Breakfast with Boulanger

We live in exciting times when I can be getting dressed to the sound of Lili Boulanger on Radio 3’s Breakfast, or driving to and from doctor’s appointments whilst hearing about the life and work of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Composer of the Week. I take back my churlish comment in my last post: BBC Radio 3 are extending their focus on music written by women beyond a single day, and across a whole week – hurrah – which means, people, I’m mainstream. I can live with it.

Looking ahead, Barbara Strozzi gets an Early Music Show to herself, and Elizabeth Maconchy provides a fitting close to Words and Music. Hensel (or, as she is known to the BBC, Mendelssohn) and Schumann dominate a Coffee Concert, Schumann’s Piano Trio is the subject of Building a Library, and the Boulanger piece I heard on Radio 3 Breakfast (D’un Matin de Printemps) gets a live performance in the evening. Even Francesca Caccini gets a look in, admittedly not exactly at peak listening time, with excerpts from La Liberazione di Ruggiero going out in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Of the eight composers I am writing about, there’s just one who doesn’t get a look in, as far as I can tell: Marianna von Martines. And that just makes me even more passionate about her music – and even more determined to tell the story of her life. I can see why she has dropped off the radar. She writes in the classical style, and those absolute giants of music history, Haydn and Mozart, have that kind of music pretty much sown up. It probably also doesn’t help that there is a not much of a story to attach to her name, or at least not one of the stories which intrigue us when it comes to female composers. No bare breasts (Strozzi), no kings and princes (Caccini and Jacquet de la Guerre), no famous family members with the same name (Mendelssohn and Schumann); no tragedy (Boulanger and Maconchy). But to write Martines’ story, whilst challenging, has also been revelatory, and made me think hard, and creatively, about what exactly constitutes a life – on the page, and in what some people have called reality. Here she is, complete with Latin inscription and extremely interesting headwear.

I tried to see the original at the Wien Museum last year, but because they are re-organising it was not possible. The musicologist Michael Lorenz explains the inscription in his fascinating blog,  http://michaelorenz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/martines-maron-and-latin-inscription.html if you want to know more.

It’s not easy to find quick and dirty access to Martines’ music, but you can find a few bars of her Overture in C, one of the most joyous pieces I have ever heard, on the BBC website, so to get a taste, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yq74f/segments. I recommend, however, a full-blown Martines feast, such as Il Primo Amore, available from Presto Classical. You will not regret it.

Great news – great music on Radio 3!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/international-womens-day-r3

I’d like to think they were listening to me on Radio 4….and, more seriously, one day a year is a start but how about looking at the programming for the other 364?

Particularly looking forward to the Strozzi concert!

Danger: female violinist at work

Here’s the lovely Nicola Benedetti. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when many people were disgusted at the sight of a woman playing the violin. As one writer (in The Girls’ Own Indoor Book, attempting to reassure teenage girls in the 1880s) says

I have also in former days known girls of whom it was darkly hinted that they played the violin, as it might be said that they smoked big cigars, or enjoyed the sport of rat-catching.

By the end of the century, those former days appeared long gone. Violin-playing was deemed ‘lady-like’, if not a suitable job for a woman – when Henry Wood, the visionary director of Queen’s Hall Orchestra and the man behind the Proms, hired six female string players in 1913 he was right to take great pride in his action, but, sadly, other orchestras did not follow suit.

So why did violin playing cause horror in so many? Because it involved what was seen as a distortion of the proper (aka ‘natural’) posture of a woman’s body. To play the violin the woman had to bend her head, use rapid arm movements, both of which were not deemed appropriate to her sex. Gradually, these views changed. So long as the woman remained properly feminine, then she could, and did, play the violin.

But this is where it gets more complicated. A deeper taboo emerges when women become expert at the violin. The violin was itself (herself) understood as female, with its softly curving shape, its belly, back, waist and neck. The real-life woman gets to play the instrument-woman with a stick. A stick. Apparently – and I’m relying on the finest of musicological sources here – the modern bow, which emerged by the end of the eighteenth century in all its sleek concaveness, lessened the connection with archery, but increased its eroticism. I am not one to judge, being a pianist, recorder player and one-time clarinettist. (Don’t even go there.)

