The great [Genoese] ladies and misses are very rarely seen on the street but usually in a carriage carried by two mules going to church or to visit their friends, otherwise they are always locked up in the house and hardly have the freedom to show themselves at the window. They place great importance in yellow [blonde] hair.
—Wicher Pott, letter of 18 December 1685 from Genoa to his father
Over the centuries, women have made a fundamental contribution to music history. This is certainly true of many Italian women, despite the fact that the freedom they enjoyed was limited compared to that of their Dutch counterparts, according to tourists like Wicher Pott, quoted above. Italian opera has relied heavily on ‘prime’ and ‘seconde donne’ (major and minor female singers) throughout the centuries, except in papal Rome, where women were in principle forbidden to appear on stage in public until the late 18th century. Everywhere else in Italy, women were seen as indispensable, and the best female singers were not even in the shadow of the greatest castrati. They also performed as part of travelling opera companies and, in the 18th century, also as itinerant virtuose on, for instance, the violin.
Of course, there were the convents for women, where the nuns themselves usually provided the music during religious services, and often to a high standard. In the four Venetian ospedali—shelters for orphans, foundlings, the sick, and the elderly—the choir and orchestra members were recruited exclusively from the female part of the residents. They were taught by the leading composers, singing teachers, and instrumentalists of their time. Foreign tourists are therefore often short of words of praise to describe the achievements of these female choirs and orchestras. In addition, numerous women (especially noblewomen) organised musical performances in their own circles, in which they regularly actively participated. And sometimes Italian women protested vehemently against the restrictions imposed on them. The Venetian noblewoman Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi wrote two literary works, in which she wanted to prove “how worthy they [the women] are and more perfect than the men.”
We can follow the Venetian singer and composer Antonia Padoani Bembo (ca. 1640-1720) closely thanks to the in-depth research done on her life and works by the American musicologist Claire Fontijn. Antonia’s father, Giacomo Padoani, was well regarded as a doctor and amateur poet after moving to Venice in 1641. In 1651, he made his will, leaving everything to his “only and beloved daughter,” on the condition that Antonia would respect her mother more than she had apparently done so hitherto. A letter from Giacomo Padoani reveals that in March 1654 Antonia took singing (and composition?) lessons with Francesco Cavalli, the composer of Giasone, probably the most successful Italian opera of the entire 17th century. By then, her reputation was already known far beyond Venice, as Duke Carlo II Gonzaga officially tried to attach her father, but in reality through him “the daughter who sings” (la figlia che canta) to his court in Mantova. For unknown reasons, the move to Mantova did not go ahead.
In August 1659, Antonia became engaged to Lorenzo Bembo, an impoverished scion of one of the ‘old’ houses of the Venetian nobility. Bembo moved in with his in-laws, which soon led to insurmountable tensions. During a military expedition against the Turks, Lorenzo was seriously injured. Three years after his return, Antonia filed for divorce. In a preserved document, she accuses her husband of all kinds of improper behaviour, including continuous neglect of his family and sexual relations with numerous women inside and outside the household. After the storm subsided temporarily, hostilities between Antonia and Lorenzo flared up again in the summer of 1676. In the winter of 1676-77, Antonia made a drastic decision and fled Venice, probably accompanied and assisted by the renowned guitarist and composer Francesco Corbetta. Her destination: Paris. Here she was welcomed in the extensive circle of Italian musicians, actors, and poets working in the French capital. Through Corbetta, she came into contact with King Louis XIV, who was extremely appreciative of her singing and supported her in many ways. Her contacts with Princess Marie Adélaïde of Savoy (1685-1712), the mother of the future King Louis XV, were also close and cordial. This is evidenced by, among other things, the dedication of the aria “Hor che lampeggia in cielo” to the princess and the works Antonia composed in celebration of the birth of Marie Adélaïde’s two eldest sons.
As a composer, Antonia made a name for herself in Paris no later than 1682, when she wrote sacred music for a female religious order, which had a special apostolate to house and train girls who had converted to the Roman Catholic faith. Antonia, too, found her home there as a resident ‘pensionnaire.’ For this pious, but spiritually and culturally vibrant environment, she probably wrote most of her surviving psalm settings, sacred songs, and choral works.
In 1707, Antonia did something extraordinary: she put to new music the libretto of L’Ercole amante, already masterfully set to music by her teacher Cavalli almost half a century earlier. Cavalli’s lavish opera had added lustre to the festivities surrounding King Louis XIV’s marriage to the Spanish princess Maria Theresa in 1662. The young Louis XIV had danced, dressed as the sun itself, during the six-hour performance. Provided with a flattering dedication in Italian, Antonia offered the now 69-year-old monarch her new setting of the opera. In doing so, she aptly paid tribute to the monarch who had supported her for many years, including granting her a pension: during his lifetime, King Louis XIV was often compared to the demigod of Classical Antiquity, being called the ‘Hercule gaulois.’ At the same time, while composing, she must have thought much and often of her own Venetian years in general and of Cavalli in particular.
Antonia Padoani Bembo’s compositions sometimes sound thoroughly French, at other times purely Italian. Not infrequently, she deploys both styles in one work and even tries to merge them. We also find this pursuit of ‘les goûts réunis’ (‘the united tastes’) in composers such as François Couperin, Georg Muffat, and Agostino Steffani in this period.
Further reading and listening
Claire Fontijn, Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) is compulsory reading for anyone wishing to delve further into the fascinating personality and oeuvre of Antonia Padoani Bembo. The book is accompanied by a CD, on which nine complete works and the sixth scene from the second act of L’Ercole amante are performed. The American ensemble La Donna Musicale has released two CDs with seven psalm settings by Antonia on its own label.
