The concerto delle donne () was an ensemble of professional female singers of late Renaissance music in Italy. The term usually refers to the first and most influential group in Ferrara, which existed between 1580 and 1597. Renowned for their technical and artistic virtuosity, the Ferrarese group's core members were the sopranos Laura Peverara, Livia d'Arco and Anna Guarini.
The Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II d'Este, founded a group of mostly female singers for his chamber music series, (). These singers were exclusively noble women, such as Lucrezia and Isabella Bendidio. In 1580, Alfonso formally established the concerto delle donne for both his wife Margherita Gonzaga d'Este and reasons of prestige. The new group included professional singers of upper-class, but not noble, backgrounds, under the direction of the composers Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Ippolito Fiorini. Their signature style of florid, highly ornamented singing brought prestige to Ferrara and inspired composers of the time such as Lodovico Agostini, Carlo Gesualdo, and Claudio Monteverdi.
The concerto delle donne revolutionized the role of women in professional music, and continued the tradition of the Este court as a musical center. Word of the ladies' ensemble spread across Italy, inspiring imitations in the courts of the Medici and Orsini. The founding of the concerto delle donne was among the most important events in secular music in late 16th-century Italy. The musical innovations established in the court were important in the development of the madrigal, and eventually the .
Background Northern Italy was a leading center of Renaissance music, which broadly covered the 15th and 16th centuries of Europe. Regional courts, ruled by competing families—such as the Este, Gonzaga, and Medici—patronized secular music immensely, commissioning compositions and forming large ensembles. Although the frottola style held early popularity, it was quickly overtaken by the madrigal in the 1520s. The madrigal became the most important secular genre of 16th-century Italy, and possibly the entire Renaissance; according to J. Peter Burkholder, "through the madrigal, Italy became the leader in European music for the first time in history". Unlike the frottola, composed exclusively by native Italians, the first leading madrigal composers were foreign Franco-Flemish musicians, referred to as Oltremontani (those from ), such as Philippe Verdelot and Jacques Arcadelt.
At the court in Ferrara, the Duke Alfonso II d'Este formed a group of mostly female singers by at least 1577. They performed madrigals within the context of the Duke's ongoing (), a regular series of chamber music concerts performed for a private audience. Although it is uncertain whether the group's members were amateur or professional musicians, they were noblewomen and would have attended court regardless. These singers included sisters Lucrezia and Isabella Bendidio, as well as Leonora Sanvitale, and Vittoria Bentivoglio. The professional bass singer Giulio Cesare Brancaccio also joined the ensemble.
Formation
The Duke formally established the concerto delle donne () in 1580. He did not announce the creation of a new professional, all-female ensemble; instead, the group infiltrated and gradually dominated the concerts. This ensemble was created by the Duke in part to amuse his young new wife, Margherita Gonzaga d'Este who was musically inclined herself, and in part to help the Duke achieve his artistic goals for the court. Margherita's influence on the church through her brother-in-law, the cardinal Luigi d'Este, allowed the concerto to use church assets such as the San Vito convent in Ferrara. The first recorded performance by the professional ladies was on 20 November 1580; Brancaccio joined the new group the next month. By the 1581 carnival season, they were performing together regularly.
This new "consort of ladies" was viewed as an extraordinary and novel phenomenon; most witnesses did not connect the concerto delle donne with the earlier group of ladies from the 1570s. However, modern musicologists now view the earlier group as a crucial part of the creation and development of the social and vocal genre of the concerto delle donne. The culture at the Italian courts of that time had a political dimension, as families aimed to present their greatness by non-violent means.
Roster and duties The most prominent member of the new ensemble was Laura Peverara, whose musical abilities prompted the Duke to specifically ask the Duchess to bring her from Mantua as part of her retinue. She was particularly lauded for her skill in accompanied solo singing. Peverara was joined by Livia d'Arco and Anna Guarini, daughter of the prolific poet Giovanni Battista Guarini. The latter wrote poems for many of the madrigals which were performed by the ensemble, and wrote texts for the balletto delle donne dances. The well-known singer Tarquinia Molza was involved with the group, but modern scholars disagree on whether she sang with them or was solely as an advisor and instructor. Whether Molza ever performed with them or not, she was ousted from any role in the group after her affair with the composer Giaches de Wert came to light in 1589. After the dismissal of Brancaccio for insubordination in 1583, no more permanent male members of the were hired; however, the ensemble occasionally sang with male singers.