No wonder then that the male violinist was often understood as a masterful lover of

his [sic] delicate, exquisitely responsive, and beloved instrument, a perception heightened by the soloist’s caressing arm movements and facial expressions, sometimes accompanied by closed eyes, suggestive of inward joy or ecstasy.

The performer Sarasate, we are told, ‘weds his violin each time he plays…’ with a ‘spirit of ardent love’. Yehudi Menuhin, himself one of the great, and fortunately for him, male, violinists of the twentieth century, said that the violin’s shape is ‘inspired by and symbolic of the most beautiful human object, the woman’s body’ and therefore must be played by a ‘master’.

Menuhin (and he was not alone) was genuinely worried about what happens when a woman plays upon her own body.

Does the woman violinist consider the violin more as her own voice than the voice of one she loves? Is there an element of narcissism in the woman’s relation to the violin, and is she, in fact, in a curious way, better matched for the cello? The handling and playing of a violin is a process of caress and evocation, of drawing out a sound which awaits the hands of the master.

Put a large cello between your legs, darling, and leave the fiddle playing to the boys seems to be the message here.

That was then, this is now. Or is it? A quick google of male violin virtuosos and female violin virtuosos suggests that the old fear of being seen as un-feminine (rat-catching, cigar-smoking) generates a particular kind of image of the female violinist. Further, the traditional erotics of violin-playing produce sexualised images of women and her instrument. The female violinist is never quite the ‘master’.

Similar anxieties emerge in women’s sport. Yes, 55,000 people watched England play Germany at Wembley. England Women. 55,000 people watching women play sport is great news – I should add that the result was less good news – but do have a look at this article about the changes in women’s football, and hear the echoes of the musical world: http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/nov/21/women-football-britain-wembley-england-v-germany. More recently, Sport England have launched a inspirational campaign to persuade more women to take up sport, tackling head on the issue of women’s bodies: https://www.sportengland.org/our-work/national-work/this-girl-can/.

This girl can.

It’s a great tagline – although most of us are not girls. And there are some powerful images.

How does this link with my writing? Because, despite working in the shadow of the courtesan, each of the eight composers I am writing about sent the same message to their contemporaries:

this woman can….compose.

That’s why I admire them so much.

Con fuoco

I sat down to compile a list of the high points of 2014, and realised that there have been so many, that it would be invidious to pick a top ten. But I did want to mark the end of the year by sharing a quotation which has inspired me (and which won’t get into the book); by celebrating the location in which I have probably written more words than any other; and revealing a small personal challenge that will take me well into 2015.

The quotation is from the composer Grace Williams’ farewell letter to her lifelong friend and fellow composer, Elizabeth Maconchy.

Williams (a Wagner-lover, showing that friendship is thicker than Wagner) had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She wrote the letter on 25 January 1977, and died two weeks later.

Well, all along I’ve known this could happen and now it has I’m quite calm and prepared and can only count my blessings – that I’ve had such a run of good health – able to go on writing – and just being me with my thoughts and ideas and sensitivity … From now on it won’t be so good but even so there are sunsets and the sea and the understanding of friends – and a marvellous broadcast of Solti’s recording of Meistersingers on Sunday.

From the deeply moving, to a celebration of Zappi’s Bike Café in St Michael’s Street, Oxford (www.zappisbikecafe.co.uk) where many a paragraph has been edited, and many a slice of Bara Brith, and cup of coffee has been enjoyed over the last twelve months. The place is extra special because Flavio Zappi and I go way back – in those days, I had no idea that he had, in a former life, been a pro-cyclist, and he (and I) had no idea that I, in a future life, would become a pro-writer – I’ve just made that job title up, and I like it. Flavio does not make the coffee any more, but fortunately there is a steady stream of witty, kind, young people who do that. It really is the best coffee in Oxford, and I recommend the place warmly.

And, last but not least, the small challenge. Elsewhere I have written about my delighted discovery of Fanny Hensel’s Das Jahr. Well, I thought it would be a good challenge for 2015 to try to play it. The first step was to spend the vast majority of my lovely publisher’s advance (not a vast amount in the first place, but…) getting my Bechstein upright piano tuned and cleaned – inside and out. Thanks to hours of work by Theo from Roberts’ Pianos in Oxford, the piano is in tip-top condition. Sadly, the same cannot be said for my piano technique. I have however made a start, with ‘March’ (my favourite movement), and I’m working through it, bar by painful bar. I can play the notes – just at a funereal pace rather than the opening’s specified 120 beats per minute, let alone the final section, with its seven sharps, and the instruction: Allegro moderato ma con fuoco.

