Women of the seventeenth century lived within cloister walls for a number of reasons. Some had a true spiritual vocation. For them, renunciation of the world was a positive choice; chastity a virtue. Others, mostly older women, found in the nunnery a serene retirement. Widows thought the cloisters to be a fitting coda to a rigorous life of duty to family. Often these women had large family fortunes, which they used to found new nunneries or to commission paintings or other architectural adornments.
There were others, those upon whom we will focus most of our attention, who had artistic—especially musical—gifts. Women of talent and ambition often found the monastery to be the most appropriate place to sing, play, compose, or teach. Finally, there were the many thousands of "extra" females, whose male guardians chose, often for financial reasons, to lodge them in convents against their wills.
Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the female cloistered population began to grow sharply, in direct proportion to the rising costs of secular marriage. It is thought that in Milan as many as seventy-five percent of women born to upper-class families were consigned to nunneries by the end of the seventeenth century. One scholar believes that convents were designed primarily to be a means of controlling the surplus female population of the wealthy or noble classes.
The most eloquent and angry condemnation of the forced claustration of young women was written by Archangela Tarabotti, herself a victim of this practice.
It is well known that the majority of nuns cannot attain perfection because they are forced to the religious life by the force exerted by their fathers and kin . . . these unhappy girls, born under an unfortunate star . . . singing pretty lovesongs and with their tender limbs forming graceful movements, please the ear and delight the soul of the base fathers who, deceitful, weaving nets of deception, think of nothing but to remove them from sight as soon as possible and so bury them alive in cloisters for the whole of their lives, bound with indissoluble knots. Paternal Tyranny, or Simplicity Betrayed, 1654.
All students of female monasticism agree that the issues of freedom raised repeatedly after the repressions generated by the Council of Trent (1545 –63) were primarily issues of class. Poorer women who entered convents did not rise through the ranks, but rather became converse, nuns who did not take final vows and usually functioned as servants. Family ties remained crucial to nuns, even after final vows were taken. Clans associated themselves with particular monasteries for generations. Within the convent, new arrivals were often protected or trained by older relatives. The Bolognese composer Lucrezia Vizzana, who entered the nunnery of Santa Christina della Fondazo at the age of eight, was given much of her musical education by her aunt, Camilla Bombacci, an organist and abbess of the institution in the 1620s. Four Vizzanis and three Bombaccis were nuns at S. Christina between 1590 and 1690.
Secular family relations supplied women with news, small luxuries, and even books, music, and musical instruments. In times of crisis, nuns relied on family connections to solve problems. Women of the upper classes entered nunneries with gentlewomen's skills; if they were placed there as children, they learned score reading, arithmetic, sewing, and the ability to sing and play an instrument. Parents of children with significant musical talent were encouraged to enroll their girls in convents with the inducement of a lowered dowry.
From the later Middle Ages up to the Council of Trent, cloistered life was made tolerable for the daughters of the privileged by free access to family, friends, and the more innocent pleasures of food and music. Nuns put on fully staged and costumed plays during holidays. But Tridentine decrees of 1563 caused zealous reformers to curtail that life severely.
Bishops Carolo Borrhomeo in Milan and Gabriele Paleotti in Bologna not only walled up the convents and limited access to family, but also attempted to restrict, if not entirely curtail, women's musical activities. Horrified women appealed to families, patrons, church councils, and even the pope. In 1586 the nuns of Santi Naborre e Felice in Bologna wrote to the pope to:
. . . express to your highness with all humility their miseries and misfortunes. . . now most recently, besides having the organ removed from here, the doctor has been denied them, so that nobody except father and mother can see and speak to them . . . wherefore we fear that, being deprived with such strictness and abandoned by everyone, we have only Hell in this world and the next.
In truth, important reformers like Carlo Borrhomeo were trying to correct abuses like forced claustration and the truly excessive secularization of some monasteries, both male and female. Unfortunately, the attempt to bring a halt to the involuntary consecration of young people failed utterly, as statistics have shown.
Nuns' music was often at the center of conflicts between monasteries and the bishops who governed them. Over the singing of plainchant there was no controversy. But the singing and playing of polyphony often took on a life of its own. This music was a rare and important source of respectable pleasure for nuns. Furthermore, a fine musical establishment was a source of family and civic pride; often, nuns' concerts were at the heart of the musical life of a city, as in Milan.
Musical prestige encouraged patronage and could be crucial to the financial well-being of a convent. The finest ensembles—Radegonda in Milan, the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, and the Collegio di Sant' Orsola in Navarra—became international tourist attractions. There was clearly an enormous sensual fascination in hearing the exquisite, disembodied voices of highly trained singers wafting over the walls of the convents' inner churches.
