Interview, Christina Pluhar on Wonder Women

Austrian theorbist, harpist and conductor Christina Pluhar delves into the history of Renaissance women composers with Wonder Women - an album featuring the works of Barbara Strozzi, Francesca Caccini, Isabella Leonarda and Antonia Bembo among others, and comprising repertoire particularly concerned with the experiences of women as well as written by women.

The opening track (a Mexican folk-song) vividly reflects traditional male disquiet about women's independence and self-assertion, while extracts from Caccini's only opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero, show us a hint of how that work inverts many of the conventional gender norms of Renaissance Europe.

I spoke to Christina to find out more - how these women managed to defy the odds and forge careers for themselves as composers, the limitations they nevertheless faced as they did so, and why the album's music is so full of witches and sorceresses of all kinds. 

This programme draws together Florentine and Venetian female composers. Was there something unique about those two cities that made them particularly favourable for women to succeed - or would we find other examples if we looked to other regions?

In Florence we have the situation where Giulio Caccini and Peri and other artists (painters, poets, composers) all got together in the Accademia to discuss perhaps the biggest revolution in music history, the birth of opera. Francesca Caccini was born into that environment, and because she had a father who educated her (and her sister Settimia) she was able to learn music. She was a performer on several instruments as well as a singer. And she had an international career - she was invited to sing in France - as well as being the composer of the first Italian opera performed outside of Italy.

Venice, on the other hand, was the centre of the evolution of opera, with the first public opera-houses. Barbara Strozzi was the illegitimate daughter of Giulio Strozzi, who was a librettist and poet there and also part of two cameratas. So she had the luck to grow up in this kind of artistic environment. Giulio had adopted her, which is extraordinary in itself. Usually illegitimate children weren't adopted by the father. She was able to live in his palazzo, and to have at least a kind of social status.

Researcher and conductor Laurie Stras observed a few years ago that many composer-nuns wrote anonymously, so we can never know their names no matter how hard we look. But then there’s Isabella Leonarda - far from being anonymous, she was famous. What was it that brought her that level of fame?

It's hard to know, because of the amount of works written anonymously (or pseudonymously, under a male name).

As for Isabella Leonarda - she entered (or, quite likely, was sent to - though we don't know exactly) a monastery when she was only sixteen. She was lucky, because they let her concentrate on her music - there was no guarantee that they would have allowed this - so she wrote an enormous amount of music, including over two hundred motets in over twenty opuses.

Most of these were printed, and that was also exceptional - for music to come out of this person with this anonymous status of a nun. She had a real career. Why she became famous and others didn't, we don't exactly know. Maybe it was just luck, that she was in a convent that was tolerant. Maybe she had some money behind her, because of course we mustn't forget that printing music was expensive.

The excerpt from Francesca Caccini’s Ruggiero evokes two female warrior figures and a largely passive male character - inverting the traditional gender roles of the time. Do we know how Renaissance audiences reacted to tales like this - would it have stirred controversy?

It's very interesting. I'd draw the comparison to Monteverdi when he wrote his L'incoronazione di Poppea. He spent so many years in Mantua at the Gonzagas' court, where he was very badly treated. Then he goes to Venice and becomes a priest, which for a man was quite a secure post - independent from the crazy situation of being a court servant. While being a priest he was also writing operas for the independent opera-houses. And what he does, with L'incoronazione, is that all the characters in that court are just really horrible people! So by writing this opera he really takes revenge for so many years of suffering being employed by unpleasant aristocrats.

So maybe it's the same for Caccini. She had a fairly free life for a woman of that time, her husband was apparently nice, she was educated in an interesting environment… but still, she only writes one opera, and this opera has Ruggiero as a dumb male, captured by Alcina the bad witch, with Melissa the good witch trying to free him. Melissa doesn't appear in her female shape - she appears as a man. So the implied statement is: If you want to be successful, you have to look like a man, not like a woman. Whereas Alcina appears as a woman, and her kind of success is the enchanting music.

How much should we read into the androgyny of some of this music - romantic songs designed to be sung by both tenors and sopranos, for example, or settings written for a voice-part that seems at odds with the specified gender of the character?

This is by no means unique to female composers - some years ago we were working on cantatas by Luigi Rossi, and it's completely unclear which kinds of voices and singers sang his music. We do know about a French tenor that loved to sing Rossi's cantatas, but none of them are written in the tenor clef; they're all in the soprano clef. Some of them are very virtuosic and have a huge range, so you could imagine they were written for French or Italian castrati - but we have hardly any information about where they were performed.

We do know that Caccini's Liberazione di Ruggiero had no castrati, because its first performance was not in Italy but in Poland. And I suppose there were no castrati there - though it could have been intentional on her part, being more interested in the female characters.