So, here’s to a 2015 con fuoco!

The mystery of the big dog

It’s probably not a mystery to anyone who knows anything about dogs, but it is to me.

So – for reasons that will become apparent when you read my chapter on the composer Lili Boulanger – I’d love to know the breed of the dog in the picture below. Just click on it to enlarge.

I’d been reading about femme fragile Lili Boulanger’s attachment to her dogs, and imagined her owning some little lap dog. Then I saw this picture. No lap dog this. Remember Lili herself is five foot nine in height…this looks like one big dog!

Mothers and Daughters

I’ve been thinking about mothers and daughters recently – in part because my older daughter is such a brilliant writer – a fact that makes me 99% happy, and 1% deeply envious of her youth, talent and vision – but primarily because, as the book starts to take shape, I am beginning to see the mother/daughter relationship as a seam that runs through almost every chapter. Ideas about motherhood may change over the centuries, but some patterns keep recurring.

Most daughters lose their mothers to death, but there are also mothers who lose their daughters, whether to death, the convent or because the mother herself walks away from her child. Marianne Wieck left her marriage knowing that she could take her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Clara, with her – but only for a few months. As soon as little Clara reached the age of five, she would be returned to very man Marianne was escaping. That is what the law of Saxony in the 1820s required. Clara was allowed to visit her mother from time to time, but it was the dominating Friedrick Wieck who brought her up, and set her on the path to international celebrity – the performer/composer we know as Clara Schumann would his creation. (Amateur psychologists might want to consider the connection between Clara’s childhood and her own performance of motherhood – see https://shadowofthecourtesan.wordpress.com/tag/clara-schumann-google-doodle/ to fuel that fire.)

And there are the mothers who live out their own dreams through their daughters, talented women who see an even greater talent in their child, or work to create a world in which that talent can express itself. It does not always make for an easy life, for mother or for daughter. Now is not the moment to ask questions about the real identity of the woman known as Princess Raïssa Mychetsky of St Petersburg.

Suffice to say that she created, first as the young wife, and then the young widow, of the much-older Ernest Boulanger the perfect Parisian shop window for her two surviving daughters’ talents. What is more, she turned a blind eye to the long-standing affair which served to help her older daughter’s career, and assiduously supported, and relentlessly interfered in, her younger daughter’s progress, whether smuggling little treats into the Palace of Compiègne or accompanying her every step of the way to Rome. The rules said that family were not allowed at Compiègne or Rome. Raïssa ignored the rules: did Nadia and Lili Boulanger gain or lose from her devotion?

But there are a couple of moments, a couple of relationships, that stand out for me. One comes at the very beginning of my story, the other at the very end. Both involve mothers and daughters who are professional musicians: three out of four of the women are composers.

Back in Medici Florence in the seventeenth century, Francesca Caccini was determined to keep control (whatever that might mean) of her daughter, Margarita’s, future. Francesca lived and worked, and was a mother, in a world which straightforwardly valued boys more highly than girls. Indeed, Caccini’s biographer speculates that when the composer herself was born there may well have been a somewhat muted banquet because, regrettably, she was a girl. The problem with daughters went beyond the belief that the birth of a girl signified weakness in one parent or the other, and into the more practical realm of money. Girls needed dowries, so, when Francesca was 7 months’ old, her father, the composer Giulio Caccini, sold land and farm buildings in Fiesole so that he could place 600 scudi in an account at the Monte di Pietà, Florence’s principal dowry bank. As an adult, and as a mother, Francesca Caccini, should have prioritised her (almost noble) son by her (almost noble) second husband. Instead, all her emotional energy seems fastened on her (singer) daughter by her first (artisan) husband. Not only that, she seems uninterested in achieving a marriage for her daughter. Threatened by the loss of teenage Margarita, who was going to be removed from her care and tuition, Francesca Caccini did everything in her power to keep the girl with her. To us, it seems that she uses the language of utility and business, not sentiment. Caccini has trained up Margarita as a singer. If she is not allowed to keep her daughter near her and thereby continue her musical education, then not only will the girl lose ‘all that she has learned’, but her mother will lose a source of income. Caccini would be left with ‘all my time wasted, and with no fruit…’ Finding out whether Caccini succeeded in her struggle for her daughter, and learning more about the consequences of that struggle (not to mention reading between the lines for the kinds of emotions we value today), has been fascinating, revealing so much about the world in which these women lived, but also the similarities and differences between now and then, them and us.

