‘While Mancini adapts [sic] the same terminology that Tosi uses (voce di petto, voce di testa/falsetto), he very strongly emphasizes the importance of blending the registers. Mancini’s ideal bel canto voice has a consistent core throughout the range, not just an evenness between the break.’70 This blended voice, identified by Rodolfo Celletti as the voce mista (in the Romantic, bel canto sense of the term), provides power and fullness to the upper notes essential to high sopranos such as Strada.71
That Strada was taught according to Pistocchi’s principles is all the more possible because of the impression her early repertoire makes. It shows the quality of a clarion-sounding, well-tuned, strong, high, and precise soprano voice as well as a melodic and rhythmic agility; all are necessities for a satisfactory performance of the pieces in question. The Bolognese school’s novelty lay in the full, rich, rounded sound, and strength of the upper notes, reached by blending the attributes of the chest vocal production into the head register.72 Arguably, Strada’s existence as a singer hung on this latter phenomenon. Nevertheless, the real question is how could eunuchs, a group of singers with altered physical mechanisms, establish vocal pedagogy not only of a far-reaching impact, but also applicable to noncastrated voices as well? The key to the enigma might lie in the focus on breathing and unifying registers, the presumable result of which was a relaxed larynx long before García’s anatomically-based method prescribed the use of a low-positioned one in the 1840s. Castrati had an undescended larynx with a width and consistency matching that of a boy, and a size like that of a small woman. This structure was supported by a thoracic cavity like that of a large man, and was surrounded by the body of an adult male, which facilitated the voice with a mature resonance and timbre. Due to their systematic training of extended years, including strict breathing-exercises, the muscles around the rib cage became developed and offered unlimited potential for vocal projection.73 ←30 | 31→Their practical experiences made it possible to explain and teach breathing technique with insight and consciousness, while their body served as a living, exaggerated example of artificially controlled, deep, and natural breath.74 Thus, the benefits of the position of inhaling became to some extent transmittable to the singing or exhaling phrase, opening the way for a free and strong vocal production and sustained tone. In this way, after inhaling, the singer could begin a phrase with parted ribs, a sunken diaphragm, and expanded lungs to support a deeper-positioned, yet more flexible larynx. In doing so, the voice could more easily remain agile, sonorous, and controllable in the later parts of a phrase, due to the security given by this well-rounded support.
Strada’s close connections to the Bolognese singing school would also very much conform with the situation which evolved around her Venetian debut season in 1720, when Benedetto Marcello wrote and published his satirical essay about the current operatic life of the city, the abovementioned pamphlet called Il teatro alla moda, focusing on the new singing style delivered in Venice by Bolognese singers. Otherwise, being a new singer, the appearance of Strada’s name seems rather to be a coincidence: her character might have been contradictory to those caricatured in Il teatro, considering that she was supposedly free from excessive egotism.
The 1720/1721 season at Sant’Angelo
In consideration of the above, it is no surprise that Marcello’s Il teatro deals with the productions, management, and singers of Sant’Angelo and S. Moisè, engaged in the 1720/1721 season as the embodiment of the new manner. Its frontispiece contains Strada’s surname, anagrams of Vivaldi, Giovanni Orsatti, impresario of S. Moisè, and furthermore that of the Sant’Angelo’s co-manager, impresario Modotto, Giovanni Palazzi, librettist of the first staged opera of the season, Vivaldi’s La verità in cimento, and members of the cast arrived from and trained in Bologna.75 According to Selfridge-Field and Strohm, this very group of Bolognese singers as representatives of the bravura singing style (together with the composer and librettist Giuseppe Maria Buini at S. Moisè) were the main target of Marcello, whose family co-owned Sant’Angelo. They are reflected ←31 | 32→in the pamphlet by a strong Bolognese dialect in the conversations between the prima donna and her mamma.76
Composers and vocalists seem indeed to have been coming in a large number from Naples and Bologna to Venice in the 1720s, as Villeneuve mentions.77 Among the Bolognese members of the company at S. Moisè there were Caterina Borghi, Cecilia Belisani, and Caterina Cantelli who all participated in Buini’s operas Il Filindo (1720) and Cleofile (1721) at San Moisè.78 In 1721 Buini married Belisani, with whom he frequently collaborated in Venice (La caduta di Gelone 1719, Armida delusa 1720).79 From the Sant’Angelo cast, Marcello mentioned the names of Chiara Orlandi and Antonia Laurenti, who shared the stage with Strada in all of the operas in which she appeared in Venice (La verità in cimento 1720; Filippo, re di Macedonia, Antigona, and Il pastor fido in 1721).80 Merighi, the most illustrious member of the company, was likewise Bolognese.
Il Teatro alla moda’s frontispiece suggests furthermore a business relationship between Vivaldi and the impresario of Sant’Angelo, Modotto, and also with the impresario of San Moisè, Giovanni Orsatti. Beyond its general description of the practice of Venetian, and in a broader sense of the Italian operatic life, Il teatro speaks about particular productions of the autumn of 1720 at Sant’Angelo and San Moisè, namely of La verità in cimento (RV 739) by Vivaldi and Buini’s ←32 | 33→Il Filindo (as is indicated by the publication date of December that year).81 According to Strohm, Marcello’s work could have harmfully affected Vivaldi’s activity in Sant’Angelo as well as in Venice more generally. After his Mantuan years he began to reappear as an opera composer in the city; already in 1721 he had little to do in the carnival season, and thereafter he disappeared entirely from Venice for four years. As Strada might have been one of his protégées, the damage that befell Vivaldi’s reputation most probably impacted her career as well, for she did not return to Venice.
As noted earlier, Strada stood as virtuosa di camera in the service of Count Girolamo Colloredo-Waldsee, the Governor of Milan since the summer of 1720.82 Colloredo himself was also quite fresh in his position; he became governor in spring 1719. Vivaldi might have gotten to know the soprano through his new Venetian patron, Johann Baptist of Colloredo-Waldsee, the imperial ambassador to Venice between 1715 and 1726, who was presumably related to the Milanese Count.83 The composer must have heard Strada in Giuseppe Vignati’s Aquilio in Siracusa, written as part of the annual birthday celebration of the Holy Roman Empress Elisabetta Cristina di Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, wife of Charles VI, and performed at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan on 27 August 1720. This possibility is supported by the fact that the seconda donna, Anna Maria Lodovica d’Ambreville, was one of Vivaldi’s singers who took part in two of his operas in Mantua the previous year: Teuzzone and Tito Manlio. Strada was given the terza donna role, but she had three arias and such fellow singers as the excellent tenor Francesco Borosini and the castrato Carlo Scalzi.84 That passionate, fierce and warrior-like heroic role type, which emerged regularly during her career and seemed to befit her personal and vocal features alike, found Strada at her debut playing princess Merope, who rejects