Chapter One
Caccini
It is carnival time in Florence, and the Medici court is celebrating a great military victory against the Ottoman Turk achieved by their honoured guest, Crown-Prince Wladislaw Sigismund Vasa of Poland. No matter that the Battle of Khotyn, four years earlier, had been in reality a shambolic, bloody stalemate in which Wladislaw had played little active part. A lavish, spectacular entertainment is needed, one that not only demonstrates the triumph of goodness over evil, but the immense wealth and power of the Medici family, rulers of the grand duchy of Tuscany. The story chosen will tell of a wicked sorceress, Alcina, who seduces a knight, Ruggiero, entraping him on her island in order to take her pleasure. Worse still, he, and a host of other previous victims, seem to enjoy the experience. Fortunately, however, a ‘good’ witch, Melissa, triumphs over Alcina, and liberates Ruggiero and his fellows. Part opera, part ballet, no expense is spared in the production, which will end with an extraordinary balletto a cavallo (dancing horses) that the audience watches from the balconies and terraces of the Villa Poggio Imperiale, a ruinously expensive symbol of Medici power, linked to the city of Florence below by a tree-lined avenue.
The date is 3 February 1625, and the entertainment is La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Roger from the Island of Alcina). The composer is thirty-six-year-old Francesca Caccini, working at the height of her career. Many forces and factors have contributed towards this remarkable moment: Caccini was, for example, lucky to be the daughter of two exceptional musicians; she was fortunate to have been born in Florence, the creative centre of the Medici world. But these propitious circumstances of breeding and location are as nothing when set against the simple fact that Francesca Caccini is a woman. Every note on every score that Caccini writes offers a challenge to the dominant values of the world beyond Villa Poggio Imperiale. La liberazione is a hard-won triumph.
As a young girl, Francesca had been set on her path to this remarkable February day in the hills above Florence by Giulio, her ambitious, talented father. Her mother, Lucia di Filippo Gagnolandi, died when Francesca was only five, leaving her daughter with little except the inheritance of a beautiful singing voice, and leaving her husband with three children under the age of six, and a son, Pompeo, aged fourteen, from an earlier liaison. Giulio’s second marriage to an impoverished eighteen-year-old singer, Margherita di Agostino della Scala, known as ‘Bargialli’, did nothing to shore up his finances, but did introduce another talented singer to the Caccini stable. Growing up as the daughter of Giulio Caccini would prove to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he was the second most highly paid composer and musician on the staff of the Medici household, and renowned as the author of by far the most influential singing manual of the seventeenth century, Le nuove musiche, published in 1601, and then translated and imitated throughout Europe.* On the other hand, Giulio was proud to the point of self-destructiveness (house arrest followed his refusal to acknowledge a social superior in the street); profligate financially and sexually (a love of gambling made it hard to support his, at a guess, ten children by three women); and sought to dominate his immediate family, sometimes, it seems, simply for the sake of it, as when he withheld the dowry of Francesca’s younger sister, Settimia. Pompeo, Giulio’s eldest son, even apparently allowed himself to be charged with the rape of his intended wife, Ginevra, so that the courts would require him to marry the young woman, since it was the only way to circumvent his father’s opposition to the union. As for Settimia, Giulio eventually paid the dowry in 1611 when her new husband’s family abducted her and held her for ransom in the city of Lucca. This particular crisis precipitated the final break-up of the Caccini family as a performing group, but until that point, and for many years, Giulio’s women had been used to showcase his exceptional talents as a composer and a teacher. Living or dead, they served to display his ability, as he explained to his readers: ‘How excellently the tremolo and the trill were learned by my late wife [Lucia] . . . may be adjudged by those who heard her sing during her life, as also I leave to the judgment of those who can now hear in the present wife [Margherita] how exquisitely they are done by her.’
