Female composers’ reputations faded with them – until now
The luscious, luminous 17th century was both a wonderful and a dreadful time to be a woman composer and musician.
The luscious, luminous 17th century was both a wonderful and a dreadful time to be a woman composer and musician.
It was splendid because a woman could be the most prolific, one of the most innovative and celebrated musical figures of her society, as were Barbara Strozzi and Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre in the worlds of Venice and Versailles. They could be actively sheltered in creative privilege, as was Isabella Leonarda, a renowned composer and nun in Lombardy who offered her music to the religious community and laity for the burnishing of faith.
They played to duchesses, humble sisters in Christ, fops, intellectuals, archbishops and kings; they taught noble proteges and sang lyrics they had written themselves accompanied by their own compositions. They commanded respect that their sisters could only envy.
It was also one of many awful times to be a woman musician, because almost all of their art was soon obliterated. Much of their work was lost forever, and their names came close to extinction. Their music was loud, full, rich and defiant: and then it was silenced. Strozzi, de La Guerre and Leonarda all had the good fortune to be part of a historical instant when the music of Italy and France was surging and flashing in bold flares of innovation. Each claimed titles of superlative achievement: the most productive, the “first woman to … ”; the pioneer, no matter what sex, of a musical form. De La Guerre staged the first opera by a French woman. Barbara Strozzi published eight collections of her songs, more music in print than anyone else at the time.
The stories of the three women, whose works are being performed by the Australian Chamber Orchestra this month, exemplify a brilliant moment when a few dazzling figures pushed their luck and found success.
While figures like Claudio Monteverdi and John Dowland can seem impressively austere in their black jerkins and dour male melancholy, women like de La Guerre, Leonarda and Strozzi were at once powerful, sorrowful, successful, and very mortal. Their exquisite music remains, but in their vanished lifetimes they were also mothers, lovers, leaders, mentors and insecurely employed jobbing artists, raising children and forging careers amid war, plague, court intrigues, religious contention, the culture and wars of the Counter Reformation, and all the other extravagant frenzies of 17th century Europe.
Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre in France and Barbara Strozzi in Venice were the cherished daughters of musical masters, raised in salons and musical clans and projected into the professional world by their fathers. Leonarda (born Isabella Calegari in 1620) was from a noble and cultured family, and she too obediently followed her patriarch’s directions.
De le Guerre, born in Paris in 1665 into a family of master instrument builders and musicians, was chosen at the age of five by the Sun King Louis XIV himself to perform as a prodigy at Versailles as la petite merveille (“the small wonder”) and “the marvel of our century”. Educated at court and a favourite of maitresse-en-titre Madame de Montespan, De La Guerre worked at the very heart of the French royal court, protegee – literally, protected one – of the most powerful women there.
Strozzi, born earlier in 1619, was also a treasured daughter although, unlike the wealthy Elisabeth, she was illegitimate. She was “adopted” by her poet father, who raised her amid several groups of creative intellectuals he founded or joined, including the Accademia degli Incogniti, which can be credited with the innovation and popularising of what became known as opera. Among its poets and philosophers was Claudio Monteverdi. Strozzi herself, a handsome young woman enjoying the best of a Venice still in its Golden Age, debuted as an adolescent when she sang informally at Incogniti meetings, where the composer Nicolo Fontei called her “the most kind and virtuosic damsel, Signora Barbara”. When her father founded a sub-branch called the Unisoni, Strozzi hosted and performed.
Female presence in such meetings was rare, and there were slurs on her chastity. Rumours spread that she was a courtesan; one account says she was raped by a nobleman, but this may have been a strange euphemism to cover her long-term relationship and parenthood with him, a married man. As her reputation as a singer grew, she was called la virtuosissima cantatrice, “the greatest virtuoso singer”. But soon her career turned to composition.
