A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Strinasacchi, Regina

by Carl Ferdinand Pohl

STRINASACCHI, Regina, a distinguished violin-player, born at Ostiglia near Mantua in 1764, and educated at the Conservatorio della Pieta in Venice, and in Paris. From 1780 to 1783 she travelled through Italy, and won great admiration by her playing, her good looks, and her attractive manners. She next went to Vienna, and gave two concerts at the National Court Theatre in the Burg on March 29 and April 24, 1784. For the second of these Mozart composed a sonata in B♭ (Köchel 454), of which he wrote out the violin-part complete, but played the accompaniment himself from a few memoranda which he had dashed down on the PF. staves.^[1] The Emperor Joseph, noticing from his box above the blank look of the paper on the desk, sent for Mozart and obliged him to confess the true state of the case. 'Strinasacchi plays with much taste and feeling,' writes Mozart to his father, who quite agreed with him after hearing her at Salzburg. 'Even in symphonies,' Leopold writes to his daughter, 'she always plays with expression, and nobody could play an Adagio more touchingly or with more feeling than she; her whole heart and soul is in the melody she is executing, and her tone is both delicate and powerful.' In Vienna she learnt to appreciate the gaiety of Haydn's music, so congenial to her own character. She played his quartets before the court at Ludwigslust, and also at Frau von Ranzow's, with peculiar naïveté and humour, and was much applauded for her delicate and expressive rendering of a solo in one of them. She is also said to have been an excellent guitar-player. She married Johann Conrad Schlick, a distinguished cellist in the ducal chapel at Gotha. The two travelled together, playing duets for violin and cello. Schlick died at Gotha in 1825, two year after the death of his wife.

[ C. F. P. ]

1. This interesting MS. is now in the possession of Mr. F. G. Kurtz of Liverpool. Mozart filled in the complete accompaniment afterwards in an ink of slightly different colour from that which he first employed, so that the state of the MS. at the first performance can be readily seen.