It was Francesca’s exceptional musical talent, however, that offered Giulio his greatest opportunity. For years, his ego and drive had ensured his success as a composer, performer and teacher in the competitive and changing musical world of the early seventeenth century. He knew only too well that singers required higher and higher levels of ability, since he himself was creating the new music that was making new demands on performers. As one anxious father noted, ‘there are so many musical compositions and the level of difficulty has reached the most difficult possible’, thus his daughter needed to be able to handle ‘with ease any song, no matter how weird or hard’. Now there was Francesca. Her voice, they said, spun ‘a finely focused thread of sound’. Not only that, but she had the musical intelligence to use that voice creatively, adding ‘dissonances’ that seemed to ‘offend’ but, paradoxically, like a lover mixing disdain with kindness, opened the way to a ‘more delightful path to harmonic sweetness’.
Giulio’s response to Francesca’s raw talent was to educate his daughter as if she did not belong to the artisan class into which he and she had been born. She studied Latin, rhetoric, poetics, geometry, astrology, philosophy, contemporary languages, ‘humanistic studies’ and even a little Greek. Crucially, she also learned composition, primarily to enhance her performances, since it was expected that singers should be able to improvise and, on occasion, perform their own song settings. Francesca’s progress was rapid. Just turned thirteen, on 9 October 1600 she was ready to appear in one of her father’s works, Il rapimento di Cefalo (The Abduction of Cephalus), alongside three, maybe four, other performing members of her family. It was the young Francesca’s first introduction to court spectacle: her stage, the Uffizi Palace in Florence; the occasion, the celebrations attending the proxy wedding of Henry IV of France and Marie de’ Medici; the audience, three thousand gentlemen and eight hundred ladies; the work, an opera lasting five hours; the cost, sixty thousand scudi, around three hundred years of salary for Francesca’s father.
Il rapimento provided a further lesson for the young Francesca, one in the politics of the music industry. Her father’s opera had been intended to be the primary spectacle of the Florentine 1600 winter season, but it was overshadowed by a work that had been performed just three days earlier at the Medici’s Pitti Palace: Jacobo Peri’s Euridice. Peri’s work has entered the music history books as the earliest opera for which complete music has survived, but, on the day, Peri quite simply judged his audience better than had Caccini. He not only gave the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice a happy ending, fitting for the happy occasion of Henry and Marie’s nuptials, but used to great effect a striking new technique, continuous recitatives between the set choral numbers.
Four years on, and Francesca’s breakthrough came when, in the summer of 1604, and the young singer approaching her fifteenth birthday, Henry IV and Marie de’ Medici, the royal couple for whom Giulio had written Il rapimento, asked the rulers of Tuscany if they could ‘borrow for several months’ Giulio’s ensemble ‘and his daughters’. And so it came to pass that Giulio, his second wife, two daughters, a son, a boy singing pupil, two carriages, six mules and 450 scudi (more than twice his annual salary) left the grand duchy on the last day of September 1604. They journeyed through the northern regions of a politically fractured land, for it would be more than 250 years until the first precarious unification of the Italian peninsula under one king. They stopped at Modena to sing for the ruling Este family; at Milan (controlled by the Spanish Habsburgs) because Francesca contracted malaria; then at Turin, where they performed for the Duke and Duchess of Savoy, and Francesca and her sister Settimia received gifts of jewellery. After just over two months of travelling, the Caccini family and entourage arrived in Paris on 6 December 1604 where they stayed with the resident Florentine ambassador – the happy recipients of kitchen privileges, firewood and wine. Giulio presented the time as the high point of his career, with visits from aristocrats, money available to ‘dress my women in French fashion’ and regular opportunities to perform for the French sovereigns.
The reality was slightly different, at least at first. Giulio’s arrogance made him few friends at the French court, and the monarchs themselves quarrelled over which of them would pay for the musicians. Everything changed, however, when Francesca sang. Henry IV declared her to be the best singer in France. It was reported that Queen Marie was so keen to secure Francesca for her own court that she was even willing to provide ‘the other’, Settimia, Francesca’s sister, with a dowry ‘enough that she could marry’. (The convention of the time was to provide both a job and a husband to women musicians.)