I will also say how in this our city [Milan] almost all the nuns' monasteries perform music professionally, both in playing various sorts of instruments and in singing. And in some monasteries there are voices so exquisite that they seem angelic, and like Sirens entice the noble people of Milan to come there to hear them . . . they seem like angelic choirs which soften the ears of the listeners, and are praised by men cognizant of such skill. —Paolo Morigia La nobilita' di Milano, 1595
To the non-virtuosa Claudia Sessa, an admirer wrote:
Shall I call you virgin, of Muse? . . . Those daughters of Jupiter now compete, but it does not seem that they can best you; they perform as Sirens, whose harmonies you surpass. Erycius Puteamus La nobilita' de Milano, 1595
The seductive aspect of nuns' music-making alarmed the more rigorous post-Tridentine bishops. In the 1570s, Carlo Borrhomeo attempted to outlaw nuns' contact with outside (male) teachers, the singing of secular music in parlors, and the playing of instruments. "Unsanctioned female (and only female) monastic music making [was categorized] as sin, even as mortal sin." (Robert Kendrick, Genres, Generations, and Gender, 1993)
Cloistered women musicians struggled with cycles of repression and toleration. In the post-Tridentine era, convent chapels were divided by a high wall into inner and exterior churches, separating nuns and their liturgy from the laity. Visitors could listen from the outer church. In 1584, Gabriele Paleotti ordered the removal of any organ that faced the exterior church. (In one monastery, nuns responded by greatly enlarging the remaining organ.) He also forbade the participation of outside musicians in convent performances and attempted to eliminate the licensing of outside music teachers. This last was a particularly vexing point, which was debated for generations in Milan and Bologna.
The strictest bishops tried, unsuccessfully, to limit nuns' music to the performance of plainchant. To those men, the musical sounds emitted from nuns' throats, by arousing listeners, betrayed the chastity of the singers, and thus required suppression.
At the other extreme, Federigo Borrhomeo, Archbishop of Milan from 1595 to 1631 found in nuns' music-making a legitimate path to states of spiritual ecstacy. He was a great admirer of the Ferrarese composer Luzzaschi, who trained and wrote for the concerto delle donne and encouraged nuns' use of Monteverdi's madrigals, with devotional contrafacta. While he discouraged excessive virtuosity, he viewed the convent as a potential paradise on earth and cloistered singing as an echo of the angelic choir. In this climate, Milanese nuns were able to develop a lively, up-to-date musical culture and high levels of performance.
How did nuns perform polyphony? First, they adapted texts from pre-existing material. In the play Amor di Virtu, the Florentine nun Beatrice del Sera (1515B 86) provided new lyrics to madrigals by Striggio. Federigo Borrhomeo encouraged the humanist poet Coppino to supply Monteverdi madrigals with sacred contrafacta.
Nuns coped with the tenor and bass parts of polyphony in a variety of ways. It seems that some nuns cultivated a baritone range; small transpositions would make all parts singable. When this was not possible, bass lines were taken up an octave or played on instruments. Composers on both sides of the walls wrote pieces specifically suited to the needs of female ensembles.
The sacred concerto, while presumably intended for the use of male choirs, proved to be an ideal medium for women musicians. First devised at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Viadanna (1602), the sacred concerto was the setting of a devotional text for one to three voices and continuo. One of the earliest collections of such pieces after Viadana's was composed by the nun Caterina Assandra of S. Agata at Lomello; her opus 2 Motette were printed in 1609.
It is just possible that the musical practices of cloistered nuns in the late sixteenth century stimulated the development of the sacred concerto. The genre was accepted even by the more antagonistic bishops. Gabriele Paleotti permitted (in 1580) a solo voice to sing to the organ "between psalms; without any concerto." The small-scale motet was, reasonably, frequently cultivated by composers who were nuns, from Assandra to Cozzolani, Vizzani, Badalle, and Leonarda. Convents whose singers and players achieved a high degree of excellence attracted the admiring attentions of male composers.
The scholar Robert Kendrick has assembled a collection of thirty-five music books printed between 1592 and 1679 that contain works dedicated to Milanese nuns. Rognoni's Selva di varii Passaggi of 1620 includes two pieces dedicated to Donna Cracia Ottava Crivelli. One of these, "Quanti mercenarii" is a decorated contrafactum of Palestrina's madrigal "Io son ferito." Three of Cazzati's collections of Cantate morali e spirituali (1659–66) are dedicated to "ale' illustrissima signora" Donna Maria Domitilla Cava. Other celebrated dedicatees were Legrenzi and Isabella Leonarda.
