BARBARA STROZZI: BAROQUE COMPOSER AND FEMINIST

A remarkable woman of the Baroque period, the Italian, Barbara Strozzi (1619 – 1677), was one of the rare female composers who was recognized in her time as among the most important in the era of European classical music.  After that, like so many women composers, she vanished from the history books for many decades, until, at last, in the twenty-first century, she was restored to her rightful place among famous musicians.

The new genre of opera was developed in the Baroque era: as a singer she had a well- developed sense of drama and was able to express profound and passionate emotion.  A great champion of woman and challenger of conventional gender roles, she dedicated two of her compositions among others to the aristocratic Duchess of Tuscany and the Archduchess of Innsbruck, Anna de Medici.

Perhaps part of her independent spirit arose from the circumstances of her birth as the illegitimate daughter of Giulio Strozzi who came from a powerful Florentine family to live in Venice.  He became a patron of the arts as well as an artist himself who created poetry, plays and wrote texts for musical works.

There is little information about Barbara Strozzi’s personal life so many centuries ago, though it seems her father must have recognized her musical potential early on since he arranged for Francesco Cavelli, Venice’s most important opera composer and musical director of the famous St Mark’s Cathedral, to teach Barbara the elements of opera.

Her mother, Isabella Garzoni, worked as a servant in Giulio Strozzi’s household, though it was never officially confirmed that Barbara was Giulio’s daughter.  Nevertheless, in his will of 1628, he nominated her as potential heir to his fortune.  It was only in his final will of 1650 that he made her Strozzi surname official, stating that he had adopted her.  Still, she took the surname Strozzi in 1637 at the age of eighteen.

Already at fifteen or sixteen, she was mentioned as singing for a gathering at the family home where Giulio set up the new Accademia degli unisoni in 1637, which served as a showpiece for Barbara’s vocal performances.  The academy also acted as a kind of debating society or discussion group with Barbara as mistress of ceremonies.

In spite of her obvious talent as soprano, she was regarded as not entirely respectable since singing was associated with sexual promiscuity in women.  In any event, historians speculate that she may have been a courtesan or high-class prostitute who never married but had a long-term relationship with her father’s friend, Giovanni Paulo Vidman, a match not of choice but by her father’s arrangement.  She had four children, of whom two daughters entered the convent and a son who became a monk. The fourth child, a son, was possibly not Vidman’s.

Malicious gossip and slander aside, Barbara Strozzi became well known to all the members of the Accademia.  A book about the academy written at that time was dedicated to her.  Moreover, she inspired a composer associate of her father Giulio to write no less than two books of songs, well received, the first called Poetic Bizarre by composer Nikolò Fontei who named her the most virtuoso of singers – all at the tender age of fifteen.

In 1644 she was one of the few composers who published her own work without any support from the church or patronage from the nobility.  There were madrigals and eight volumes of music, Opus 1 – 8.  She also wrote cantatas, arias, ariettas and motets, making up a total of one hundred and twenty-five works, which were well received and the publications remained successful over a period of twenty years from 1644 to 1664.

Since she was a singer, the emphasis in her composition was on vocal pieces which were not religious, in the main, aside from one volume of motets called Sacri musicali affetti, Opus 5.  The madrigals were works for more than one voice.  Cantatas, arias and ariettas were expressive solo works in the new operatic style, while arias and ariettas repeated the same music for each verse unlike cantatas, which were more elaborate pieces.  They consisted of multiple sections and a variety of ways of setting the text, ranging from recitative, the closest to speech, to full-blown melodies.  The arioso was an intermediate stage between recitative and aria, more lyrical than recitative and less formally structured than the arias we know today.

Strozzi was an important musical creator in the genre of cantatas, with texts written by herself, her father and by writers in the Marinist tradition of the poet Giambattista Marini who wrote romantic lyrics using complex and elaborate concepts.

She composed prolifically and her hundred and twenty-five long works were unique in many ways.  The poetic texts to her songs even had directions for performance and expression, which were unusual for her time.  The melodies she composed were complex and spectacular, though within a singer’s natural range.  Her rich composition, her performing technique and her own rendering of her work all indicated that she was a true musician in her own right, independent of her father, which happened more and more as he got older.

In 1644 she published a set of madrigals for two to five voices with texts by Giulio but after that he gradually faded into the background, leaving her to shine as musical creator, actress and performer who accompanied herself on the lute or theorbo.

Most of her works were written for soprano voice and she used dissonance to great effect, which was characteristic of the seconda practica tradition.  As virtuosissima cantatrice, namely the composer’s voice, she was intensely emotional, singing texts about unrequited love, using the dissonance of the seconda practica to highlight the extreme   feelings.  In this way the drama of the work was conveyed within an atmosphere of unpredictability.

Her work was on a par with the best of her male contemporaries, the emphasis being on the cantatas.  After 1664 she became less well known, though her work lived on in its intensity and innovative use of form.

Taken from the chapter, Barbara Strozzi:  Women making Music from the book A Modern Reveal:  Songs and Stories of Women Composers is the following appropriate quotation, a dedication by Barbara Strozzi to the Italian noblewoman:

“ I most reverently consecrate this first work, which as a woman I publish all too boldly, to the most August Name of Your Highness so that, under of oak of gold it may rest secure against the lightning bolts of slander prepared for it.”