Fast forward 350 years, and move from Italy to England, and we are in a more familiar world – in some respects at least. The composer Nicola Lefanu remembers

hearing my mother playing the piano when I was in bed going to sleep at night when I was very tiny. I think of it as a sort of romantic memory but it’s really the opposite; she was a professional composer and at that stage the only time she had to write music was when her children were in bed.

These childhood experiences inform Lefanu’s understanding of what it is to be composer. It is very much a vision of the composer in the world.

I never saw myself as a composer set apart because I don’t think composers are set apart, really. I think music is a social art, and that composing is a solitary activity but it comes to fruition in a social context, and that’s always been something I believed. I don’t see composers or writers or anyone as on a pedestal; I don’t have a nineteenth-century view of them like Wagner did; maybe that’s the advantage of having had a mother who was a composer. On the one hand it’s the most fantastic role model, but, equally, I knew that being a composer was quite an ordinary thing; it’s a lot of hard work and it can be very distressing: works can get turned down, and all kinds of bad luck can get in the way, but it can also be very elating and wonderful when things go right. I was very familiar with the vicissitudes of the profession and I had absolutely no illusions about it.

Lefanu’s mother was Elizabeth Maconchy, one of the great composers of the twentieth century. Maconchy’s daughter is not saying that her mother was ‘ordinary’ – obviously Maconchy was exceptionally talented as a composer – but making the crucial point that it was entirely ‘ordinary’ that Maconchy was both composer and woman (and mother). This meant that as a child, Nicola Lefanu thought it was self-evident that she herself could be a composer. It never entered her head that composing was a male activity, that it would be an odd job for a woman. Instead, she took it ‘completely for granted’.

(Prayer Before Birth, Maconchy’s 1972 setting for women’s voices of Louis MacNeice’s powerful poem, which he wrote during the darkest days of World War II, seems appropriate here. Maconchy was heavily pregnant with her first child when war was declared in September 1939. Nicola was her second daughter, born in 1947.)

Lefanu’s personal experience taught her something that our society still seems slow to realise. It is, or it should be, ordinary for a woman to be a composer. It is, or it should be normal for a Mum to be a composer. Earlier this year, I ended my radio talk with the utopian vision of a future in which hearing women’s music, whether in our concert halls or on Radio 3, would be the ‘new normal’. It really shouldn’t take growing up with a composer for a Mum to make that possible.

Corsets, refugees, and skipping ropes: what I’m not saying about Lili Boulanger

There are two things that I tend to say to students, and to myself. One is to imagine a fierce (fierce because she cares, of course) Anna standing at one’s back saying ‘So what?’ The other is to remind the non-fiction author, even those who are writing academic essays, and particularly those who are not, that one’s work should not anxiously display everything one knows. In other words, cut, and cut again.

But, hey, who says that I’m right? So here are some thoughts about underwear, starving refugees, and skipping ropes – three topics which cannot, will not, be squeezed into an already bulging chapter on Lili Boulanger.

So, underwear first, naturally. Lili Boulanger was a very sick woman for most of her life. Born in 1893, she was tall for her time (five foot nine inches), and very slender. No, she wasn’t anorexic, she – probably – had Crohn’s Disease, or, since Crohn’s had not been ‘discovered’ then, abdominal tuberculosis. The labels don’t really matter. She suffered horribly, and there was nothing anyone could do to help.

I’ve been trying to understand how her experience of illness impacted upon her career as a composer – it’s not always straightforward – but I’ve also been thinking about Lili’s day-to-day life in the 1910s. How did she actually manage to function with her dismal repertoire of symptoms? Forget for one moment her compositional activity. How did she, a young ‘lady’ from a privileged Paris world, cope practically with the round of dinners, picnics, balls, concerts, long journeys to the South of France…whilst experiencing recurrent acute abdominal pain, diarrhea, and fevers to name but three of the most distressing symptoms of Crohn’s?

