Isabella Leonarda, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Antonia Bembo Padovani, Rosa Giacinta Badalla, Bianca Maria Meda
The
program on this recording provides a cross-section of pieces written by women in
late seventeenth-century Italy and France. This moment in European history was
rich with possibilities for women’s self-expression, especially in music. It
witnessed such important political and cultural figures as Queen Christina of
Sweden (an important patroness of music in Rome, among her other talents).
Women were also central to the literary and cultural debates of grand
siècle France, and the possibilities for their formal learning were evident
in the cases of the extraordinary figures who received degrees from Italian
universities. The
spread of public opera in Italy also allowed for the fame of women singers to
spread through (and outside of) the Italian peninsula.
The
composers recorded here received their training and developed their careers in
one of two structures possible for young female musicians at this time: either a
sympathetic and musical family (Strozzi, Jacquet, Bembo) or female religious
institutions, especially those in northern Italy (Leonarda, Meda, Badalla, and
Bembo’s career in Paris).
While sharing in many of the musical structures which were being
formalized into an international style, each of the compositions recorded here
displays an individual’s interaction with the conventions of her time.
In
her youth, Barbara Strozzi (c.1619-1677) was a well-known singer in mid-century
Venice, her skills supported by her adoptive father, the librettist and poet
Giulio Strozzi.
The recent work of Beth Glixon has done much to illuminate the
circumstances of her life, as she used her connections to Venetian noblemen and
literati in an effort to forge a life for herself and her children.
Her eight publications span two decades, and the serenata Hor che Apollo is taken from her last published work, the op. 8 Arie
dedicated to to the music-loving German duchess Sophia of
Brunswick-Lüneburg, the daughter of the Elector Palatine (1630-1714).
Strozzi must have met the duchess during Sophia’s Grand Tour of Italy
in 1664-65.
Although there is no direct record in the court’s travel diaries of an
encounter between the two women, Strozzi’s dedication to op. 8 refers to
musical performances by famed singers in the duchess’s Venetian lodgings,
presumably including one or more by the composer herself (‘suo gran merito,
che dando ricouero ne suoi Regii Alberghi alle muse fa sentire alle Sirene
dell’Adria le voci de più esquisiti Cantanti’).
The
serenata is the longest piece, and the only one to call for instruments (two
violins), in the collection.
In nocturnal lament, its speaker (a forelorn lover) first thinks of his
sleeping Phyllis, then expresses his devotion to her, emotions faithfully
reflected in the instrumental ritornelli that follow each section. But these
outpourings are rudely interrupted by the speaker’s realization that his
beloved laughs at him even as she sleeps (‘Ma isfogatevi, spriggionatevi, miei
sospir’), set by Strozzi as a dramatic flourish, followed by an extended slow
aria of departure and amatory death (‘Deggio per ciò partir’), as the
cantata traces an arc from devotion to disillusion.
The arietta ‘Miei pensieri’,
from the op. 6 ariettas for solo voice and continuo (published seven
years earlier), offers a much simpler structure,.
The three stanzas of its anonymous poem each repeat the opening poetic
line at the end, and Strozzi took advantage of this for a clever musical rhyme,
as the end of the stanza musically repeats not the opening, but the end of the
first poetic quatrain (both quatrain and couplet are repeated).
A
generation after Strozzi, Antonia Bembo also was born, and received her early
musical training in the maritime city.
According to the studies of Marinella Laini and Claire Fontijn, she fled
for personal reasons (possibly a failed marriage) to Paris around 1675.
There she resided in a women’s religious community, where she produced
music for court circles (and was thus a contemporary of Jacquet de la Guerre).
Her compositions were collected between 1697 and 1707 in manuscript
volumes called Produzioni armoniche,
and her Lament of Mary is a dramatic spiritual cantata narrating the Madonna’s
sorrows at the Cross of her Son.
It highlights Mary’s reproach of death in an ‘aria vivace’ that
returns (‘Che fai, che tenti’) after several recitatives and a strophic aria
(‘Staccato dal ramo’).
More
formalized religious communities were the most famous institutions of women’s
music-making in Italy (and indeed all Europe).
The two solo motets by Benedictine nuns, probably close contempories,
display the level of virtuosic vocal writing for which the female monasteries of
northern Italy became renowned among travellers and musical observers.
We know almost nothing about Bianca Meda’s life; she seems to have
taken her vows at the Benedictine house of S. Martino del Leano in Pavia at some
point in the 1680s.
