Beatrice Venezi’s BLOG – From Hildegard to Nannerl. The Baroque as a haven of happiness.
Today I don’t just want to tell you a story. I want to read it to you. I have some documents with me — a letter written almost four hundred years ago, a dedication from a sixteenth-century book, a note from a brother to his sister — and these documents, when laid out in sequence, tell a story that for centuries someone has tried to erase. Let’s start with the most recent one. It dates from 1920 and is signed by an English gentleman, the founder of one of the world’s greatest orchestras:
«There are no female composers; there never have been, and there never will be.» — Sir Thomas Beecham
Take a moment to reflect on that phrase “there will never be”. It is not an opinion. It is a judgement, delivered with the same calmness with which one states a law of nature — rain falls, the sun sets, women do not compose.
The year is 1920: across half of Europe, women are beginning to win the right to vote, and a cultured, refined and authoritative man writes with nonchalance that half of humanity is, by nature, incapable of making music.
He was wrong, of course. But what I want to show you today is something else: his posture was no accident. He was repeating, in his own words, a phrase that had been spoken for centuries. And my job, I believe, is ultimately this too — to go and recapture the music that phrase has made disappear.
The story begins much earlier, in the Early Middle Ages, with the first female musician in recorded history: Hildegard of Bingen. A woman who had visions, and was therefore believed to be mad, and whom the Church, at one point, simply forbade from singing — from letting her melodies float through the church. I shall talk about Hildegard another time, because she deserves an episode all to herself, and I do not wish to merely touch upon her. In this article, I shall limit myself to mentioning her because of the principle she illustrates as the exception that proves the rule: a woman, at that time, could at most perform music — for pleasure, for entertainment. To compose it? No. And even if she did compose it, she could not admit to it.
In fact, for centuries, almost none of the music composed by women has survived. Then — and this is where the bright part begins — something happens.
There was a time when it seemed as though everything might change. It was the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and it was as if the sea, for once, had receded, revealing an island. A happy island. Europe was filled with female musicians; painters began to depict them proudly holding their instruments; some of them signed their own compositions; some were paid as much as the men. For a few decades, on that island, the impossible became possible.
The first to set foot there has a name we should all recognise, And yet almost nobody knows her: Maddalena Casulana. It is 1566, and Casulana becomes the first woman in Western history to publish her own music under her own name. It wasn’t enough for her simply to compose: she wanted to put her name to it. And in her first book of madrigals, published in 1568, she wrote a dedication that still moves me today, because she didn’t ask anyone’s permission. She said she wanted to prove to the world:
«The vain delusion of men, who consider themselves such masters of the lofty gifts of the intellect that it seems to them these cannot be equally shared by women.»
Read it carefully. In 1568, a woman put it in black and white that it was a “futile mistake” for men to believe themselves to be the sole masters of intellect and talent. She wrote this in a dedication – that is, in the most prominent part of a book. She did not whisper it. She had it printed.
Casulana wasn’t alone. Around her, and following in her footsteps, there was a veritable court of rebellious young women. There was Barbara Strozzi, born in Venice in 1619 — Venice, which at that time was a small enclave where a woman could study, sing, travel and even inherit property. Barbara went on to become the most prolific composer of cantatas of the entire seventeenth century. And do you know what she got in return? Suspicion. Gossip. She was free, independent, supported herself through her art, and was unmarried: so the malicious tongues insinuated that she was a courtesan, because a woman like that, evidently, must have had something else going on. It is a murmur that comes from far away, that sceptical sneer from those who always imply that a woman, to reach such heights, must surely possess other talents. We know it well, even today. Barbara knew it, and she played on it: her first book introduces her in this way —
«My first work, which, as a woman, I am being rather bold in publishing.»
“Far too bold”. With what irony, and what pride, a 17th-century woman apologises for daring to do so!
Then there’s the brightest star of them all, the beating heart of that island: Francesca Caccini, known in Florence as ‘la Cecchina’. A singer, lutenist, harpsichordist, poet in Italian and Latin — and, above all, the first female opera composer in history. At the Medici court, she wrote, composed, taught, and became — brace yourselves, at a time when we are still fighting for equal pay — the highest-paid musician of all. Not just the highest-paid woman. More than anyone else, men included. On that island, for a moment, the impossible truly was possible.