The singers of the concerto delle donne were officially ladies-in-waiting of the Duchess Margherita, but were hired primarily as singers. Despite their upper-class background, the singers would not have been welcomed into the court's inner circle had they not been such skilled performers. D'Arco belonged to the nobility, but a minor family only. Peverara was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and Molza came from a prominent family of artists. The musicologist Thomasin LaMay posits that the women of the concerti delle donne provided sexual favors for members of the court, but there is no evidence for this, and the circumstances of their marriages and dowries argues against this interpretation. The women were paid salaries and received other benefits, such as dowries and apartments in the ducal palace. Peverara received 300 scudi a year and lodging in the ducal palace for herself, her husband, and her motheras well as a dowry of 10,000 scudi upon her marriage.
The new singers played instruments, including the lute, harp, and viol, but focused their energies on developing vocal virtuosity. This skill became highly prized in the mid-16th century, beginning with basses like Brancaccio, but by the end of the century virtuosic bass singing went out of style, and higher voices came into vogue. The composer Luzzasco Luzzaschi directed and wrote music to showcase the ensemble, and accompanied them on the harpsichord. The composer and lutenist Ippolito Fiorini was the maestro di cappella, in charge of the entire court's musical activities. In addition to his duties to the overall court, Fiorini accompanied the concerto on the lute.
Despite having married three times in the hopes of producing an heir, Alfonso II died in 1597 without issue, legitimate or otherwise. His cousin Cesare inherited the Duchy, but the city of Ferrara, which was legally a Papal fief, was annexed to the Papal States in 1598 through a combination of "firm diplomacy and unscrupulous pressure" by Pope Clement VIII. The Este court had to abandon Ferrara in disarray and its music establishment was disbanded. While the existence of the concerto delle donne was widely known, its detailed history was largely lost, dispersed between archival records, until the beginning of the 20th century when the Italian literature critic Angelo Solerti drew attention to Ferrara's 16th century court culture.
Music Performance The concerto delle donne transformed the series. In the past, performers and audience members would alternate roles, as the gatherings were "social music for the enjoyment of the singers themselves". During the ascendancy of the concerto delle donne the roles within the became fixed, resulting in "concert music for the pleasure of an audience". The performances had a restricted audience; only selected dignitaries and few courtiers saw the concerto delle donne; one such dignitary may have been the Russian ambassador , in 1581.
The performers were thoroughly coached and rehearsed in their work, down to all hand gestures and facial movements. The women performed up to six hours a day, either singing their own florid repertoire from memory, sight-reading from partbooks, or participating in the balletti as singers and dancers. The ladies' musical duties included performing with the duchess's balletto delle donne, a group of female dancers who frequently crossdressed.
Aside from Brancaccio, all the singers in the concerto were female sopranos. There is no evidence that the ensemble used falsettists. This fact is surprising, considering that castrati were shortly to become the biggest stars of a new art form, opera. In 1607, Monteverdi's influential L'Orfeo featured four castrato roles out of a cast of nine, showing the new dominance of this vocal type. It also contrasts with the court of Margherita's father, where Guglielmo Gonzaga actively sought out eunuchs.
The elite, hand-selected audience members favored with admission to performances by the concerto delle donne demanded diversions and entertainment beyond the pleasures of beautiful music alone. During the concerts, members of the concerto'''s audience would sometimes play cards. The ambassador of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Orazio Urbani, having waited several years to see the concerto, complained that he was forced not only to play cards, distracting him from the performance, but also simultaneously admire and praise the women's music to their patron Alfonso. After at least one concert, to continue the entertainment, a dwarf couple danced. Alfonso was not as interested in these peripheral entertainments; in one instance he excused himself from the party to go sit under a tree to listen to the concerto, and follow along with the madrigal texts and musical scores, which were made available to listeners.
Style The greatest musical innovation of the concerto delle donne was its departure from one voice singing diminutions above an instrumental accompaniment to two or three highly ornamented voices singing varying diminutions at once. Such ornaments were meticulously notated by the composers, leaving a detailed record of the concerto delle donne's performance practice. Although traditionally such ornaments were improvised in performance, notation was used to coordinate and rehearse the multiple voices; the singers may have continued improvised diminutions in their solo repertoire.
Specific ornaments used by the concerto delle donne, mentioned in a source from 1581, were such popular 16th-century devices as passaggi (division of a long note into many shorter notes, usually stepwise), cadenze (decoration of the penultimate note, sometimes quite elaborate), and tirate (rapid scales). Accenti (connection of two longer notes, using dotted rhythms), a staple of early Baroque music, are absent from the list. In 1592 Giulio Caccini claimed that Alfonso asked him to teach his ladies the new accenti and passaggi styles.
Repertoire
Many Italian Renaissance composers wrote music either inspired by the concerto delle donne or specifically for them. Between 1581 and 1586 especially, Alfonso's court saw its most "vibrant and culturally productive period, during which its literary and musical talents were focused most keenly on providing repertoire for the ladies' performances, both in private and as part of court spectacle".