concerto delle donne

concerto delle donne, a type of virtuosic professional female vocal ensemble that flourished in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Concerti delle donne were especially prominent in the northern Italian courts of Ferrara, Mantua, and Florence.

The end of the 16th century saw a significant shift in the practice of vocal art music in Italy. Madrigals—multivoice musical settings of secular Italian poetry—had until then generally been performed by amateur musicians, including members of the nobility, and had often been composed in a style accessible to nonprofessionals. After about 1580, however, professional performing ensembles—groups composed of highly trained musicians, usually not of noble birth, who performed for noble patrons—became increasingly common. That turn toward professionalization coincided with the emergence of an extremely difficult repertoire of ensemble madrigals and solo songs. The concerti delle donne at the rival courts of Ferrara (seat of the Este family), Mantua (ruled by the Gonzaga dynasty), and Florence (the domain of the Medici family), as well as similar ensembles patronized by the nobility of Rome, constitute part of that trend.

Evidence of a group of professional female singers performing together in Ferrara exists from the early 1570s. A more-prestigious group—the one now most commonly associated with the term concerto delle donne—was instituted as part of the musica secreta (private court music) of Ferrara in the years just following the marriage of Alfonso II d’Este and Margherita Gonzaga in 1579. The latter group included Laura Peverara (or Peperara), Anna Guarini, Livia d’Arco, and Tarquinia Molza. Many prominent composers in Italy—among them Giaches de Wert, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, and Luca Marenzio—wrote works for the Ferrarese concerto. Some of that music was compiled by the poet Torquato Tasso in two collections, titled Il lauro secco (1582; “The Dry Laurel”) and Il lauro verde (1583; “The Green Laurel”), both titles being puns on Peverara’s first name.

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The group in Ferrara seems to have established the mode for such ensembles, and the Mantuan and Florentine courts soon had their own concerti delle donne. Evidence of the Mantuan group dates to the 1580s, and the composer Claudio Monteverdi likely had that group in mind when he wrote some of his early vocal works, especially those in his third and fourth madrigal books (1592 and 1603, respectively). Some of the madrigals in his seventh book (1619) are designated for performance by groups of female singers, demonstrating that the style and texture of the concerti remained an important part of his compositional palette. In Florence the famed intermedi (musical interludes) to the drama La pellegrina performed as part of the wedding festivities of Ferdinando De’ Medici (Ferdinand I) and French Princess Christine de Lorraine in 1589 include pieces composed for groups of professional female singers. The Florentine composer-singer Giulio Caccini trained his two daughters, Francesca and Settimia, in that style of singing, and the sisters performed together as a concerto. The court diarist Cesare Tinghi referred to them as “le donne di Giulio romano” (“the ladies of Giulio the Roman”). Indeed, the lengthy preface to Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602; “The New Songs”) constitutes one of the most-important documents on singing during that period. In it Caccini prescribed the articulation of notes through the opening and closing of the glottis (a technique not normally advocated in 21st-century vocal pedagogy), which enables the execution of rapid and wide-ranging ornaments. That method of singing seems to have been an essential feature of 17th-century vocal technique, and it was a hallmark of the performance practices of the concerti delle donne.

The distinctive musical style associated with the concerti delle donne displays several features that were considered progressive by theorists and commentators of the time; they include virtuosic ornamentation, florid passagework, sometimes biting dissonances, and close attention to the expression of text through music. The richness of that mode of composition and the singing associated with it has led to its description by present-day scholars as the “luxuriant style.”