Barbara Strozzi dedicated two of her music prints, Cantate, ariette, e duetti (Opus 2, 1651) and Sacri musicali affetti (Opus 5, 1655), to the Austrian Habsburgs, which raises questions about the nature of her relationship to the powerful imperial family. This essay places her prints into the context of the Habsburg courts and examines textual and paratextual elements of the prints to suggest reasons why she may have chosen to dedicate them to the Habsburgs. It argues that the dedications served different purposes but that both of them ultimately served as publicity for the composer herself, in that she used a connection to the Habsburgs to help shape her public image.

This article traces the career trajectories, publishing strategies, and intertwining networks of Barbara Strozzi and two of her Venetian contemporaries: the Jewish salonniére and poet Sara Copia Sulam (1592?–1641) and the forced nun and polemicist Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). All three figures were connected to the influential Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti, a libertine circle of writers, critics, and opera librettists with interests including literature and music. Each woman pursued a career as a public intellectual in an early modern world that often chafed at women’s voices, and each broadcast their ideas by publishing on prominent presses. The experience of Copia Sulam, who was prominent as the Incogniti academy was beginning to coalesce and was forced from the public eye after meeting with a vicious backlash for her intellectual activities, could in the coming decades serve as a cautionary tale to Strozzi and Tarabotti, who had long and prolific careers that were nevertheless beset by controversy. Though the trajectories of these three women varied in significant ways, their shared literary networks and their use of the presses to craft a commanding public persona illuminate the editorial environment for women in seventeenth-century Venice.

The seven surviving printed collections of Strozzi’s vocal music (out of eight) have been well enough studied for their musical contents, but less so as bibliographical objects in the context of production methods that were increasingly ill-suited to the repertory in terms of format and typography. When viewed in this light, some of them are very odd indeed. Extreme examples are her opp. 5 (1655) and 8 (1664), which must have undergone some significant intervention during the printing process itself, chiefly – I suggest – because in each case, Strozzi identified a dedicatee in midstream, and changed her plans accordingly. My broader point is that any music print demands close examination in terms both of how it was put together, and of what it might reveal about the (now lost) manuscript sources on which it was based. But in Strozzi’s case, this also raises questions about her intentions in printing her music in the first place.

At least since Ellen Rosand’s foundational work on Barbara Strozzi, scholars have recognized both the libertine environment of Strozzi’s upbringing and the sensual, even erotic character of much of her music. While that eroticism is usually portrayed as heterosexual, I draw attention in this article to a handful of pieces whose same-sex orientation has largely been overlooked. In Eraclito amoroso and La fanciuletta semplice (both from opus 2), and, perhaps most strikingly, the Sonetto that launches opus 1, such desire emerges not only from the poetry Strozzi selected, but also from her treatment of that poetry. Of course, non-heteronormative expressions of sexual attraction were not so unusual in contemporary Venice. Same-sex activity was considered a facet of profligate sexual desire generally, and it appeared often on the operatic stage. I highlight these particular works, however, as especially provocative examples of Strozzi cultivating the eroticized image that her father seems to have intended for her.

Nicolò Fontei was one of two teachers of Barbara Strozzi. He settled in Venice, a thirty-year-old priest, in 1634 and quickly became associated with Barbara Strozzi and her father Giulio. At Venice he published sacred music and collaborated in staging an opera, Sidonio e Dorisbe (1642). He also issued three books of secular music, Bizzarrie poetiche poste in musica, thefirst (1635) with texts wholly by Giulio Strozzi, the second (1636) with texts partly by him, and both for the use of Barbara Strozzi. The first book can be seen as a progressive series of studies in vocal technique, music theory and composition for the young singer-composer. Music of the second and third books may have been performed at meetings of the Accademia degli Unisoni. One dialogue, “Lilla, se amor non fugga” (1639) reflects the subject of a debate held by the Unisoni on the relative powers of tears and song to produce love.

