BOLDNESS IN THE BAROQUE — Nicholas Phan

This post is the program note I wrote for the first concert of CAIC’s 2020 Collaborative Works Festival, Women of the Baroque, which was broadcast October 9-11, 2020.

Studying music history during my freshman year in college, I briefly came across the names Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi in the journey we took at lightning-speed through the history of Western music, and while we spent a few moments analyzing one excerpt from a cantata by Strozzi, very little was made of the fact that a woman was composing music in the 1600s, or that she was one of the only women that appeared in this education. Instead, we proceeded onwards with our crash course through history, spending the rest of the course listening to the music of white men whose compositions form what we consider the “canon” of western classical music.

As this history is generally taught, it is overwhelmingly white and heterosexual men who have driven western music’s course through the ages. Monteverdi, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, Mahler, Wagner, Verdi have all been afforded great positions in the so-called classical music canon and are revered as having steered music through to the present day with their innovative, boundary-pushing large-form compositions. When they appear in music history textbooks at all, women contemporaries of these “great men” are often remembered as spouses, performers, patronesses, or teachers, as prominent positions in the professional musical world remained blocked by sexist social norms. Though Clara Schumann was a virtuosic pianist and composer, she is most often recalled as Robert’s wife and as an inspiration for many male composers. Alma Mahler is relegated to being remembered as the wife of Gustav, her promising compositional talent stifled by her husband’s insistence that she conform to gender norms and cease writing music. Pauline Viardot is remembered as the great prima donna who took the stages of Europe’s opera houses by storm, but her compositions are forgotten. Nadia Boulanger is lauded for her great influence as a teacher of her many white male students who came to make up the classical music canon of the 20th century, but her own music, and that of her sister Lili, are sidelined.

Despite this false narrative, women have been composing music for centuries, relentlessly pushing against the oppressiveness of the musical patriarchy. As we commemorate the centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States through song for this year’s festival, it’s important to acknowledge that this milestone achievement was just one victory in the worldwide centuries’ long struggle for equal rights for women that continues today. While it was wonderful to see the many calls in the musical press for increased representation of women on classical music programs back in 2018, which was the centenary year of Lili Boulanger’s death, it was dismaying to see that the only composers anyone was advocating for were living composers, as if no women had ever composed music of worth at any other point in music history. On the contrary, beautiful music has been composed by women through the centuries, and the purpose of this year’s festival is to give this music a proper platform that allows it to be showcased, adding musical dimension to their significance as historical trailblazers.

“…show the world the futile error of men who believe themselves patrons of the high gifts of intellect, which according to them cannot also be held in the same way by women.”

— Maddalena Casulana

In 1568, Maddalena Casulana published her First Book of Madrigals, the first complete volume of music by a woman to be published in recorded western music history. In the dedication, she wrote that her hope was to “…show the world the futile error of men who believe themselves patrons of the high gifts of intellect, which according to them cannot also be held in the same way by women.” She went on to publish two more books of madrigals as well as pieces which were included in other collections. The opening song of this program is taken from her second book. Of her complete works, 66 madrigals survive.

Filmed on September 29, 2020 at The Poetry Foundation as part of CAIC's 2020 Collaborative Works Festival: The Women.

Casulana trailblazed her way into a career as a professional musician, starting as a singer. Her successes were completely unheard of at a time in which women were often considered property. As professional women’s singing ensembles and the new genre of opera gained footholds as popular entertainments in the courts of Italy, trained women singers were increasingly sought after. This demand opened the doors of musical training, which had previously available exclusively to men and nuns, to women. As a result, the women composing music in Italy during these years were also renowned as singers, and they largely worked in smaller-scale vocal genres like vocal chamber pieces that could be performed in the salon.

Francesca Caccini, known during her lifetime as La Cecchina, also came to composition through a career in singing. Born into a musical family, Francesca began her career singing in her father’s ensembles, and quickly gained notoriety and fame as a virtuoso singer. By the time she was 21 years old, the King of France was doing his utmost to get her released from her engagement at the Medici court, who wouldn’t release their prized singer for an extended sojourn in France. In 1618, at the age of thirty and just months before the death of her father, the influential opera composer Giulio Caccini, she published her Il primo libro delle musiche, a collection of vocal works that furthered the development of the monody. The selections on this program are taken from this collection, which Francesca used often in her teaching of younger singers. Highly valued by her patrons, the matriarchs of the Medici family, she would go on to become one of the highest-paid and most-valued members of the Medici court, her salary exceeding that of her father. Her one surviving stage work, Il liberazione di Ruggiero, composed in 1625, is largely considered to be the oldest opera written by a women composer.