Yet no deal was done. Giulio gave the impression that the Grand-Duke of Tuscany himself had refused Caccini permission to accept the job for Francesca from Marie de’ Medici, but in fact he had his own agenda, writing that he had ‘invested’ much ‘labour’ in Francesca, and he did not want to lose his controlling interest, even to a French queen. Marie, in turn, gradually lost interest and the moment passed. Nevertheless, although Giulio was unwilling to admit it, a subtle shift in the balance of power between father and daughter occurred in Paris in the early months of 1605. He was now as much the father of ‘La Cecchina’ (little Francesca) as she was the daughter of the great Giulio Caccini.*
Francesca’s social and musical education continued apace. She knew about the precarious nature of a musician’s life from her own parents’ history. Her mother, Lucia, had been fired from her job as a musician only a year after Francesca’s birth, collateral damage from the arrival of the new duke, Ferdinando I, who wanted to purge his predecessor’s luxuries, or at least be seen to do so. Francesco I had been something of a text-book Medici villain, known to history as debauched and cruel if also scholarly and introverted, so it is unsurprising that Ferdinando wanted to make a break with the past. Did Francesca also know that, six months after Lucia’s death, her father lost his job in highly suggestive circumstances? A courtesan, known as ‘La Gambarella’, was having singing lessons with Giulio. Rumours began. La Gambarella’s lover, who was bank-rolling the lessons, had Giulio fired. The case did not help Giulio to recruit young female singers to his studio in Florence, and for a time his career stuttered horribly. One Duke Vincenzo, for example, wanted his protégée, Caterina Martinelli, to gain more experience, but not in Caccini’s house, the duke writing that Giulio ‘insisted on trying to make me understand that she would be safe, but I closed his mouth with a single word’. Martinelli went elsewhere.
The return journey to Tuscany provided a chance for Francesca to test out the effectiveness of her social, political and musical education. Whilst the rest of the Caccini family returned to Florence, Francesca, still only sixteen, remained for six months at the Este court in Modena, where she taught Giulia d’Este, only one year her junior, to ‘sing in the French style’. There, Caccini applied all the lessons she had learned about how to survive (or not) the vagaries of high politics and sexual intrigue, and gained yet more insight into the workings of the elite families for whom she might one day work. The Este family did not want her to return to Florence.
Then came the carnival season of 1607. The Medici family, led by the Grand-Duchess, Christine de Lorraine, were at the time based in Pisa, and were planning a court spectacle. It needed to be impressive, but also cheap (perhaps costumes could be reused, suggests Christine) and to allow dancing amongst the cast and the guests. Christine turned to Michelangelo Buonarroti, great-nephew of the Michelangelo, who designed and scripted what would be the major entertainment for the carnival that year: a barriera, a dance representative of a battle. It was Michelangelo who chose Francesca Caccini, not yet twenty, to write the music. With the ‘advice and consent of her father’ Francesca seized the opportunity, not only producing her scores efficiently but creating ‘very beautiful’ music, in Michelangelo’s words.
We will never be able to judge for ourselves if Michelangelo was right, because, as with so many of Caccini’s works, the music has not survived. According to her contemporaries, however, La stiava (The Slavegirl) was more than beautiful; it was ‘una musica stupenda’. The performance began with a sinfonia ‘for many instruments’ during which the cast entered, and ended with a five-voice chorus to which both the cast and audience danced, as per the command of the work’s patron, Christine de Lorraine. Francesca embraced the new Florentine stile recitativo (now simply known as recitative), which had been championed by her own father, who, in the preface to his Le nuove musiche, praised its ability to make the singer ‘speak in music’ by employing a certain sprezzatura di canto. Sprezzatura, the hallmark of Renaissance sophistication, involved, in the words of its champion, the writer Castiglione, ‘a certain non-chalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it’. To sing with sprezzatura one had to have the skill to make the performance effortless and natural. Father and daughter, both experts in precisely this skill, asserted the new style in direct competition with the music being composed by Venice’s musical avant-garde, led by that city’s star composer Monteverdi, but also in competition with their own colleagues in Florence, composers such as Jacobo Peri, who had set out his own groundbreaking take on this middle ground between speech and song in his notes to his opera Euridice.
