Antonia: Baroque Women V Bembo, composer, biography, discography
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COMPOSERS
William Lawes
Antonia Bembo: Baroque Women V
INTERVIEWS
Antonio Florio
10 CDs for a desert island : Paul Hillier
ESSAYS
Dowland´s Lachrimae
Van Dyck
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COMPOSERS
Bembo, Antonia: Baroque Women V
COMPOSERS
ANTONIA BEMBO: BAROQUE WOMEN V
Bembo’s preface to Produzioni armoniche alludes to her financial difficulties in France; she probably could take along but few of her own possessions and a limited supply of ready money. She wrote that the king had taken mercy on her predicament and offered her shelter in a women’s community, the Petite Union Chrétienne des Dames de Saint Chaumont (“Small Christian Union of the Women of Saint Chaumont”) in the parish of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle, then on the outskirts of Paris but now located in the ninth arrondissement. Established in the early years of the 1680s, this non-cloistered community offered shelter to women who had been left alone for various reasons. If Corbetta indeed proves to have been Antonia Bembo’s escort from Venice to Paris, she would have needed assistance at exactly the time that the Parisian women’s community was formed. He died in April 1681, when the Mercure de France published an obituary extolling his musical talents.

The pension given by the king to the Christian Union provided Bembo with a “room of her own” in the community. In the dearth of documentary evidence about the composer and her music, however, one wonders if her works were performed and, if so, in what way and under which circumstances. As a soprano, she surely sang most of the forty-one pieces of the Produzioni armoniche. But what of the three-, four-, and five-voice works, such as are found in the motets, the psalm settings, the divertimento, and the opera? Did sacred and secular works overlap to the same extent as in seicento Italy, so as to allow their performance in the women’s community? Many of the larger works call for men’s voices; how would these have been supplied? How well acquainted might Antonia have been with her contemporary the composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre? Taken together their works constitute the overwhelming majority of music composed by women during Louis XIV’s reign.

These and many other questions are treated in my forthcoming book on the composer, Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo. Several scholars join me in editing her works, a few of which have been published and appear in the list above. There are as yet no commercially available recordings to be had—sopranos, especially, take note! We eagerly await recording projects that will one day yield a discography.

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