Tempesta di Mare Presents THE WOMEN BEHIND THE SCREEN

On May 13 & 14, 2023, Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare performs music composed for, and first performed by the virtuosic all-female ensembles of the Ospedali Grandi, baroque Venice's four institutions that cared for its poor, sick and orphaned citizens. Revered across Europe for their extraordinary music making, the women were taught by Italy's most esteemed composers of the era: Vivaldi, Porpora, Hasse, and others.

Tempesta will assemble an ensemble of strings, oboes, recorders, bassoon, lute and organ, the instruments taught at the Ospedale della Pietà, the most famous of the four institutions, where Antonio Vivaldi was the music director. The ensemble will be joined by contralto Kirsten Sollek. Repertoire will include selections from Vivaldi's oratorio Juditha triumphans, which was performed at the Pietà in 1716, plus additional music listed in the Ospedali's institutional archives, copies of which currently reside at Duke University.  

When the musical ensembles of the Ospedali were first formed in the 16th century, they were choirs. Boy residents were trained in various trades, leaving the task of providing choral music for the institutions' church services to the girls. In the 17th century, instrumental instruction was added, and the ensembles began performing motets, oratorios and other sacred vocal music with virtuoso instrumental parts, as well as purely instrumental music. The women's public performances attracted large and wealthy audiences, generating income for the institutions. Each Ospedale had its own music masters and many others taught and wrote for the ensembles, including Giovanni Legrenzi, Antonio Lotti, Nicola Porpora, Johann Adolf Hasse, Baldassare Galuppi and, most famously, Antonio Vivaldi. 

 

The most esteemed of these ensembles was at the Ospedale della Pietà, the institution that took in orphans and foundlings. Many of the "figlie del coro" (children of the choir) would stay at the Pietà for their whole lives, passing their musical knowledge and experience to younger residents, creating a continuing tradition of musical excellence for women in Venice. As the reputation of the Pietà grew, musically talented girls who were not orphans enrolled as paying students. Today, the Ospedali Grandi are thought of as a precursor to 19th-century conservatory training.  

 

Violinist Anna Maria (1695-1782), the most famous resident musician of Pietà, spent her entire life there. One of the figlie privilegiate, choir girls exempted from chores due to musical achievement, she was soloist and concertmaster from 1723 to 1729, when Vivaldi was writing a new concerto every two weeks. The solo part for this Concerto in E-flat, RV 260, appears as number 11 in her personal music notebook, inscribed as "per Signora Anna Maria," and is clearly written for a virtuoso of the highest order.

The women performed behind a lattice screen, which left them shrouded in mystery and resulted in fantastical accounts that imagined them to be beautiful, young virgins. But these were the daughters of poverty, many abandoned as infants or orphaned by disease. In a rare first-hand meeting with the figlie del coro in 1743, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was horrified to discover that the musicians serenading him were mature women aged 21-60, and many were physically deformed, scarred from illness, and otherwise unattractive to him.  

These performances are part of Tempesta di Mare's In-Focus diversity project A Fuller Story, which seeks out the stories of historically underrepresented people and their significant contributions to the creation, survival and subsequent performances of 17th and 18th-century music.  This includes the female musicians at the Ospedali Grandi. The lives of these musicians are a study in paradox. They had agency and celebrity as musicians that few other women had at the time but lived in poverty in regimented religious institutions, prohibited from pursuing music professionally in the outside world should they ever leave.

More information about Tempesta and A Fuller Story can be found on Tempesta's website: https://tempestadimare.org/in-focus/a-fuller-story/

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