Not only Caccini’s compositional talent, but her sheer professionalism, was on display in La stiava. She was not expected to travel to Pisa for the performance but she did everything she could to ensure the work was a success from her base in Florence, insisting not only that the parts were ‘sung many times’ under her own supervision, but writing them ‘in a way that they can be revised there’, at Pisa, during the final rehearsals. The pressure she was working under is visible when a last-minute addition to the text arrived, for which she had to produce music. She dashed off the necessary bars and sent it to Pisa, her half-brother Pompeo as courier, that very same evening.
La stiava was Caccini’s breakthrough work as a composer and it provided her with vital insights into the politics of music at the Medici court, insights that would shape her future career. Christine de Lorraine, the most powerful person in the court, had insisted not only that Michelangelo change his original plot, but then that he transform the motivations of its male heroes. Faced with a Persian slave woman who, predictably, given the genre, is revealed actually to be the King of Persia’s daughter captured by pirates en route to her planned marriage with the King of India, the knights fight for the honour of taking the princess to her proper consort now they know she is ‘twice a queen’. Christine de Lorraine intervened to insist that the knights should be inspired to fight not by the slave’s beauty but by her ‘nobility, or novelty, or other evident merits’. As musicologist Suzanne Cusick writes, although ‘presented amid many of the usual Florentine trappings of spectacle – music, brilliantly coloured costumes, mock battles, and solo and ensemble song – one overarching theme of the plot was the transformation of a woman from an object of desire, competition and exchange to a sovereign subject, a transformation wrought by her own self-defining voice’.
Christine de Lorraine’s intervention was only to be expected in a world in which artists of all kinds knew that they had to tailor their work to the tastes of the particular individual, the patron, who had commissioned the work and upon whom they were dependent for their livelihood. The patron’s power, whether political or religious, permitted him or her to tell an artist, composer or writer exactly what to do in their next work, and then, of course, to change his or her mind half-way through rehearsals.
Christine de Lorraine had come to wield power only recently. She had been married to Grand-Duke Ferdinando in 1589, and spent the best part of two decades in the provinces, physically safe but politically marginalized. Now, Ferdinando was a very ill man, and Grand-Duchess Christine was beginning to flex her muscles. Her husband’s death the following year, and the succession of the couple’s son, Cosimo II, did not halt Christine’s emergence from the shadows, because Grand-Duke Cosimo’s health was bad at the best of times and he was confined to his bed for months at a time. Although without an official title, Christine remained the de facto leader of the Medici state.
In 1607, therefore, Francesca Caccini was in the right place, at the right time: a woman composer for what was becoming a woman’s court. It was Christine de Lorraine who counted, and it was Christine de Lorraine who, on 15 November 1607, appointed Francesca Caccini as la musica to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany. She would be paid ten scudi per month for which she would sing, both as a solo virtuosa, whether improvising or sopra’l libro (by the book), and in ensembles, whether in church, chamber or theatrical settings. She would also play the lute, theorbo, harpsichord, guitar, harp ‘and every sort of stringed instrument’. Although only twenty, she was hired to evaluate the performances of others and, crucially, to compose new music and prepare its performance in a wide variety of settings, in Florence and beyond. Musicologists Carter and Goldthwaite have recently revealed, in remarkable detail, just how dynamic, economically and artistically, Medici music-making was. To take just one carnival season, 1610–11, the first to be celebrated during Grand-Duke Cosimo II’s reign because the court had been in mourning the previous year for the death of Ferdinando I: this season was to be filled with jousts, sbarre, comedies, a balletto (by Ottavio Rinuccini), a pastoral (by Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger), and a revival of Rinuccini’s Dafne. In the balletto, performed at court on the last Monday of carnival (14 February), Jacobo Peri sang the part of Neptune ‘in his customary manner and to great applause’, and was also charged with setting to music, in his ‘most noble’ recitative style, the remainder of the text, except for a few verses that were to be set to music by the same women who sang them: Vittoria Archilei, Settimia Caccini and Francesca Caccini, who sang two, and therefore presumably composed two.
Francesca Caccini truly deserved her title of la musica. Day in, day out, she produced new work to order, and to timescales that would horrify most twenty-first-century composers. A suggested timetable for those wishing to put on an early modern opera these days starts at least nine months before the opening night. To secure a famous singer takes even longer, and that nine-month figure does not include, of course, the writing of the opera itself. What takes months and years now, took Caccini days or weeks. Her most important collaborator was the man who had recommended her in 1607, and remained a loyal friend and supporter, Michelangelo Buonarroti. (The history books may have paid little attention to this Michelangelo, precisely because of his giant of a great-uncle, but ironically, it was the great-nephew’s efforts, begun precisely at this time, to create the Casa Buonarroti museum/gallery in Florence that did much, and still does much, to ensure the Michelangelo’s iconic status.) Michelangelo would send his poetry to Caccini as soon as the ink was dry on the page; she would set his words to music and then complete the process by teaching the new material to her singers. Caccini urged Buonarroti to stay ahead of the game, suggesting that he ‘should start thinking about some little comedy for eleven actors, for that’s how many we are . . . even though we don’t have a sure decision, I have enough in hand to want to give you a warning, so you won’t be caught off guard’. In addition to court entertainments, Caccini was expected to write for the church year, becoming by the end of the decade the most important composer for Holy Week in Florence. Again and again, she created moments of spiritual wonder, bringing touches of spectacle to familiar ceremonies, as when on 19 April 1618 the congregation heard the voices of her unseen female singers as if by magic because Caccini had placed the performers in the hidden network of corridors that linked, and still link today, the palaces and churches of the Medici.
At other times, Caccini was commissioned to write music that would not merely celebrate Medici God-given power, but serve to protect it. When Christine de Lorraine feared both for her son’s life and for the Tuscan state, the one threatened by severe illness, the other by catastrophically bad weather, she was inspired by a divine vision to hold a forty-hour vigil in the Medici church of San Lorenzo. Heaven, purgatory and hell would be depicted in the church; every parish and confraternity would be rewarded if they processed to San Lorenzo; Christine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Magdalena, and her young family would walk through the streets among their people, one small prince carrying a cross, followed by his brothers, and then his mother, accompanied by women on foot. It was a remarkably choreographed display of piety and humility, and it was Francesca Caccini who was required to create the music. The composer chose to have voices appearing from four directions, with two groups of men inside the church, and two groups of women in the hidden passageways.
These major, public events were rarer than those in which Caccini performed her own music in private or semi-private settings at the heart of this female court, whether a reception held by Maria Magdalena in her bedroom for the gentildonne of Florence to celebrate a successful childbirth, or singing at the bedside of the sickly Cosimo II. The irony is that the private, exclusive nature of her work, such a mark of her success in her own time, is just one of the reasons that Caccini’s achievements have not been acknowledged in traditional music histories.
Caccini was gaining in confidence with each passing year, and working well with the equally energetic and pragmatic Michelangelo. When it came to massive court spectacles, however, Caccini was often merely a small cog in a very big machine involving poets, composers, singers, instrumentalists, painters and architects, as well as seamstresses, carpenters and masons. Once the poet’s idea had been accepted, the superintendent of buildings acted as designer and producer, providing machines for the staging with the help of the court architect, whilst the court wardrobe master provided costumes. The superintendent of music then distributed the work and chose the singers, and the major-domo had to make sure that those who wrote or copied the music and the spoken parts were paid, in order that the parts were circulated in good time for rehearsal and performance.
In this profoundly collaborative working culture, it was only too easy for a woman’s name to slip off the list of credits, as it were. Only now are music scholars uncovering Caccini’s involvement in significant compositions, such as Marco da Gagliano’s five-act, continuously sung and hugely expensive opera, Sant’Orsola, for which the scenery alone cost six thousand scudi. Caccini, now earning twenty scudi a month and, as such, one of the best-paid court servants, contributed music (primarily composed for ‘her’ singers) for both the 1624 and 1625 performances. The opera presented something of a production challenge, since it told the story of ‘the martyrdom of Saint Ursula with the eleven thousand virgins her companions’. Gagliano/Caccini ended up with a chorus of eleven virgins. When the work was revived the next year, one of the virgins was found to be pregnant, leading to a rapid recasting.