Which is why I was thinking about underwear and the myriad ways in which women’s clothes make life just that little bit harder than it needs to be. Especially if you are sick. I found out that (and all things are relative), it would all have been even worse for Boulanger if she had been a decade or more earlier than she was. For anyone with severe abdominal pain, any kind of corsetry must have been unpleasant, at times agonizing, but at least this

wasn’t the fashion by the time Boulanger reached adulthood.

Nevertheless, in the liberated 1910s, the stomach still remained compressed by the new, more ‘natural’, corsets – and women still wore five pieces of underwear: chemise, corset, corset cover, drawers, and petticoat. Nipping to the loo is not really an option under these circumstances. You can sort of see why bed rest might have been the easier option for a sick woman. All this makes me even more delighted that Lili Boulanger (lightly corseted, one hopes, and with a skirt that reached just above – yes, you read that right, above – her ankles) learned to ride a bike in the summer of 1911, pedaling in the lanes around Hannecourt, a hamlet west of Paris, close to the Seine, where the Boulangers had their second home. Lili’s first lesson was on 27 July. Two weeks later she has been on an expedition to a hamlet some six kilometres away, then the following day, sixteen kilometres, there and back, to Mantes-la-Jolie, her local town. A day off the bicycle was followed by an impressive expedition to Houdan, just over thirty kilometres away. Forty miles and a novice. Chapeau, Lili!

I visited Hannecourt while I was in Paris, travelling by slow train as Boulanger would have done from the Gare St-Lazare, close to her city address in the 9th arrondissement. But I didn’t get off at Gargenville (Hannecourt’s village), but kept going a couple of stops to Mantes-la-Jolie, to see an exhibition called Maximilien Luce: quand l’art regarde la guerre: 1914-1918. I was the only person there, which was a relief in that I was shaking after only a few minutes, and spent much of the time trying not to sob. Luce was a pacifist, and his work speaks eloquently to the horror of war. And suddenly I realized that, although Boulanger notes (in passing) that there are Zeppelins overhead at 10am in Paris, and writes with despair when she hears about the Battle of Verdun, it is as if the war is happening to other people, somewhere else. Luce’s art, and the documents provided in the exhibition, shows that it was happening right on Boulanger’s doorstep, whether in Paris or Hannecourt. Surely there was no way to escape the sight of columns of Belgian refugees trudging

through the village near the Seine,

no escaping the sight of young men heading to the killing fields from Paris’ own Gare de l’Est?

I have to admit that writing the life of Lili Boulanger has been tough – one of the reasons I write is to get a sense of detachment from lived experience, and that detachment is difficult to maintain in the face of terminal illness or the mud of the trenches. I was, however, greatly cheered when I came across the following photographs here: http://www.musimem.com/prix_rome_1909-1913.htm. Lili Boulanger’s greatest achievement, according to the music history books, was winning the Prix de Rome, the most prestigious prize in French music. To win, she had to go into a kind of retreat with the other finalists at the palace near Paris, and produce a particular piece of music. Sort of Big Brother meets the Great British Bake-Off but with a cantata rather than a lemon tart as the outcome, and a cast made up of young male composers (and Lili). Anyway, these photos, taken, I think, a year or two before Boulanger’s time at Compiegne, show the Finalists having a joyous time.

I just hope Lili Boulanger, in the summer of 1913, got to jump rope.

Looking for Lili

I could almost re-print, word for word, my first post on this blog, written just after arriving in Palermo. Just change Palermo to Paris. It’s the fantasy that one can touch down in a strange city, and suddenly writing will become easy. And then the reality. In practical terms, so many little things need to be sorted out (getting the coffee right, getting hold of more pillows…these things are important, no?). Emotionally, a small voice is saying, quite insistently, ‘what are you doing here far from the comforts of home and loved ones?’

Fortunately, due to the fact that I was arriving in Paris on Monday night, and Professor Sassanelli of Bari University was leaving Paris on Wednesday morning, I was forced into action, and out of the apartment, on my very first day – the professor being someone I wanted to meet in connection with my research into Lili Boulanger’s short life (1893-1918). Sassanelli has been working on the contents of a locked suitcase deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale de France by Nadia Boulanger, big sister to Lili, and fierce protector of not only her own formidable reputation as one of the great figures in music in the twentieth century, but that of her composer little sister.