This motet (on a text in Italianate Latin) was probably meant, at least
in its published form, as a piece for the Elevation of the Host at Mass, as its
topic of the soul’s love for Jesus was a common idea for musical expression in
preparation for the reception of Communion. But the affective language of the
text was also appropriate for nuns, as they considered themselves to be brides
of Christ (‘amores sponsi’). At first sight, the motet seems paradoxical, as
it uses music to call upon earthly musicians to be silent, so that the soul may
better contemplate Jesus’ love. Yet it ends with a realization that silence is
impossible (‘Ah, quid dico!’) in the expression of the soul/the nun’s
feelings for Christ.
Meda underlined this psychological moment with a vocal flourish, a quick
turn to fast tempo, and the surprise entrance of the violins in a recitative
section. As
was normal in the genre, the piece ends with a florid ‘Alleluia’. Both of
the arias (‘Quantae deliciae’ and ‘Amare et silere’) are strophic, with
ritornellos for the two violins
Published
when she was barely twenty, Rosa Badalla’s collection of motets for solo voice
and continuo testify to the century-long musical fame of her religious house, S.
Radegonda of Milan, and her own often surprising compositional imagination.
Although she would live another thirty years, her book of 1684 would be
her only publication, and its appearance at a time when the monastery was still
under a formal interdict of polyphony (for musical ‘transgressions’ a
generation before) shows the power and renown of S. Radegonda’s nuns. Badalla
had come to the house probably from the neighboring Venetian city of Bergamo
around 1678. The
destination (far from obvious from the text) of Non
plangete is for the feast of the Birth of the Virgin Mary (8 September).
The motet opens with an imaginary address to the patriarchs of the Old
Testament, languishing in Limbo before Christ’s coming; since Mary’s birth
was the event that began the preparations for His Incarnation, these ‘ancient
fathers’ are called on to rejoice.
Badalla set the dark affect of the scene in an opening aria using a
three-bar repeated bass (an ostinato), over which the vocal line holds long
notes. The
free recitation ‘O veridice prophetae’ flowers into virtuosity at
‘Nazarenum florem’, and the motto aria ‘Cara dies’ confirms the
underlying joyous affect of the piece. As normal, the motet’s language quickly
turns more personal, and the penultimate aria ‘Non plus me tentate’ sets its
rejection of worldly temptation to vocal fireworks, again a gesture appropriate
for a musical nun.
Badalla’s originality in vocal writing, and audible use of musical
structure, are well displayed in the piece.
The
instrumental pieces also mix convention and fantasy.
Isabella Leonarda spent most of her long life as an Ursuline nun in the
northern Italian city of Novara, between Milan and Turin.
Her order was dedicated to the education of young women, and most of her
twenty publications must have originated as works for the girls and sisters in
her pedagogical care at her school named after the patroness saint of her order
(the Collegio di S. Ursula). Sonata
duodecima, the only solo piece from her only collection of exclusively
instrumental music, mixes convention and liberty in the character of the
sections and the adventuresome harmonic writing.
It begins with a rhapsodic Adagio quite like the early solo sonatas which
Leonarda would have heard in her youth. A quick invention-like movement follows,
and then a bipartite triple-time movement which is the heart of the sonata.
The following Adagio features surprising modulations to flat keys, and
then an Aria develops a repeated-note figure.
The final fast gigue brings the sonata back to its home tonal region.
At
the end of the period covered by this recording, the pieces of Jacquet de la
Guerre reflect both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The unmeasured (i.e. notated with relational, not precise durational
values) prelude from her first keyboard book of 1687 obviously stands in the
long French tradition of such pieces, written in a ‘broken-chord’ lute idiom
(style brisè).
Twenty years later, the two pieces with violin and keyboard or continue
show the changes in Jacquet’s own style as well as in her city.
Sonata 2 from a set of six violin sonatas of 1707 is a remarkably
‘constructivist’ piece. It consists of three fast movements broken after the
first by a short but harmonically striking Adagio (filled with dissonant chords
and grinding suspensions).
Each of the Presto sections begins by exploring a melodic idea (normally
cited again about two-thirds of the way through).
The straightforward rhythms of the first recall a seventeenth-century
canzona, while the second develops the idea of an arpeggiated chord in the
violin over a descending bass.
Jacquet then extended the movement by reversing these roles between the
instruments. The last movement is the most obviously virtuosic, with its triplet
figures that give impulse to both its binary sections. Finally, the Allemande
‘La Flamande’ (evidently in a real or imagined ‘Flemish’ style) uses
both older and newer traits in the combination of style
brisè with the dissonances of the striking descent at the end of its first
binary half. Its
‘double’ is a heavily embellished repeat of the original, with ornamentation
in the right hand of the keyboard part. In accordance with the title-page of the
edition, this recording presents the piece with the top line of the keyboard
doubled softly by a violin.
That this practice is documented by a 1729 report on the playing of
another daughter from a musical family, this time a Mademoiselle Couperin, is
perhaps only fitting for this recording, which highlights the musical talents of
such women at a formative time in Western European music.