Jeannette Sorrell on Le Tre Soprano

Move aside, Two Gentlemen of Verona...! This new album from Jeannette Sorrell and Apollo's Fire highlights the extraordinary flourishing of female musicmaking that took place in late 16th-century Ferrara.

In collaboration with three sopranos all named Amanda (Forsythe, Crider and Powell), Sorrell brings to life some of the music that might have been performed by (and indeed written for) this trio, initially conceived as a focus for the artistic and musical energies of the Duke's young wife. 

I spoke to Jeannette to get the full story...

I hate to open by talking about a rich old man, but Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara seems to have been quite a patron of the arts in general, not just of music. Could a group like the Concerto delle Donne have arisen in some other city, or did the stars align just right in Ferrara?

Honestly, I think it was his young wife that was really the key to the whole thing. She was the one who really loved music. There was a significant age-difference between them and he was very conscious of the need to keep her happy. So he was the one who encouraged her to find three 'ladies in waiting', who were actually excellent musicians, in order to start and ensemble.

My understanding from what I've read is that he wanted to make sure that she was entertained and happy and would not be tempted to go and have an affair. So at a very young age she went and put out the contemporary equivalent of an RFP, and found these three (even younger) girls - two of them were really just teenagers - and that's how the whole thing began.

So do you think he was intending it to be as artistically serious as it became, or was it just a 'nice hobby' for his trophy wife?

Well. My impression is that it's more the latter, but we don't really know. I think he had plenty of other things that were occupying his attention outside of music, whereas the music itself really became his wife's project and then the three young musicians. Their teacher, coach and composer, Luzzaschi, was really a crucial figure in this. He created their music and coached them in performing it.

You mention in the booklet the influence that Luzzaschi (via the Concerto, with whom he worked) had on Monteverdi. Would it be fair to say that Monteverdi’s music wouldn’t have developed in the way that it did without these women?

It seems that he definitely would have heard their music. Luzzaschi wrote such florid music, and yet also so contrapuntal - it seems to require a lot of freedom. It was a very innovative and challenging compositional, and yes it would seem that that probably was an influence on Monteverdi.

Did the three members of the group have particular roles or specialisms, or was it an ensemble of three equal voices?

They were all sopranos, and what we mostly know that distinguishes them individually from each other is the instruments that they played. The harpist's harp is still extant today, in fact, and is in a museum. So they were well-rounded musicians and that was typical of the time - even going into the eighteenth century it was typical that musicians played at least two or three instruments and could also sing competently.

The idea of multiple simultaneous sets of diminutions, for which the Concerto’s members were famous, seems incredible and even chaotic - not far off free jazz! Where did this technique come from, and how did they manage to keep things together?

I will say that for us, performing and recording this music was one of the most difficult things we've done. How to approach it so that it stays together and everything lines up, and yet it seems that it needs a lot of freedom. It was quite challenging, and I'm very grateful to our soprano Amanda Forsythe, who came to this project with a particular commitment to, and confidence in, those pieces. We had to make a lot of choices about how we were going to stretch one note and rush through another one a bit - that kind of thing - so that it would all line up but have a compelling sense of freedom.

Given that opera was about to explode onto the scene, what stopped women from progressing from the concert-hall to the stage? Why did castrati end up being the big stars of the new art form?

In the case of these particular women, one of them was murdered by her jealous husband, which obviously was quite an obstacle for her. But more generally, my impression from having spent some time delving into this is that the situation in Ferrara was pretty unusual. Having three women in such public roles. That didn't become the norm across Italy. Certainly in the eighteenth century there were some very prominent well-known female opera singers, but that was somewhat later. From what I've read, these women were certainly famous, with poems written in their honour by major Italian poets, but there was also a great deal of resentment from men.

The reason Anna Guarina was murdered by her husband, for instance, was that he was jealous of her fame. He accused her of adultery as an excuse, but in any case he just kind of got away with it and was not punished. The Duke, who had been the protector of these three women had died, and then there was the complication of Ferrara becoming one of the Papal States, and in that governmental transition nobody cared enough to punish Count Trotti for murdering her.

At least one scholar has speculated that the Concerto delle Donne had unofficial side careers as escorts to the members of the court. Is this plausible, or is it more in the area of gossip and rumour?

I certainly haven't come across any evidence for that. Count Trotti certainly tried to suggest that his wife Anna had been unfaithful but there was nothing to back it up. Her brother was an accomplice in the murder (which is incredible in itself) but years later confessed that he knew she was innocent - but that he, too, was jealous of her fame.

It was still a very, very patriarchal society. You could say almost anything and people could well believe it.

Some people hold up the Concerto’s formation as the very first moment it became possible for women in Europe to have careers as musicians. It’s certainly a seismic shift - would you go that far?

It's an interesting debate - is it a turning point, or more of a blip that then goes away? The Concerto delle Donne lasted for seventeen years, and then the Duke who had been their protector died, and then there's a war and the Papal States take over, so there was this political chaos and the court was abandoned and everybody fled. So is that the reason it came to an end? If things had turned out differently, would it have come to an end anyway because it wasn't really spreading beyond Ferrara?

Having said that, there does seem to have been a bit of a fashion in the following decades for other courts to retain an all-female ensemble, in imitation of the Ferrarese Concerto - do we know anything about why this trend fizzled out?

A little, yes, but it seems to have just faded away. We're totally speculating as to why, but the fact that one of them was murdered by her husband on trumped-up charges and he was never punished - I think that says a lot about what the society was like. Even a bit later, you have composers like Barbara Strozzi in Venice - she's about a generation later, and she was likewise accused of being some kind of 'lady of the evening' and there were all kinds of nasty suggestions about her role in society. We also know that she was probably raped and had to run away from an abusive partner.

So the fabric of society at the time was still extremely patriarchal. There were no protections for women. You do have some blips on the screen of incredibly bold, outstanding, talented women, and occasionally you have a man who's willing to protect or support them. But there's no consistency.

And I suppose at that time it really did rely on having a sympathetic man at the top of the pile. 

I think so, yes.

What sort of longer-term consequences did the Concerto delle Donne have?

I feel that the musical style (for which the credit really goes to the composer Luzzaschi) remained prominent for about fifty years, and there were for a time some similar ensembles around Italy. I do think Luzzaschi was ahead of his time musically - a few decades later, the earliest Baroque composers start to take on board what he did and going in a more dramatic direction with it, and that's where opera originates.

So in a sense the very idea of opera itself is at least partly reliant on the Concerto having existed?

Yes, I think so. Monteverdi was so bold in his use of dissonance and florid melismas, and placing music at the service of the poetic lyrics, but Luzzaschi a few decades earlier was already doing that. So I think Monteverdi made it more accessible, a little bit simpler, certainly more dramatic - but he didn't just come out of nowhere.