Just one year after the publication of Francesca Caccini’s Il primo libre delle musiche, Barbara Strozzi was born. The illegitimate daughter of the esteemed poet and librettist, Giulio Strozzi, an influential member of the intellectual circles of Venice, her father worked to promote his “adopted” daughter’s musical career. After displaying virtuosic vocal and musical ability from an early age, Giulio arranged for Barbara to study composition with Francesco Cavalli – one of the founders of the genre of opera. After many years of performing for the intellectual accademie in Venice, an unusual feat for a woman, Barbara published her first book of musical compositions, a book of madrigals – a daring move for a woman of questionable social status with no patronage (unlike Francesca Caccini’s close, life-long relationship with the Medici family) that challenged the widely-held misogynistic belief that women should not publicly display their intellect at the time. Much like Maddalena Casulana before her, Strozzi was keenly aware of the risks of publishing. In the dedication to her first book of madrigals, to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, she wrote, “As a woman, I am all too bold in publishing this work. I reverently consecrate it to your Most August Highness’ name, so that it may lie protected under a golden oak tree, and not be harmed by the swords of slander that are already drawn to fight against it.” Strozzi would go on to become the most published composer during her lifetime, publishing eight volumes of her music – an astonishing achievement for a single mother of four, who never had noble patronage nor support from the church. A highly experimental composer with both form and modality, she pushed the emotional and expressive boundaries of the cantata form. Aside from her compositional ingenuity and mastery, her prolific output is much of the reason she is so well-represented on this program.

Another Venetian singer who studied composition with Cavalli was Antonia Bembo. Bembo has an extraordinary biography that illustrates many of the challenges women composers faced during the Baroque period. Abandoned by her husband for five years while he went on a military tour, she was left with no means to provide for her family. She eventually filed for divorce, accusing her husband of abusing her, repeatedly raping her while she was pregnant, having sex with the household staff, stealing her jewels, and fathering illegitimate children while he was away with the army. She lost her case and was forced to flee from Venice to Paris with one of her daughters, Diana. She was aided in her escape by the famous lutenist, Francesco Corbetta, who was a high-ranking musician at King Louis XIV’s court. Through Corbetta, Bembo was introduced to the Sun King, who admired her singing and composition so much that he granted her both a place to live and a pension.

Bembo dedicated most of her compositions to Louis XIV in gratitude for his aid, which allowed her to devote her time to composition, including the writing of an opera L’Ercole amante. The selections on this program are taken from her collection of 41 vocal works, Produzione armoniche, and demonstrate her facility with both French and Italian Baroque styles and languages. Perhaps the first truly international woman composer, she was able to go back and forth between styles with ease, blending them at times to create a sound that was distinctly her own.

Another composer who enjoyed the patronage of the Sun King was Antonia Bembo’s contemporary Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. The daughter of a harpsichord-maker and organist, Elisabeth Jacquet was trained by her father in music and displayed exceptional talent at the harpsichord from a young age. She was taken into the French court under the auspices of the King’s mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, who oversaw much of her music education. Around the age of 20, she married the organist Martin de la Guerre, and took on his surname as a secondary surname – a bold proclamation of her intention to continue her professional musical life after marriage. A few years later she would publish her first volume of her music, Les pieces de clavecin: Livre I, which was dedicated to the King. Well-known as a composer during her time, de la Guerre was the first woman to have an opera produced in the history of France, Céphale et Procris. After composing instrumental sonatas that would revolutionize the form, she returned to vocal music, publishing two books of cantatas on biblical subjects, and a final set of cantatas on mythological secular subjects published in 1715. Practical in her desire to have her music performed, she instructs that it is perfectly acceptable to perform the airs from these cantatas as separate pieces, something we have done for this program.

Little is known of the final composer on this Women of the Baroque program, Julie Pinel. What is known is that, like Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, she also was a respected harpsichordist and similarly came from a family of musicians that had many connections to the French court, one of whom, Germain, was the Sun King’s childhood lute instructor. While biographical details about her are scarce, her collection of 31 songs, Nouveau receuil d’airs sérieux et a boire, published in 1737, survives. The opening song from this sole volume of her work is featured on this program.

Women in the early baroque and late renaissance realized new opportunities as the noble classes became fascinated with their singing voices. Born into families (often musical dynasties) that radically valued their education, and mostly supported by wealthy noble patrons, these women carved out wildly successful lives in music through their compositions, as well as their performing careers. As recorded history exalts in the creations of their male peers, our experience of the music of this period is lesser for our oversight of these visionary women. The near-erasure of their works from music history and overfocus on the accomplishments of their male peers would lead the next generations of women musicians to question themselves as they made forays into composition, leaving them to feel as if they were starting anew in their efforts to blaze trails and break through glass ceilings. After traveling from Italy into France over the course of this program, we will see in next week’s concert that the proceeding generations of women in Paris, ignorant of this rich musical history, would struggle to gain footholds in hallowed halls of music as composers, and often succumb to crushing internal doubts about their abilities. In this program, it is our privilege to bring alive these foundational compositions and reinterpret them for the present moment, with the hope that today’s composers can feel the long lineage that supports them in their work.