The soprano Luísa Todi, born Luísa Rosa de Aguiar (1753–1833) in Setúbal, developed a remarkable international career that established her as one of the greatest European singers of her time.¹ At the age of 14, she began her career as an actress at the Teatro do Bairro Alto, where she was engaged together with her sister Cecília to perform in Tartuffe by Molière, in a Portuguese translation. Two years later, she married Francesco Saverio Todi, a violinist in the theater’s orchestra.²
Alongside her acting career, she studied vocal music with David Perez, thereby absorbing the legacy of the Neapolitan vocal school. In 1777, she launched her international career, making her debut at the King’s Theatre in London, and subsequently performing over the following years in many of the leading opera houses across Europe, including Paris, Geneva, Turin, Potsdam, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Venice, Bergamo, Naples, and Madrid, among others. She was consistently met with great admiration from both audiences and critics.³
In 1796, she settled permanently in Portugal, where she taught singing until the onset of blindness, and she died in 1833.⁴ According to contemporary accounts, her interpretative style was grounded more in dramatic expressiveness and emotional intensity than in the earlier virtuosic tradition of brilliant and ornamental singing, positioning her as a representative of the emerging aesthetic of “sensibility.”⁵