Isabella Leonarda was very different. Born a year after Strozzi in nearby Piedmont into high-status establishment clan, she was donated in adolescence, like her five sisters, to an Ursuline convent. She was to remain there for the rest of her life, rising over her long life to the rank of superiora, as well as magistra musicae, a teaching role. Convents were known for their cultivation of female talent in music.
The value of this music was cherished beyond the walls, where its origin with “sacred virgins” was especially respected. Leonarda appears to have been mentored by Elizabeth Casata, an organist in the convent, and Gasparo Casati, perhaps her husband, who published two of her early works among his own.
In time, encouraged by the security of her small world, Leonarda would compose much religious music: motets and sacred concerti, Latin dialogues, magnificats, masses, litanies, responsories, psalm settings. She innovated boldly, using vernacular texts, textless instrumental music in solo sonata for violin and continuo. Her opus 16, the eleven sonata da chiesa, was extraordinarily the first published instrumental works by a woman. We know very little about her, or what provoked her ambition, but over 60 years she created in her rest hours nearly 200 compositions and 20 volumes of music, making her, like Strozzi, one of the most prolific women composers of the time.
Strozzi, the supposed harlot, was acclaimed in her time as one of Europe’s finest singers and most prolific composers. She had three children to her partner, a patron of the arts, and lived with her parents until their deaths. She is thought to have supported herself with composing and of course was busy with caregiving; having a professional career under the circumstances seems extraordinary. She died in obscurity at 58 without leaving a will and further unpublished music is scattered across European collections. The last, lost volume of her work was apparently dedicated to the Duke of Mantua, but by 1665 the court that had cultivated Monteverdi had lost its lustre. And envy could bring injury. Strozzi had written plaintively, as a young woman, in the preface of her Opus 1, Il primo libro de’ madrigali her hopes for the work, “which I, as a woman, all too ardently send forth into the light … so that under your Oak of Gold it may rest secure from the lightning bolts of slander prepared for it”.
De La Guerre had far better fortune. At Versailles she wrote most of her first works for the Sun King himself, then in 1684 at the age of 19 married a fellow musician and moved back to Paris, where she was soon teaching and giving concerts to high praise.
Three years after her marriage, when another woman might have been buried (literally or figuratively) by childbearing, she published a rare set of harpsichord pieces, one of the first printed in France that century. This included her famous pioneering unmeasured preludes and was followed by ballet scores and, then, like Caccini, an opera, Cephale et Procris. Written in 1694, it’s claimed as the first opera written by a woman in France. But French audiences, cautious about the form and its innovations, wanted only a few performances, and this was the end of her efforts in that form.
Ten years after this humiliation, de La Guerre was devastated by the deaths of her husband and 10-year-old son, as well as both her parents and her brother. Afterwards she restrained herself to performance, often concerts in her own home, and the development of her works on the sonata. This was an Italian form developed in preceding decades by Leonarda, and she continued to challenge the purity of the French styles with her interest in the rival tradition as a pioneer in particular of the trio sonata. She was among the first to write in the form of accompanied harpsichord works and later took up the Italian form of the cantata, beloved by Strozzi. Her last published works were collections of cantatas both secular and sacred.
Strozzi was likewise a pusher of form, said to have used irregular barring and daring to add discordant clashing notes for emphasis, drawing out dissonance and establishing uncommon harmonies.
Her instinct for lyrics – often her own – and the human voice meant her experiments with cantata used the combination of recitative and a single instrument to gorgeously extend its potential and execution. Strozzi was lucky because her manuscripts were published and conserved, so that scholars could resuscitate her voice 400 years after her lifetime.
These women shone in their lifetimes, but when they died their musical legacy quickly began to fade.
Even with 20th century rediscoveries of female artists, risk-averse orchestras and ensembles hesitated to include now-unknown composers in the repertoire. Perhaps it’s only in the past decade or so that glances have been cast back into the annals of baroque and these gleaming illuminated pages reopened.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra performs Baroque Revelry at Sydney’s City Recital Hall on June 26, 27, 29, 30.
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