Nancy Storace arrived in Vienna in 1783, when she was just eighteen, to sing with the Italian opera company. The following year she married a young violinist, John Abraham Fischer, who treated her so badly that Nancy left him within the year, taking back her maiden name (an unusual gesture at the time) as if to wipe him from her memory.
Here are Cecilia Bartoli and Andras Schiff to perform this music for you:
