Born around 1640 to Dr. Padoani and Diana Paresco, Antonia studied music and letters with two private tutors--in addition to Cavalli, she had a Latin teacher—a luxury usually available only to the patriciate. Clearly her parents wanted the best for their only child. In addition to the letter that Padoani wrote to the duke about her progress with her distinguished teacher, further correspondence from 1654 reveals her in very fine musical company indeed; her father considered a match for her with the illustrious guitarist Francesco Corbetta (c. 1615-81). As if to adumbrate Padoani’s connection to the Mantuan court, we learn that the first position held by Corbetta had been in service to the Gonzaga, a decade before this meeting with the Padoanis. Corbetta, not one to stay anywhere for long, had soon obtained a passport from Mantua with which he had meanwhile traveled to Vienna, Brussels, Hannover, Spain, and... Paris. Might it have been Corbetta’s praise of the French court when he met the young Antonia that inspired her youthful admiration for the monarch, one that she described as dating from childhood and that her alter ego Clytie poetically fashioned as “since the cradle”?

Antonia’s music teacher, too, may have furthered her curiosity about France. As the foremost Italian opera composer of his day, in 1660 Francesco Cavalli accepted an invitation to Paris to stage a dramatic work upon the occasion of the king’s wedding to Maria Teresa of Spain. Despite competition and tensions with the opportunistic Jean-Baptiste Lully, during his stay Cavalli managed to produce L’Ercole amante on a libretto by Francesco Buti, a dramatist with nearly two decades experience in France. Doomed to failure because of production delays in the opera house itself, the opera did not please the French public and Cavalli returned to Venice in 1662 in low spirits. When Bembo took up the libretto again and entirely refashioned L’Ercole amante in 1707, she made a tacit connection to her teacher: as a Venetian composer in Paris using the same libretto for an entirely new setting, she underscored her musical pedigree. Despite her father’s efforts to marry her to Corbetta, the union did not take place and the guitarist continued his European travels without ever permanently attaching himself to any country, court, or person. Doctor Padoani may have been disappointed that his daughter could not or would not take on the musical career that he may have envisioned for her. Instead her interests turned toward a Venetian nobleman; in 1659 she married Lorenzo Bembo (1637-1703), a descendent of the patrician family’s best-known member, Pietro Bembo (1470-1547). The newlywed couple lived in the Padoani home in Venice for the first year of their marriage. Significant conflicts between her father and husband surfaced almost immediately, but her allegiances were with the latter in the early years of their marriage. Three children were born to them at the Padoani’s Paduan home: Diana, Andrea, and Giacomo. Following Dr. Padoani’s death in 1666, Antonia and Lorenzo returned to Venice to live in the parish of San Moisè, near St. Mark’s.

Soon thereafter Lorenzo joined several nobles conscripted in the final battles of the War of Candia at Crete (1631-69). Left on her own to care for the three young children, Antonia later wrote that during his absence they had very little on which to subsist. Alas, this declaration appeared in legal papers in which she sued for divorce.

After Lorenzo returned from Greece, the marriage quickly disintegrated and the two lived separately in Venice. The divorce request drawn up by Antonia in 1672 charged Lorenzo with physical brutality, infidelity, stealing her belongings, and negligence of family support. He denied the accusations and she lost the case. Might it have been the humiliation that she suffered from publicly accusing him and then being proven wrong that made her feel she must escape to a better life that she imagined awaited her in Paris? Like Clytie, was she thus “despised by fortune”? Perhaps then it was not entirely her admiration for Louis XIV that drew her to France, but it would be under his protection that she would find solace and resolution. Poetic license gave Clytie the same liberty, tracing her fondness for the “Sun” since childhood.

Perhaps it was Corbetta—her old friend and fellow musician—who helped her to escape. At the time of her departure in winter 1676-77 he had been granted a pass to travel from England “to foreign parts,” perhaps Venice. Antonia did not leave without making careful plans. She took some of her belongings to the homes of various acquaintances in the city, but left her most valuable possessions at the convent of Saint Bernard on Murano, out of Lorenzo’s reach. She entrusted her daughter Diana to the abbess and a friend at the convent; her sons presumably stayed with their father. 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.