Barbara Strozzi wrote all her cantatas for soprano voice - there's no indication of an alto, tenor or bass cantata. There are cantatas for tenor or bass voice for example in Monteverdi's or Merula's printed works, and sometimes they are published as for soprano overo tenore. Cantatas for bass usually quite different in style. You can assume that cantatas in soprano clef could have been transposed to whatever key was needed by the singer performing them - and most of them were performed by the composer herself. But beyond that we know relatively little, because they weren't big celebratory works performed at court, which would have been well documented. They were daily, almost commonplace, performances, so people wrote about them less often.

Is there any parallel with the switching of default genders in later styles, for example a man singing Frauenliebe und -leben, or a woman singing Winterreise?

That was completely common, but there was much more of a division understood between the singer and the text, so it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows. Of course when the text is sung by a countertenor (or, back then, a castrato) and it's something about a man being tormented by his love for a woman then it makes more sense, but I don't think they cared about it - there's no evidence that it mattered to them, at least.

Part of what you’re trying to rebalance in this album is the way that for much of history it’s been incredibly hard for talented female musicians to make it. Yet some did - Strozzi in particular, who seems to have been so successful that she became financially independent. What was different about her career, that enabled things to turn out so unusually well for her?

Well, in a way things went well for her, but they didn't go that well. For instance: She was the daughter of a librettist, yet she didn't write any operas. She continued to write cantatas for her whole life. And, yes, she earned money by that, because they were printed - she clearly gained funding and support - but you have to compare her to the likes of Francesco Cavalli, her teacher, who wrote an incredible number of operas.

And I always ask myself what went wrong for her, to be in Venice and yet not writing any operas. Was that world exclusively for male composers? Or was there really something else she wanted to do? I can't say. So I'm hesitant to say she had a great career, because at the same time I think she had a really difficult life. It's a miracle that she could make that kind of money - she was a successful performer and composer - and yet there's something missing from her career. I can't quite believe that it was voluntary. I imagine that the environment was closed, because the opera-directors and male composers didn't let her write anything for them.

One of the reasons for this album exists is because I wanted to bring the lives of these seventeenth-century composers into our consciousness, but also because I myself have been an early music conductor for many years, and there aren't that many! I see a big change today - there are young female conductors having great careers and starting to become famous, which thirty or forty years ago would have been very rare. And there's also a change in the attitude and self-confidence of the young instrumentalists and singers.

I think the whole #MeToo movement has improved the situation. Young women today have much more self-confidence and are much more brave than was the case a few decades ago, and that's great. But we shouldn't forget that only a hundred years ago, a woman composer was outright forbidden to compose - Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had to completely give up her musical education and talent because her husband told her to.

I find it interesting to bring it back into people's minds. Obviously the lives of today's musicians can't be compared to the seventeenth century, where women had no rights at all. Another example we haven't mentioned is Antonia Bembo, another Venetian. She was married to a very violent man, who was mistreating her and her children, and she asked the authorities for a divorce. But it wasn't allowed; the authorities made the decisions, and women had no rights, even in cases of violent abuse. So a couple of years later she escaped to Paris, though she had to leave her children behind her. Once she was there she was very successful, gained support from Louis XIV, and became famous in France. 

Why are there so many witches, sorceresses and supernatural beings represented in the music on this album?

La bruja ('the sorceress') is a traditional Mexican song. The album is, of course, about the female composers of the seventeenth century, but I also wanted to enlarge it and broaden the focus. That's why we also included traditional music in the album. So the opening track is La bruja - not only because it’s a fantastic piece, that's sung so nicely by Luciana Mancini here, but also because I love the fact that a generation or so ago in Mexico, 'bruja' was what the men would call women who tried to be free and independent, and didn't want to be in the shadow of their husbands.

Is that just an insult, or did they think these women were actually witches?

It has nothing to do with magical powers - it was just a word for women who didn't want to fit in. But for me, it's a great thing, because I think women from all cultures and in all times should be able to live freely and live their lives as they like. So that statement comes first on the album. It's not a coincidence. And maybe it's also linked to some of the things that Francesca Caccini is saying in La liberazione di Ruggiero.

Against the backdrop of a society that largely denied the idea of women being capable of musical achievement, the women on this album prove otherwise. Is there any evidence of minds changing in their own time - of detractors coming round and conceding that these composers were, indeed, just as accomplished as their male colleagues?

We have a lot of written accounts about Strozzi and Caccini - as performers. Women performing, and really moving the audience, is something we have a lot of evidence about. Especially when they're young and pretty! But then inevitably with age comes the time where it was felt that they should get married and disappear from professional life (and you can see this happening right up to the twentieth century). As for accounts acknowledging them as composers, I'm not so sure. It might have been an area that men felt was more their territory.