This chapter offers a speculative account of Barbara Strozzi’s singing, her repertory, her vocal technique, and the ways in which her physical experience as a singer served as a catalyst for some of the most original features of her compositions. After noting the similarities between Giulio Strozzi’s glowing descriptions of Anna Renzi’s singing and his daughter’s compositions, I examine the two highly virtuosic pieces in Opus 2 dedicated to the soprano castrato Adam Franckh that reveal by comparison the special way in which Strozzi likely composed for her own voice—syllabic passages in the lower register, melismatic writing in the middle voice and upper middle voice with easy transitions from one to another register. Furthermore, I argue that her composition was inseparable from her physical experiences as a singer and captures something of the pleasurable sensations that she must have experienced as she explored the full potential of her own instrument.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 1 (1644), composed to poetry by Giulio Strozzi, comprises madrigals of two to five voices, so that it stands apart from all of her other works, largely written for one or two voices. While many of the themes in the book follow the work of Barbara’s predecessors and contemporaries, with poems of love, both requited and unrequited, some of the texts refer to old age and the fleetingness of life. In this chapter I suggest that the book represents, in part, an homage to the recently deceased maestro di capella, Claudio Monteverdi (1568-1643). Aside from nods to “la vecchiezza,” there is the transformation of Strozzi’s and Monteverdi’s “Gira il nemico” from Book 8 into a lament of old age, along with references to the master’s Orfeo and to the composer’s last publication, Selva morale e spirituale.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 3 stands apart from her other works by virtue of its mysterious dedication to the “Ignotae Deae”—a feminized version of the motto “Ignoto Deo”— that the Accademia degli Incogniti had borrowed from St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. Although seemingly affirming Strozzi’s links to the Incogniti, the enigmatic dedication also speaks to Strozzi’s ability in her music—both in this volume and elsewhere in her oeuvre—to dissimilate: to use music as means not of expressing her feelings but hiding them from her listeners. This hypothesis is born out in an overview of the volume’s organization, her choice of poems, and treatment of the poems that continually emphasize deception and deceit, where the musical setting often contradicts or even undermines the poem. In the end Strozzi herself emerges as the Unknown Goddess, who neutralizes even seemingly misogynist poems with deft humor, irony, always keeping her mask firmly in place.

Ellen Rosand provides an overview of Strozzi in the fifty years since her groundbreaking article, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuossisima cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1976. In it she explores the many performances and recordings of Strozzi’s music, discoveries about Strozzi’s life, discussion of her music, the iconography associated with the composer (in particular the portrait by Bernardo Strozzi that Ellen and David Rosand identified), as well as her image in popular literature, on radio and in film, all of which have given us not only a much richer and fuller sense of who she was, but a greater appreciation of her the quality of her music.

This essay explores the use and eventual abandonment of two pitch aggregates – canto per bemolle (signature of a single flat) and canto per bequadro (void signature) – in Barbara Strozzi’s music. Rooted in the two cantus of Guidonian pedagogy, Strozzi’s practice distinguished tonalities according to their bemolle or bequadro signatures, which signaled distinct pitch collections, cadence points, and text affects that she associated with tonal flatness or sharpness. Between the 1640s and 1660s, Strozzi expanded her notated key signatures while maintaining the distinction between flatness and sharpness, but her tonal style never settled into the norms of functional tonality, such as clear tonic/dominant and major/minor oppositions. We must therefore understand Strozzi’s tonal practice as complete and coherent on its own terms, and not as a transition between Renaissance modes and eighteenth-century keys. In doing so, we perceive her flair for vivid, dramatic, and even bizarre text-expressive effects according to the tonal system of her era.

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzis and Widmanns, who were connected not only through commerce and culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourishing in Venice in the seventeenth century, and to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected. Furthermore,the essay sheds new light on the genre of the and the role it plays in celebrating the individual’s features and perpetuating personal memory.

This chapter interrogates the widespread modern framing of Strozzi’s life and music through the unanswerable asking of whether or not she was a courtesan, and proposes alternative viewpoints from which and with which to understand and represent her. Working from a reception study of popular and academic cultural framings, new engagement with primary materials, and intersectional feminist perspectives on the analysis and representation of contested gendered experiences, this chapter asks what it is that this repeated question does – its functions and its fall-outs – and suggests another way of engaging with the scanty material evidence that has survived of Strozzi’s life. This chapter concludes with a proposal to retire the courtesan question in favor of a more grounded and culturally sensitive understanding of Strozzi’s family life through common seicento Venetian relationship practices, restoring Strozzi’s own representation of herself to the forefront of our representations of her music and person.

A distinctive feature of Barbara Strozzi’s compositional style is her predilection for unusual endings that defy the expectations by concluding too abruptly (leaving the listener hanging on the dominant or without a strong sense of closure) or delaying the final cadence (inciting the listener’s desire for closure). After briefly summarizing ideas about closure from classical rhetoricians and early modern musicians and considering the likely influence of the humorous and often ironic rhetorical stance that was popular among Strozzi’s friends and acquaintances in the Accademia degli Incogniti, I explore Strozzi’s enigmatic conclusions in a selection of both sacred and secular compositions. Drawing upon Bettina Varwig’s Music in the Flesh, I propose that the endings are remarkable not only for the ingenious ways they respond to their text and eschew convention, but also because of the profound impact on the listener’s physiological responses, inspiring variously laughter, irony, frustration, yearning, pleasure, or even rapture.

