Barbara Strozzi

Barbara Strozzi was baptised in Venice on 6 August 1619. She was the daughter of Isabella Garzoni, a servant in the household of the poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, who later acknowledged her as his adopted and probably natural daughter. Giulio Strozzi was an important figure in Venetian intellectual life: he wrote opera libretti, including for Monteverdi, and moved in the city’s most brilliant literary circles. He gave Barbara an education exceptional for a girl of her time.

Highly gifted as a singer, Barbara studied composition with Francesco Cavalli, Monteverdi’s pupil and future great composer of Venetian opera. Venice was then in a musical ferment: in 1637 it opened the world’s first public, paying opera house. That same year Giulio Strozzi founded the Accademia degli Unisoni, a circle of scholars and poets that met at his house. Barbara, aged eighteen, sang there and proposed the topics for debate, which aroused both admiration and gossip.

She never married. She had four children, at least three of them with the Venetian nobleman Giovanni Paolo Vidman, a friend of her father’s. Two of her daughters entered convents and one of her sons became a monk. This independence, rare for a woman of the time, and her presence in male academies earned her satirical pamphlets. She nonetheless pursued a unique career as an independent composer publishing her works under her own name.

In 1644 she published her opus 1, a book of madrigals on poems by her father. Seven more collections followed up to 1664, over a hundred pieces in all: more printed secular vocal music than any other composer of her day, man or woman. Unlike many musicians, she worked for no court or church: she dedicated her collections to princes and patrons such as the Duchess of Mantua, the Archduke of Innsbruck and Emperor Ferdinand III, hoping for their support.

Barbara Strozzi is one of the great exponents of the chamber cantata, a new genre in which a solo voice accompanied by basso continuo tells a small dramatic scene, alternating recitative and aria. Her cantatas are full of passion: heartbreak, jealousy, despair, irony. She herself was probably the performer of her works, written mainly for soprano.

Among her most famous pieces are Lagrime mie (1659), in which the singer weeps for her lost love with heart-rending dissonances and striking silences, L’Eraclito amoroso (1651), on the philosopher who weeps for the world, and Che si può fare (1664), a lament over a descending ground bass. Her music shows a perfect command of the new Baroque style and a keen sense of word expression.

After Giulio Strozzi’s death in 1652 she had to manage her affairs alone and invested her money shrewdly. Her last collection appeared in 1664. She died in Padua on 11 November 1677 without a will; her son Giulio Pietro inherited her estate. Long forgotten, Barbara Strozzi was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and is now among the most performed and recorded Baroque women composers.