Anna Renzi

Anna Renzi (born c. 1620, Rome [Italy]—died after 1661) was an Italian singer, actress, and star of public opera in Venice during the mid-17th century. Prominent composers such as Claudio Monteverdi crafted roles to suit her voice and style of performance.

Like several other female singers in early Venetian operas, Renzi hailed from Rome. As a young woman, she studied with Filiberto Laurenzi, and together they moved to Venice to prepare for her 1641 debut there, in the role of Deidamia in Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza (“The Pretended Madwoman”). It was the first production to be staged at the Teatro Novissimo, one of several theatres where Renzi sang during her career.

The libretto for La finta pazza was penned by Giulio Strozzi, a prominent poet and member of the Accademia degli Incogniti (“Academy of the Unknowns”), a circle of aristocratic intellectuals who actively promoted the development of Venetian opera. Members of the group wrote not only numerous librettos for the Venetian stage but also various works describing individual operatic productions. In 1644 Strozzi published a collection of essays and poems in praise of Renzi, Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (“The Glories of Roman Lady Anna Renzi”), which included contributions by a number of the Incogniti writers. Strozzi’s introductory essay describes Renzi’s abilities as a singer and actress—the inexhaustibly beautiful quality of her voice, the physical gestures and poses that she used to help portray her characters, and her intellect and imagination.

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Renzi was in high demand in Venice throughout the 1640s, participating in numerous productions at the Teatro Novissimo and the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo. Perhaps her most-lasting contribution to music history was her creation of the role of Ottavia in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643; The Coronation of Poppea), the libretto of which was written by another Incogniti poet, Giovanni Francesco Busenello. An anonymous poem in Strozzi’s Glorie describes the “divine voice” with which Renzi passionately rendered Ottavia’s lament. (It is possible that she also played the comic role of Drusilla in the same production; such doublings were not uncommon in early opera, and Renzi is known to have been a master of both comedy and tragedy.) In the early 1650s she participated in several productions at the Teatro S Apollinare, where she worked with the impresario Marco Faustini. Although she left Venice for brief periods to work elsewhere, including at the court at Innsbruck intermittently from 1653 to 1655, she resided in Venice for most of her active career, with her last documented performance there in 1657. She left the city in 1659.

As an operatic prima donna, Renzi had a degree of financial independence not available to most women of the 17th century. Surviving contracts indicate that she commanded a high price at the peak of her popularity in the mid-1640s. In a contract signed in 1649 with the dancer and choreographer Giovanni Battista Balbi, Renzi acted as a full partner in a professional venture to mount the opera La deidamia (“The Madwoman”; music probably by Laurenzi) in Florence. (In 1643/44 she had sung in a Venetian production of the same opera but apparently without participation in the financial aspects of the venture.) Balbi did mount that opera in the following year, and that contract suggests that Renzi was the featured prima donna. She also negotiated a marriage contract in 1645 with one Ruberto Sabbatini—probably the same violinist with whom she served at Innsbruck in the early 1650s—although the marriage itself was never documented. She similarly made arrangements to marry in 1662, but it is again unclear whether the event ever took place; references to the planned marriage constitute the latest surviving evidence concerning Renzi’s life.