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drplacebo* Note: I will make non-FMF posts soon; one big post coming tomorrow, which is taking forever to write both because there's a lot of background info involved and because two hours' worth of writing disappeared into the ether earlier today.
It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
For the most part, it took until the second half of the 19th century for women composers to be socially accepted and achieve even limited recognition, and it wasn't until the second half of the 20th century that women have been recognized as among the leading composers of the day. There were a few exceptions, mostly women related to famous male composers, such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. That makes Francesca Caccini (1587 - after 1641), who worked during the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque era, especially remarkable.
Caccini was part of a musical family; her father Giulio Caccini directed the choir of the St. Nicholas church in Pisa and was highly regarded as a music teacher. The earliest record of her as a musician is from Medici court diarist Cesare Tinghi, who wrote in 1602 about Giulio Caccini's two daughters singing in his choir. Records of her early musical activities are sketchy; the next definite date is 1614, when she had evidently been a court composer to the Medicis for some time, and Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, then Tuscany's de facto ruler, made her the highest-paid musician at the Medici court. Most of her work was incidental music for stage plays, though she published a collection of solo songs and vocal duets in 1618. In 1625 she composed her best-known work, the opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero, believed to be the first opera ever composed by a woman. She remained the Medicis' leading court composer until 1627, when, recently widowed, she married her second husband, a Lucchese nobleman named Tommaso Raffaelli, and moved to Lucca where she was employed in some musical capacity by the prominent Buonvisi family. Widowed a second time, she returned to Florence in 1634 and again served the Medici court as a composer and music teacher until 1641, when she retired and disappeared from the record. Her whereabouts after 1641 are totally unknown.
La Liberazione di Ruggiero represents the earliest era of opera: Claudio Monteverdi, arguably the inventor of opera as we know it today, was still alive and actively composing. Based on an episode in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, it was composed for a visit of the crown prince of Poland, Władysław Sigismund (later Władysław IV), in February 1625. Władysław was so pleased with it that he had it performed again in Warsaw, making it only the second Italian opera to be performed outside Italy. Today it is Caccini's only surviving stage work, and has been performed a number of times since being revived in 1983. The YouTube video featured here is a semi-staged production (with narration in Spanish) performed in Argentina in 2016.
It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
For the most part, it took until the second half of the 19th century for women composers to be socially accepted and achieve even limited recognition, and it wasn't until the second half of the 20th century that women have been recognized as among the leading composers of the day. There were a few exceptions, mostly women related to famous male composers, such as Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. That makes Francesca Caccini (1587 - after 1641), who worked during the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque era, especially remarkable.
Caccini was part of a musical family; her father Giulio Caccini directed the choir of the St. Nicholas church in Pisa and was highly regarded as a music teacher. The earliest record of her as a musician is from Medici court diarist Cesare Tinghi, who wrote in 1602 about Giulio Caccini's two daughters singing in his choir. Records of her early musical activities are sketchy; the next definite date is 1614, when she had evidently been a court composer to the Medicis for some time, and Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, then Tuscany's de facto ruler, made her the highest-paid musician at the Medici court. Most of her work was incidental music for stage plays, though she published a collection of solo songs and vocal duets in 1618. In 1625 she composed her best-known work, the opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero, believed to be the first opera ever composed by a woman. She remained the Medicis' leading court composer until 1627, when, recently widowed, she married her second husband, a Lucchese nobleman named Tommaso Raffaelli, and moved to Lucca where she was employed in some musical capacity by the prominent Buonvisi family. Widowed a second time, she returned to Florence in 1634 and again served the Medici court as a composer and music teacher until 1641, when she retired and disappeared from the record. Her whereabouts after 1641 are totally unknown.
La Liberazione di Ruggiero represents the earliest era of opera: Claudio Monteverdi, arguably the inventor of opera as we know it today, was still alive and actively composing. Based on an episode in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, it was composed for a visit of the crown prince of Poland, Władysław Sigismund (later Władysław IV), in February 1625. Władysław was so pleased with it that he had it performed again in Warsaw, making it only the second Italian opera to be performed outside Italy. Today it is Caccini's only surviving stage work, and has been performed a number of times since being revived in 1983. The YouTube video featured here is a semi-staged production (with narration in Spanish) performed in Argentina in 2016.