For all the collaboration, each and every production relied fundamentally on one person and one person only: the work’s patron. In Caccini’s case, two women were all-important to the continuance of her career as a composer. One, of course, was Christine de Lorraine, through whom Caccini had gained the position of la musica. The other was Christine’s daughter-in-law, Arch-Duchess Maria Magdalena of Austria. She became principal regent in February 1621, on the death of her husband, Cosimo II, holding power on behalf of her son, Ferdinando II, then only eleven years old.
The robust, energetic Maria Magdalena was, if anything, even more involved with the productions she commissioned than her mother-in-law. Her letters show a woman who knew her music, knew her singers and knew how to command. Nowhere is Caccini’s dependent status more visible than in the casual way in which her ability to produce compositions on demand is taken for granted by her Medici employer: ‘Moreover, we command that you immediately let Maria [a singer] know that we have chosen the part of Urania for her, being satisfied that La Cecchina [Caccini’s nickname] will compose for her an appropriate aria for the words that have been changed.’ This is not to diminish Caccini’s achievement. The great figures of her time were equally dependent upon their patrons, for good and bad. One year, Galileo Galilei might be offering his discovery of the ‘Medicean stars’ (four moons of Jupiter) to Grand-Duke Cosimo II and receiving a generous financial package in return. Another year, the Medicis would do nothing to prevent Galileo’s silencing by the Inquisition, nor his death in 1642 under a damnatio memoriae.
The Medici family owned Caccini and her music. A letter dated 18 December 1614, written by the composer to her collaborator Michelangelo, complains that ‘the women’, Christine and Maria Magdalena, have heard the rehearsals for a performance, but that the Grand-Duke had not yet turned up, even ‘though we wait from day to day to be thus commanded; indeed, one evening we were gathered waiting to do so until three hours after dark’. On another occasion, when a nobleman, Virginio Orsini, made a request that Caccini be ‘detailed to his household in Rome’, the Medici family simply refused. As Suzanne Cusick explains, just as ‘fathers exchanged daughters to create and sustain relationships between their families, so princely households exchanged performances and artistic workers’.
In this patriarchal world, Caccini had her victories. The principal court poet Andrea Salvadori, a good-looking womanizer, was renowned for ‘accommodating the parts and the music to favour the one who was in his heart’, or in other words, seducing young singers who would then get preferential treatment. Salvadori did not count on Caccini’s response, as recounted by a contemporary writer, Cavalcante (trans. Suzanne Cusick):
Francesca Caccini, a woman as fierce and restless as she was capable in singing and acting, could not abide this behaviour, and began to expose and talk about him, first in passing and behind his back, and then openly and to his face, revealing his intentions, and designs, and the origins of his favouritism.
Caccini’s whistle-blowing led to Salvadori being ‘disdained’, at least for a time, by the Medici women, and more importantly his supply of singer-victims dried up. Salvadori, unsurprisingly, vented his anger in the gloriously titled poem Donne musiche parlano dall’Inferno (Women Musicians Speak from Hell), which was probably performed at court in early 1621. Caccini, equally unsurprisingly, was furious, and ‘it took a lot of effort to quiet her’.
In the short term, the two were forced to make peace, but Caccini waited for her moment. Six years later, Salvadori wrote a piece for the celebration of a noble marriage, over which he took great trouble:
It had already been set to music, the [stage] machines sketched and the parts assigned when Francesca took her best revenge, like a man who waits for the worst place and time. Finding herself one day with the Most Serene bride, she sang the part that was to have been hers, and praised the verses and the workmanship of it, adding ‘Serenissima, everything will go well, and I like it. I have only one remaining doubt.’ ‘What is that?’ prompted the princess.
Caccini had her opening. She went on to suggest, delicately, that the plot could be construed as horribly offensive. Admittedly, this was a stretch, revolving around the idea that the male hero could be seen to be emasculated by the storyline, but, stretch or no, the princess insisted that the entertainment be changed and Salvadori was commanded to produce another comedy within eight days. He in turn gained a petty revenge by creating the character of Discordia and casting Francesca in the role. But the narrator of this quarrel ends by writing: ‘Exulting at this, she always said that the response was not equal to the blow.’ Francesca Caccini knew she had won.
