Summary: <br> <br> <br> Barbara Strozzi, Amor domiglione (“Sleepyhead Cupid”, 1651); Molly Netter, soprano; Avi Stein, harpsichord; and Ezra Seltzer, cello <br> <br> <br> <br> We mark the death on November 11, 1677 – 342 years ago today – of the composer and singer Barbara Strozzi at the age of 58. Madame Strozzi saw eight volumes of her music published in her lifetime, making her the most extensively published composer of her time. <br> <br> <br> <br> Barbara who?<br> <br> <br> <br> Fame and memory are fickle, to say the very least. It takes very little time for us to forget people who were even recently front-page important. Quickly, off the tops of our heads, who were the vice-presidential candidates on the losing tickets going back to 2000? Who ran with Al Gore? John Kerry? Mitt Romney? Hillary Clinton? (Yes, we remember John McCain’s 2008 running-mate Sarah Palin, but for all the wrong reasons.)<br> <br> <br> <br> (For our information, those recent vice-presidential candidates were, respectively Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Paul Ryan, and Tim Kaine, respectively.)<br> <br> <br> <br> Fame and memory are fickle, often most unfairly so. Certainly, that is the case with Barbara Strozzi, who was a prolific composer of the highest quality working – with some success – in what was most definitely a man’s world. Hers is a fascinating story.<br> <br> <br> <br> Giulio Strozzi (1582-1652) in 1627<br> <br> <br> <br> She was born “Barbara Valle” in 1619 in Venice, the illegitimate daughter of a woman named either Isabella Griega or Isabella Garzoni who went by the nickname of “La Greghetta.” Admittedly, when a woman goes by such a nickname – particularly in a place like Venice, which was the Bangkok and Las Vegas of its time – we generally assume that she makes her living, well, you know, on her back. But La Greghetta was, in fact, a domestic servant in the employ of the poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi (1582-1652). Strozzi was the real deal whose opera libretti were set by, among many other composers, Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi. Giulio Strozzi was almost certainly Barbara’s father; he referred to her as his “adoptive daughter”; she and her mother lived in his home; and at the age of 18, Barbara took the name Strozzi as her own. <br> <br> <br> <br> It was Giulio Strozzi who recognized and cultivated Barbara’s extraordinary talent as a singer and a composer. Guilio arranged for her to take lessons in both voice and composition, the latter with one of the most important composers of the time, Francesco Cavalli (born Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni; 1602-1676).<br> <br> <br> <br> Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676)<br> <br> <br> <br> For Barbara Strozzi, it was a prescription for success. Growing up in what was then the opera capital of the world, in the house of a famous librettist, surrounded by and hobnobbing with singers and composers and studying with the best of them, Barbara developed rapidly. When she was 15, she was described as being “la virtuosissima cantratrice di Giulio Strozzi”: “the virtuosic singer of Giulio Strozzi.” <br> <br> <br> <br> Barbara’s first publication – of an eventual eight – is a volume of madrigals appropriately entitled Il primo libro de’madrigali (“First Book of Madrigals”). Published in 1644 when she was 25 years old, the volume contains madrigals for two to five voices set to texts by her father, Giulio Strozzi. That she was acutely aware of the special challenges of being a woman composer is made explicitly clear in the preface, in which she wrote:<br> <br> <br> <br> “Being a woman, I am concerned about publishing this work. Would that it lie safely under a golden oak tree and not be endangered by swords of slander which have already been drawn to battle against it.”<br> <br> <br> <br>