It has often been said Barbara Strozzi’s dedication of each of her printed books of music to a different patron demonstrates her lack of success in finding stable support. A careful examination of the system of dedications leads to a different conclusion. The main function of a dedication was to obtain the gradimento, or appreciation, of the dedicatee for the gift of the book, which would be expressed, almost always, in financial terms, as a gift to the author of cash or valuables. In agreeing to this exchange, the dedicatee also gained a reputation as a patron of the arts, but even more so as an exemplar of generosity. Strozzi’s dedications, therefore, demonstrate success in obtaining the approval of a series of important patrons.

This essay aims to reconstruct Strozzi’s ideal poetic library and to understand the impact that her literary choices had on her compositions. The poems she set come from a variety of traditions, from madrigals looking back to the late sixteenth century, to more contemporary styles, some of them quite irreverent. The poets named in her volumes include some of the leading figures rom the Venetian literary, theatrical, and academic spheres of the mid-seventeenth-century: authors of dramme per musica such as Giulio Strozzi, Aurelio Aureli, Pietro Paolo Bissari, and Giacinto Andrea Cicognini; noble amateurs such as Marc’Antonio Corraro, Nicola Beregan, and Pietro Dolfin; academics such as Gian Francesco Loredan; as well as several poets and librettists linked to the Roman singing world such as Sebastiano Baldini and Giovanni Pietro Monesio. Strozzi’s interpretation of metrical models and her stylistic originality shine through in the variety of forms she offers.

This chapter looks at Barbara Strozzi both as a daughter and a mother. She was raised in the house of her adoptive father, Giulio Strozzi, and her mother, Isabella Garzoni, or Griega. The relationship between Barbara–born illegitimately, as had been her father and grandfather before her– and Giulio, is enhanced through a close reading of his wills. The household eventually expanded to include Barbara’s four children, born to her and one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Vidman. Barbara had known Vidman at least from 1634, as revealed in Nicolò Fontei’s dedication to Vidman in his Bizzarie, though their first child was born only in 1641. Vidman died in 1648, yet the Strozzis’ connections to his family continued until 1719, with the death of Barbara’s eldest son, Giulio Pietro.

The Veglia prima, ..seconda, and ..terza degli Unisoni (Venice, 1638) describe three meetings of the Academia degli Unisoni founded and hosted in 1637/8 by Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652). They reveal details of Barbara Strozzi’s public role as composer and performer, and the defend the Strozzis and Unisoni from anonymous libel and slander, compiled in the manuscript Satire et altre raccolte per l’Accademia de gli Unisoni in casa di Giulio Strozzi (Marciana, It X, Codice 115 (=7193)) [Satires and other collected works regarding the Academy of the Unisoni in the home of Giulio Strozzi]. This essay clarifies the chronology and relationship between these two bodies of writing discussed by Ellen Rosand. I identify the Academico Spensierato as the author of the three letters that conclude the Satire: the letter from the Spensierato to Giulio Strozzi, and the two letters following that ventriloquize Giulio and Barbara Strozzi.

In this chapter, I highlight specific challenges the continuo players face when performing Strozzi’s music. I argue that only by understanding Strozzi’s music as well as its poetry and harmonic language that the harpsichordist can truly partner with the singer to deliver a dynamic performance. First, most of Strozzi’s music is sparsely notated, so the continuo player must figure out the harmonies and notate figured bass according to their own analysis. Second, Strozzi—like composers of her time—does not provide performance instruction on how long the realized chords should be held or how they should be arpeggiated. To that end, I examine the cases of long-held notes and provide concrete suggestions on how one might approach the realization and timing based on text and rhetoric. In addition, I discuss how figured bass can be utilized to flesh out the melodies in written-out ritornello when no treble part is provided.

This chapter introduces one of most unusual madrigals in Strozzi’s Opus 1, Al Battitor di bronzo della sua crudelissima Dama. Giulio Strozzi’s sonnet takes its inspiration from one of the most practiced themes of ancient Greek and Latin poetry, that of the exclusus amator, the excluded lover. While many such poems focus on the door itself Strozzi’s poem brings to the fore, instead, the plight of the doorknocker itself, for it (and the madrigal’s music) will only find its repose after the beloved allows the lover to enter her home. It was in Venice that bronze objects, with their innate sensuality, reached their greatest heights. The Strozzis’ madrigal, then, celebrates one of the city’s highest art forms through a combination of literary wit and musical inventiveness.

This chapter explores the practical realities of what it is to perform Strozzi’s music in a twenty-first century context and the artistic possibilities those realities open up, the challenges they raise, and the potentialities they create. Combining personal experience, recent classical music industry research, and cross-genre artistic ideas and insights, this chapter suggests new ways in which Strozzi’s works might be made to sing, in multiple meanings of that word. Identifying barriers to performing Strozzi’s music, this chapter then turns to Strozzi’s working practices in search of tools with which to overcome or side-step those barriers. Through sharing the author’s methods for creating new performances of Strozzi’s works, inspired by Strozzi’s example, this chapter concludes with an invitation to readers to discover their own ways of singing Strozzi today.