Midway between the two major Salvadori tussles, a different kind of crisis threatened Caccini’s position. When an opera from the previous season was revived, one of Caccini’s pupils, Maria Botti, was promoted to a larger part for the revival, and Caccini asked that one of her own siblings take Botti’s original role. She was over-ruled on this, and then Botti started causing problems, proving incapable of learning her new part. Caccini was fired. Enraged, the composer claimed that Botti was singing badly on purpose, whilst Botti claimed to have been ill-treated by Caccini. One commentator anxiously (or gleefully, it is hard to tell) wrote that he was beginning ‘to wonder if it will be possible for la Cecchina to survive, because I know these emotions, and those tongues, and . . . what they have said on other occasions’.
Caccini did survive. Time and again, she reveals herself to be a canny operator in this often vicious world, working to manage the unrealistic expectations and arbitrary demands of her patrons, not to mention the attacks from rival artists. She could be fiercely protective of her (often exhausted, often very young) singers, whilst always taking care to couch any resistance in terms of abject humility, or to soften her stance with humour. Above all, her professionalism shines through. Writing to Michelangelo, this time from Pisa, in February 1618, Caccini thanks her friend for sending over his poetry: ‘now it remains for me to match it with my part, that is, in composing and singing it’. She hopes to find a time to sing it to ‘their Highnesses’ but can’t give a firm promise, ‘given the surprises that can happen’. She can report, happily, that ‘His Highness’ has called for her each day, and she has taken the opportunity to talk up Michelangelo’s work when in his presence. Caccini concludes that she is hopeful of being able to write good news to him soon, ‘because if the [Medici] ball bounces to my hand I won’t let it get away’.
Caccini’s ability to hang on to ‘the Medici ball’ over many years relied on her ability to understand, and manipulate to her own advantage, the gender politics of the Medici court, as she had done in dealing so successfully with Salvadori. The extent of her triumph is, however, hard to comprehend because, despite the painstaking work of scholars that has revealed so much about Caccini’s life as a composer, the vast majority of her compositions are lost to us.
There is an exception, and it is a masterpiece: Caccini’s Il primo libro delle musiche (The First Book of Music), which appeared from nowhere in 1618. To listen to the songs collected together by Caccini in this, the first and only volume of arias she published, is to enter a world of intense feeling, expressed in musically innovative ways: desire – including my favourite, ‘Rendi alle mie speranze’ (Give Me Back My Hopes); loss – ‘Lasciatemi qui solo’ (Leave Me Here Alone); and anguish – ‘Ferma, Signore, arresta’ (Stop, Sir, Stop). Other songs are, in the words of eminent musicologist and Caccini’s biographer Suzanne Cusick, ‘mysteriously compelling despite the absence of so-called expressive devices’, with ‘Maria, dolce Maria’ (Maria, Sweet Maria) and ‘Jesu corona virginum’ (Jesu Thou the Virgin’s Crown) communicating ecstasy and tranquillity rather than agony by means of ‘melodies so well organized and harmonies so modern as to render the deceptively simple songs unforgettable’.
At the core of the collection are Caccini’s arias, brilliant compositions constructed from the harmonic building blocks that were the starting point for every composer in her time. Her favourite building block is the romanesca, consisting of two phrases, the first of anticipation, the second of resolution, all based around fourths in the bass part. A composer could follow the pattern to the letter (or rather, to the note), but the great composers/performers tend to push constantly, brilliantly and inventively against the framework. It has been argued that the romanesca was as elastic as the twentieth-century blues, in its flexibility and its encouragement of the creation, always from conventional or recognizable materials, of sound structures as never heard before. This is precisely Caccini’s achievement.
Il primo libro delle musiche is remarkable in other ways too. It is a book of music written by a woman for women, offering examples of every genre that a female solo singer needed to master, revealing the ‘myriad tricks of a musica’s trade and much more’. These tricks include playing confidently with gender, often in suggestive ways. ‘Ardo infelice’, a breathless, desire-filled lament, is gender-neutral, in the same way that many of Shakespeare’s most well-known sonnets conceal the gender of both the speaker and the beloved, allowing room for all sorts of combinations of desire. Meanwhile, ‘Io mi distruggo’ is a duet so ‘textually and musically explicit in its performances of longing, union, and fantastically ornamented singing as to leave little doubt that it is as much a lesson in sexuality as in vocality’. As Suzanne Cusick astutely observes, one of the tricks that Caccini is teaching her female musician reader is how to sing about desire without acknowledging any knowledge of desire.