Nadia placed a long embargo on the suitcase being opened (she died in 1979), and even when the embargo ceased, nothing was done for a time, perhaps because of anxiety about its contents.

 

Put simply, there are two dominant narratives in play concerning Lili Boulanger – and her family. One is of Saint Lili, the sweet-natured, supremely talented, doomed girl-woman. The other, proposed by her most recent biographer, Jerome Spycket, is more ordinary and, in that sense at least, more convincing. Lili, it seems, did have some very good times in her short life – and it’s thanks to Spycket that I know about Lili and her bicycling adventures – more of which another time. For the moment, here’s a gratuitous image of a woman on a bicycle, dating from 1922, but relevant to 1911 as you will find out if you click on http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com.

To return to Spycket: his book is also much more speculatively salacious. He identifies a host of ‘mysteries’ surrounding Lili Boulanger and her family, and does not hold back from offering his own solutions to those mysteries. (I should add that there’s also an eminently sensible book by Caroline Potter which tries to re-focus everyone on the music).

So, that’s the state of play at the moment. Over coffee, Professor Sassanelli filled me on some of her findings. I, like everyone else, will need to wait to find out the detail – until her work is published, and until the documents themselves have been through the cataloguing system of the library. For now, however, and without jumping the gun on Sassanelli’s months of hard work, it is enough to say that we had an interesting talk about Nadia Boulanger’s belief that certain aspects of her life needed to be kept out of the public domain, most likely out of a desire to maintain her professional standing.

And so, once again, the shadow of the courtesan is cast. Nadia Boulanger believed, perhaps rightly, that any hint of an emotional, let alone an erotic, life would compromise her professional standing. To achieve what she did (and, by God, she achieved a lot), that aspect of her existence had to be sacrificed and/or concealed.

That was yesterday. Today it’s been a complete change of gear. No more Lili Boulanger for a while – instead, it’s time for the composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, who flourished in another Paris, that of the last years of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Her territory was the Île Saint-Louis, about 10 – 15 minute walk from my tiny fourth floor apartment near Place Monge.

Here’s the island (Isle au Vaches) before Louis XIII and those seventeenth-century property developers got hold of it.

Tomorrow, the plan is to set off early to avoid the hordes of tourists that I witnessed yesterday as I walked to and from the Bibliothèque nationale (I found out later that Beyoncé was visiting Notre Dame Cathedral that very day, and that her daughter, Blue Ivy, played the keys of the organ, as can be seen in some touching family photos posted by the-artist-who-is-coming-to-haunt-this-blog) and seek out Jacquet de la Guerre’s Paris. I’m looking forward to my early morning walk, and might continue what I like to call research by visiting the handful of magnificent churches where Jacquet de la Guerre’s male relatives plied their musical trade (Notre Dame – complete with its organ touched by Blue Ivy, Saint-Chapelle, Saint-Severin, Saint-Eustache…it’s a very fine itinerary). By then, it will be time for a long lunch I expect. Just don’t ask me tomorrow evening how many words I have written.

Little Angels? The mystery of the Alleota sisters

One of my duties as a non-fiction author, and I take this duty seriously, is to bear witness to the past – and, in the case of this book, to uncover the details of lives that have tended to be overlooked or undervalued. Myths are as important as facts, however. Take the following description of the exceptionally talented choir of nuns of the convent of San Vito, Ferrara:

It appeared to me that the persons who ordinarily participated in this concert were not human, bodily creatures, but were truly angelic spirits.

Just in case the reader thinks the writer is finding nuns attractive, there is a careful distancing. The reader must not ‘imagine that I refer to the beauty of face and richness of garments and clothing’. No, ‘one sees only the most modest grace and pleasing dress and humble deportment in them.’

The demand for modesty, grace, humility, for little angels, is one that informs women’s lives, that teaches us all, to quote Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl. As the ground-breaking musicologist, Suzanne Cusick, writes about Renaissance composers: women are seen in their own time as angels or sorceresses, not truly human, ‘never what they are actually are …. formidably talented musicians’. My job, as a non-fiction author, is to move past the myths, and try to shine a light on what those nuns actually were – ‘formidably talented musicians’ – and what enabled them to be so.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I come across individuals whose lives might be better explored in fiction – not only because there are so few historical facts to play with, but also because one feels that the psychological story could be told better that way.

