(b Rome, c1620; d after 1661). Italian soprano. Her career on the operatic stage spanned at least 17 years, and she was the most celebrated singer in Venice during the 1640s. According to contemporary sources, her study of human personalities enabled her to bring the characters she played to life, and she could perform for many nights in succession without loss of dramatic or vocal quality (see Strozzi). As a young woman she sang at the French embassy in Rome, probably in Ottaviano Castelli’s La sincerità trionfante, overo L’Erculeo ardire (1639, music by Angelo Cecchini), but certainly in the same author’s Il favorito del principe (1640, music by Filiberto Laurenzi), in which she sang the role of Lucinda.
In 1640 Renzi arrived in Venice, accompanied by her teacher, Laurenzi, to play Deidamia in Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza, which inaugurated Venice’s newest theatre, the Novissimo, the following year. Her next roles were Archimene in Sacrati’s Il Bellerofonte (1642, Novissimo), Aretusa in La finta savia (1643, Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo, music largely by Laurenzi), Ottavia in L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643, SS Giovanni e Paolo, music probably largely by Monteverdi) and the title part in La Deidamia (1644, Novissimo, prologue and intermedi probably by Laurenzi; composer otherwise unknown). A contract with the impresario Geronimo Lappoli for La Deidamia reveals that Renzi earned 750 ducats for her performances, a large sum for that period. These roles were commemorated by Strozzi and others in Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (1644), which included a portrait of the singer (see illustration). Renzi was singled out in other publications by members of the influential Accademia degli Incogniti (G.F. Loredan, for example, published a tale of her exclusion from Parnassus by Apollo so as not to make the Muses jealous), and Orazio Tarditi’s Canzonette amorose (1642) is dedicated to her. In 1645 John Evelyn heard her sing in Rovetta’s Ercole in Lidia at the Teatro Novissimo. That same year Renzi signed an agreement to marry Ruberto Sabbatini – possibly the Roman violinist who served at the Innsbruck court during the mid-1650s and was employed at the Neuburg Hofkapelle in 1662 – but there is no evidence that the nuptials took place (the assertion that she married the composer Alessandro Leardini seems unlikely; see Notes and Queries).
In the late 1640s Renzi returned to the Teatro SS Giovanni e Paolo (because of the war over Crete the theatres had evidently been closed for two seasons), where she played the title roles in Torilda (1648) and Argiope (dedicated to her in 1645 but not performed until 1649), the libretto of which was partly by G.B. Fusconi (a member of the Incogniti), whom she named as one of her executors in a will of 1652. In December 1649 she joined in a partnership with the dancer and choreographer G.B. Balbi to mount an opera, Deidamia, in Florence. Although Renzi lived in Venice during 1652 and part of 1653, no performances by her are documented there. In the latter year she probably sang in Genoa in Torilda and Cesare amante. From October 1653 to August 1654, and again from August to December 1655, she was at the Innsbruck court. She sang the title role in Cesti’s Cleopatra during her first soujourn, and during her second played Dorisbe in his Argia, performed for the visit of Queen Christina of Sweden. Between those two visits she sang in Venice at the Teatro S Apollinare in P.A. Ziani’s Eupatra (1655). Renzi’s last known performances took place at the same theatre in 1657, when she was Damira in Ziani’s Le fortune di Rodope e Damira. She left Venice in 1659 but returned in 1662 with the intention of getting married; no later references to her have come to light.
SennMT
G. Strozzi: Le glorie della signora Anna Renzi romana (Venice, 1644)
Will, 4 Oct 1652 (MS, I-Vas, Notarile, Testamenti chiusi, Atti Francesco Beacini, no.69)
G.F. Loredan: Bizzarrie academiche, ii (Bologna, 14/1676), 180
Notes and Queries, 12th ser., xi (1922), 415
W. Osthoff: ‘Neue Beobachtungen zu Quellen und Geschichte von Monteverdis “Incoronazione di Poppea”’, Mf, xi (1958), 129–38
C. Sartori: ‘La prima diva della lirica italiana: Anna Renzi’, NRMI, ii (1968), 430–52
L. Bianconi and T. Walker: ‘Dalla Finta pazza alla Veremonda: storie di Febiarmonici’, RIM, x (1975), 379–454
S. Durante: ‘Il cantante’, SOI, iv (1987), 349–415
E. Rosand: Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: the Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, 1991)
B.L. and J.E. Glixon: ‘Marco Faustini and Venetian Opera Production in the 1650s: Recent Archival Discoveries’, JM, x (1992), 48–72
B.L. Glixon: ‘Private Lives of Public Women: Prima donnas in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Venice’, ML, lxxv (1995), 509–31
THOMAS WALKER/BETH L. GLIXON