The Operas of Stephen Storace

It is almost a tradition that Musica Britannica editors come before you to tell you of the music they have unearthed. But tonight I shall not talk to you about No Song, No Supper as it has already had three broadcasts and for some of you may have lost its novelty. It is the only English opera by Storace that survives in full score, but delightful though it is, it is not really typical of Storace's work as a whole. So I propose to limit myself to Storace's full-length operas ( No Song is a short opera, an afterpiece), and I hope to show you that he aimed to write a type of opera much more akin to Il Seraglio than to any ballad opera, that he introduced the Viennese classical style into our theatres, that he introduced the ensemble with action and the extended finale into our operas, and that he had more sense of the theatre than any other English opera composer of the eighteenth century.