Scholars have only recently undertaken serious studies of nuns who were composers. It is probable that much music written by nuns was lost during the abolition/destruction of monasteries after the Napoleonic conquest (1796). A few composers were fortunate enough to have their works published, doubtless by affluent relatives. This very short list includes Vittoria Aleotti, Assandra, Claudia Sessa, Sulpita Cesia, Cozzolani, Vizzana, Badalla, and Leonarda.
It must be pointed out that these nuns form the majority of women who published music in the seventeenth century. The lives of these women share certain characteristics. All were from patrician families. Cozzolani, Vizzana, and Leonarda were elected to high offices within their institutions. Both Cozzolani and Vizzana witnessed wrenching scandals in their convents, which arose from musical rivalries within the choirs.
It is instructive to compare the musical life of nuns with those in other contemporary religious institutions. The most famous of these were the Venetian ospedale. Instituted in the later Middle Ages by mendicant orders, the four ospedale (Pietà, Mendicanti, Incurabili, and Ospedaletto) were taken over by the state in the fifteenth century. Choirs of women and girls were recruited from the noble and citizens' classes. The choirs and instrumental ensembles were of such high quality that they provided prestige and revenue for their institutions.
Girls were given rigorous training in singing, instrumental practice, theory, musicianship, and pedagogy. Unlike their cloistered colleagues, they not only taught one another but had free access to male tutors, often the best musicians in Venice. Young women could choose to become lifetime members of a choir; the option was (at least theoretically) their own. However, the ospedale offered little opportunity for female composers. The male music masters who, like Rosenmüller, were largely drawn from the Cathedral of St. Mark's, were paid to provide the ospedale with music.
Carissimi, Marazolli, and Mazzocchi worked in Rome and thus belonged to a completely different world. Seminaries, private chapels and the papal choir produced reams of sacred polyphony and were lavishly funded. Musical establishments all included paid professionals, many of whom were not clerics and who also performed in opera. The German College (Jesuit) where Carissimi spent virtually his entire professional life, bore scant resemblance to the Venetian ospedale, in that its choir became a tourist attraction and that the ensemble of boys and men (among them a fair number of castrati) was required to perform from behind a screen.
Curiously, not much is known about the performance of small-scale sacred cantatas. While it can be assumed that works for high voices by Carissimi, Marazzoli, and Mazzocchi were performed by castrati, it is also possible that the important community of secular women virtuosi could also have sung them, perhaps in the salons of Queen Christina of Sweden or the important cardinal-patrons. In the lavish Roman atmosphere, it seems that nuns' music received little attention. Interestingly, Roman nuns were significant patrons of art and architecture.
Even though it seems miraculous that nuns in Milan or Bologna managed to maintain impressive musical communities in the face of occasional severe repression, we must remember that there were some advantages to that life. In the secular world, women musicians were usually discarded when their beauty faded. Even in the eighteenth century, the famous Handel diva Cuzzoni was abandoned by her public after she turned 40. She died in poverty. Nothing is known of the later life of Barbara Strozzi. Perhaps she entered a convent.
Nun musicians lived long professional lives. Furthermore, they were able to compose for and direct large ensembles. In its heyday, S. Radegonda had two choirs, each with its own string band; Cozzolani was able to compose and perhaps direct large-scale music for double choirs. Monastic life, even with its frustrations, was accepted as a normal option for a large percentage of the female population of Italy. Revolt occurred only when repression went far beyond the pale. Through various stratagems, including the use of family influence, the writing of petitions, and flat-out disobedience, nuns often prevailed in their conflicts with patriarchal authority.
—Mary Springfels
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Canti nel Chiostro, Cappella Artemisa, Tactus TC 6000001 (includes three works by Lucrezia Vizzana)
Carissimi, Giacomo. Cantatas, Tudor 735
———. Motets. Bongiovanni GB 1003-2
———. Vocal Music. REM 311084
Leonarda, Isabella. Motets and Sonatas. Bayer 2-10078/79
Luzzaschi. Madrigals, HMFrance HML 590; Amon Ra CD SAR 58
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———. Sacred Vocal Music. Tactus TC 561304; HMFrance HMA 1901032
———. Selva Morale e Spirituale. Hyperion CDA 66021; Sony Classical 5K 53363
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These expanded notes are made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois General Assembly.
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