Programmes

Four Nuns and a Courtesan:
Female composers from the cloister to the salon

Music
Hildegard of Bingen, Lucrezia Vizzana, Caterina Assandra, Rosa Giacinta Badalla and Barbara Strozzi

Fee range
from £1,000 for one singer and one continuo

Performing forces
solo version with Deborah Roberts, soprano
organ plus chitarrone and/or harp

Description
Available as a one-hour programme with no interval, or full-length concert with reader and optional extra singers

Few people today realise how much music went on in female convents.

They might also find it hard to believe just how many girls ended up in the cloister; often against their will. Yet it is a fact that this was the fate of as many as 70 per cent of women from the upper and middle classes in seventeenth-century Italy. Marriage was a very expensive business, so that the lower dowry required by a convent, particularly for a musical girl, was a very attractive prospect for parents who needed to secure a future for several daughters.

Compared with her later sisters, the eleventh-century Hildegard of Bingen enjoyed a long life in which she was free to both travel - which she did a great deal - and to write and lecture on a vast variety of subjects beyond music. Yet by the seventeenth century, following the imposition of strict enclosure forced upon them by the Council of Trent, music was one of the few remaining ways in which nuns could continue to express themselves

Despite the restrictions, our three later nuns: Lucrezia Vizzana, Caterina Assandra and Rosa Giancinta Badalla all published their music. It is richly expressive, and the technical requirements attest to a standard of performance which must have rivalled the courts of the time.

Barbara Strozzi's music is finally gaining the popularity it has long deserved, but less attention has gone to the lovely sacred music she wrote in addition to her many love songs. In her Sacri musicali affetti she uses all the same expressive devices and word painting that characterise her secular music. Interestingly, the music composed by her often no less worldly, cloistered sisters shares the same musical language. As brides of Christ they wrote love songs to him which were as warm and passionate as to any earthly lover.

This programme is accompanied by readings which contrast the lives of these extraordinary women All were creative and often struggled to find a voice in a highly restricted world. They often found intriguing ways of doing so, and even the genteel nuns of Santa Cristina in Bologna were not beyond hurling roofing slates upon the heads of the beadles sent to wall them in during one of their many conflicts with church authorities.

This concert is both informative and highly entertaining. The music may be unfamiliar, but its quality will be a revelation to many.

Ms Roberts, with her beautifully crystalline voice, superb diction and scholarly manner, demonstrated how such women were able - jealousy, scandal and rivalry aside - to express themselves in "as warm and passionate a manner as any earthly lover."
The Ham & High

Download this description as a PDF file.

Listen to music

Barbara Strozzi: Sino alla morte

Fees are quoted exclusive of travel and accommodation, where applicable. All concert/production costs, including organ hire where necessary, to be met by the promoter.