Braham and The Storaces
This 1794 performance also marked Braham’s first encounter with the Storace family. Stephen Storace (1762–1796), the son of an Italian musician based in Dublin was an accomplished composer; and his sister Anna, known as Nancy (1765–1817), formerly also a student of Rauzzini, a talented soprano. They had already had much experience in Italy and in Vienna where in 1786 Nancy created the first Susanna in Mozart's Figaro, and both had been friends of the composer. In Vienna Nancy had contracted an unfortunate marriage with the psychopathic English composer John Abraham Fisher, from whom she soon separated. At Braham’s début, which was the first of the season at Bath, Nancy also performed, as a soloist and in a duet with him. It was the starting-point of a liaison which was to last for over twenty years, during which Nancy bore Braham a son, Spencer.
Stephen invited Braham to take the lead role in his new opera Mahmoud in 1796; Braham triumphed at the première. Later that year he sang lead roles, also to acclaim, at the Italian Opera in London, an extraordinary attainment for a Briton. In 1797 he appeared in the role created for his mentor Leoni, as Carlos in Sheridan's The Duenna at Covent Garden. The long triumphant phase of Braham's career was launched, which in its early years saw him and Nancy singing in every major continental house as well as in Britain, to audiences which contained, in Paris (1797), Napoleon, in Livorno (1799), Nelson, and similar notables wherever else they appeared. Braham became the first English male singer to command a European reputation. In 1809 he sang in Dublin at the unheard of fee of 2000 guineas for fifteen concerts, an indisputable sign both of his fame and popularity, and of the growth of music and entertainment as industries in this period.
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