Take the intriguing sixteenth-century Alleota sisters, based in Ferrara, seventy miles south-west of Venice. One of the few points of certainty about the Alleota sisters is that (as so often in the lives of female composers) there is an ambitious father in the background. Giovanni Battista Alleoti was a successful engineer and architect for the powerful Este family in Ferrara.

So far so good, but then there is mystery. Were there two composer sisters or only one? One story has Vittoria learning her art simply by watching her older sister, Raphaela, being taught. Little Vittoria emerged as something of a prodigy, outstripping her older sister. Another view of the evidence suggests, however, that Vittoria and Raphaela are one and the same person.

A simple reason for the two names can be found in the fact that Vittoria was sent to the convent of San Vito – that same convent of angelic nuns noted above – when she was seven, and chose to stay there, if that is the right word, when she was fourteen. For Vittoria, it was a simple choice between continuing a musical life within the convent, or getting married and not doing so. It is quite possible then that, at some point during her time as a nun, Vittoria changed her name to Raphaela.

But two publications appeared in the same year, 1593, one by Vittoria Alleota, the other by Raphaela Alleota, one secular, one sacred. Neither publication acknowledges the other. One scholar, whilst acknowledging that there may well have been two sisters, has hinted at an almost schizophrenic division of personality if there was only one:

One senses that Vittoria and Raphaela, whether the same or different persons, did not wish to know one another.

She goes on to argue that whilst her/their father is in control of the secular music, Raphaela writes her own dedication to the Sacrae cantiones.

Perhaps Raphaela sought to heal a private demon by asserting a new identity that distanced her from her family, especially from her father. Little Vittoria, father’s pride and prodigy, seems to disappear completely, replaced by an independent woman who could select her own texts and lifestyle.

 

Move forward a few years, and we find a description of the ‘Maestra’ of the Convent of San Vito, Ferrara who ‘sits down at one end of the table and with a long, slender and well-polished wand…’ No angel, this Maestra beat time, in an era when the idea of the conductor was entirely new. The Maestra is named as Raphaela Alleota. It seems she had found her place.

 

 

There is no portrait of Alleota, so a modern female conductor, Anu Tali, and her ‘wand’, will have to do. For an entertaining look at the growing presence of female conductors in the classical music world, 400 years and more on from Alleota at the convent San Vito, see http://jessicamusic.blogspot.de/2013/09/fanfare-for-uncommon-woman-conductor.html. Progress is, however, slow…

 

 

Tonight’s the night

Morecambe and Wise, Beyoncé, and Miley Cyrus made it through, but (as far as I can remember) President Obama disappeared without trace. And Chrissie Hynde put in a late, unplanned appearance, complete with rude words, which may or may not have made the director’s cut. All this, in a back room of the ICA on a hot summer night last month. And tonight’s the night when I find out what I actually said for Radio 4’s Four Thought. To be honest, it was all a bit of a blur at the time.

 

An enjoyable blur, however, partly because the producer, Giles Edwards, nudged me firmly and wisely with regard to content and delivery, but mainly because the other speakers were so good: polyamory, anger, and the Caribbean as paradise explored with energy and wit.

 

Meanwhile, back at the business end of things (aka actually writing the book), it’s getting exciting again. First up, two  intriguing Parisian composers, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and Lili Boulanger.

 

Even a few days into the research, the conventional picture of at least one of the women is starting to look deliciously dodgy – more another time, but that’s her above. Right now, I’m getting everything together ahead of a research trip to Paris, not to mention dusting down my schoolgirl French in preparation for the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale. It took me about 30 minutes to write a three sentence e-mail to the librarian there, and one of those sentences was apologising for my French. But, as I did in Florence and Lucca, Berlin and Leipzig, Vienna and Venice, I will be wandering the streets in which Jacquet de la Guerre and Boulanger lived, soaking up the atmosphere – and not just in Paris, but beyond, whether Versailles, where Jacquet de la Guerre was sent, aged 8, as a gift to one of Louis XIV’s mistresses or Mézy-sur-Seine, where Lili Boulanger, aged 24, was taken to die in ‘peace’ in the final months of World War One, with Paris itself under threat.

 

Here’s the music Boulanger wrote in her final months, poignantly entitled D’un matin de printemps (Spring Morning): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5iG1dyYo18.