And then the island sank.
Why history, every now and then, instead of moving forward, she retraced her steps, going backwards. The men turned up their noses: their dominance in the arts, achieved without having to compete with anyone, was suddenly under threat. And so the old weapon of all time — morality, reputation — returned to mask the insecurity of a society that wanted women shut away at home once more. Listen to the voice of that receding tide. It is a letter from 1633, written by the poet Fulvio Testi to the Duke of Modena:
«A woman who pursues a career as a musician seriously jeopardises her reputation. If Your Highness seeks perfect integrity in female singers, do not look to this part of the world. Here, female singers take certain pleasant liberties, and a great many other women too – who cannot sing – become singers in this part of the world.»
Can you sense the implication? Testi doesn’t dwell on it. He leaves the sentence hanging — “they become singers”, as if to say something else — and leaves the rest to be implied. It is the same voice as Beecham’s, three hundred years earlier. The exact same voice.
The letter was followed by the law. In 1686, Pope Innocent XI forbade women from taking part in any musical or theatrical performances, and banished all female singers from Rome. In their place, castrati took to the stage — children who had been mutilated to preserve a high-pitched, “feminine” voice, yet with the power of a man’s chest: rather than allow women to sing, it was deemed preferable to create men who could imitate their voices. Women were left with but one refuge: the convent. The island had once again been swallowed up by the sea.
And it was precisely in this insular world that, in 1751, a little girl was born in Salzburg.
Her name is Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia. At home, they called her Nannerl. Before the world came to know Mozart – Wolfgang Amadeus – she was the Mozart family’s child prodigy. The eldest sister. At the age of twelve, her father described her as one of the finest pianists in Europe, and the famous duo of child prodigies who enchanted every court on the continent were none other than the two of them, sitting side by side at the piano: Nannerl and her little brother, five years her junior. As she grew up, Nannerl also became an excellent composer.
But there’s a problem: she’s a girl. So, when he set off on his journey to Italy in 1769 in search of fortune, his career was sidelined in favour of his brother’s, which was more comfortable. He left, she stayed at home, and every time he left, she was struck by excruciating migraines — as if the music she could no longer let out were building up inside her until it threatened to make her burst. She shut herself away in her room, in the dark, for days on end.
Her brother, however, adores her. He shows her every note he writes, holds her opinion in the highest regard, and at first conceives his music for four hands — as if playing it alone, without her, would make it incomplete. And at one point he writes her a note. It is the most tender, and at the same time the cruellest, document in the whole of this story, because it is the genius himself begging his sister not to give up:
«I’m amazed! I didn’t realise you were capable of composing so beautifully. In a word, your Lied is lovely. Please do try to write more pieces like this.»
But in 1784 she did what was expected of a woman: She marries an elderly baron, moves to a village six hours away from everything she could have been, and raises her own children and those her husband brings with him as part of his dowry. Time for music dwindled, then vanished. She’d received that note from her brother seventeen years earlier — and immediately afterwards she’d locked her talent away in a cupboard.
Nannerl is forced to remain silent.
Nothing remains of the music that Nannerl was capable of composing. Not a single note. The little girl who was perhaps the most talented of them all (“she who possesses true talent“, in Wolfgang’s own words) has, for ever, become nothing more than this: Mozart’s sister.
Right. I’ll leave it there for now, on the threshold of that locked cupboard. Because what comes next is another story, and deserves another instalment. After Nannerl came Romanticism, and Romanticism did something even more subtle than a ban: it did not forbid women from making music; it convinced them that their role was to inspire it, not to create it. The muse, not the composer.
It is the century in which we shall meet a woman whose compositions They were published under the name of her brother Felix — Fanny Mendelssohn — and one of the greatest pianists of her time, who gave up composing, convinced that she was incapable of doing so — Clara Schumann. But I shall tell you about them next time.
For now, just bear this in mind. Beecham wrote in 1920 that that music had never existed. Fulvio Testi had already written as much, in his own way, in 1633. And both of them were wrong. That music did exist, and how. It’s just that almost no one allowed it to be written down. Our task — mine, when I step onto the podium, and yours, now that you are reading this — is very simple: to reopen that cupboard, and finally let those notes ring out once more.
Beatrice Venezi