Caccini was playing with fire with these kind of gender games. Indeed, her friend Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger would almost get burnt some four years later when he entered similar terrain, the year he published an edition of his famous great-uncle’s poetry. To more recent commentators, the edition is ‘one of the grossest misdeeds that an editor had ever committed’, because Michelangelo not only modernized much of the language, but changed the gender of the works’ pronouns to conceal their homoerotic content. But Caccini’s friend had good reason to make those changes. A hundred years before the edition of 1623, the artist Michelangelo had expressed love and desire for men and women in his poetry. Now, in the full glare of the Counter-Reformation and its Inquisition, such expressions were inadmissible. For three months at the end of 1622, the censors scrutinized the poems before, at last, letting them pass. That ‘alcuna indecenza’ (nothing indecent) appeared may not, therefore, have been an expression of Michelangelo the younger’s prudishness, but a reflection of the social and political reality of his time.
As for Caccini, there is absolutely no indication that her Il primo libro fell foul of the censors in any way. Why, then, was there not a second book? At the time, it was noted that the composer was keen to publish more, but ‘was forbidden to do so’ by both the Medici doctors and the Medici Serene Highnesses, ‘for the sake of preserving her person, as she had been gravely ill’. Perhaps, but behind these words lies the reality that Caccini was only and ever a servant of the Medici and that any publication needed to be about them, and for them, rather than for Caccini herself. Until recently, Florence’s rulers had suppressed composers’ names in any and all documents, whilst showing little interest in print, at least when it came to music. Francesca Caccini’s breakthrough work, La stiava, for example, had not been printed but instead was circulated in manuscript form, providing a vital representation of Christine de Lorraine’s power at a difficult time of political transition. In this context, it seems all the more remarkable that Il primo libro appeared at all, a precious, momentary glimpse of Caccini’s ability as a composer. The work made clear, to a world beyond the Medici palaces of Tuscany, that the baton had indeed been passed from Giulio to Francesca Caccini and it is pleasing to think that Giulio recognized and even honoured his daughter’s achievement, for, when he died in the winter following the publication of Il primo libro, he left Francesca a magnificent hand-painted keyboard instrument, a symbolic tool of her trade.
Giulio’s death did nothing to interrupt the rise of his daughter. In the winter of 1623–24, in an attempt to pour oil on troubled waters (the Medici and the papacy were constantly at political odds), Caccini was to sent to Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici’s Roman household as a gift to the Florentine Maffeo Barberini, whose election as Pope Urban VIII was being celebrated in Rome throughout that winter. Seven years earlier, on her first stint in Rome, Caccini had been very much the support act to Jacopo Peri. Now she was the star performer, playing for cardinals and music lovers, at veglie (artistic meetings) for Rome’s elite women, for private visitors, just before or after a meal, often for several hours, alone or with the singer Adriana Basile, herself a gift from the Duke of Mantua, moving between the great Renaissance and baroque venues of Rome, including of course the magnificent Villa Medici, created by Carlo de’ Medici’s father during the days of his own cardinalate. At last, on the final Sunday in January 1624, Caccini was called to perform for the pope in his private apartments and for one day Florence and the papacy were reconciled by Caccini’s music.
The tensions did not take long to resurface, because the Medici family needed papal support to annul a marriage arrangement for one of Cosimo II and Maria Magdalena’s daughters, Margherita. She had been promised to the Prince of Parma, but now it was hoped that Margherita could be married to her mother’s Habsburg nephew, Crown Prince Wladislaw of Poland, who would be visiting Florence during the carnival early in 1625. A four-month season of state entertainments was being planned, all part of Maria Magdalena’s ongoing attempts to align Tuscany more closely with the Habsburgs, and thus to distance the Medici family from their traditional loyalty to France. This also illustrates the underlying power struggle for the entire Italian peninsula (and beyond) that was being waged between the established superpower of Habsburg Spain and a resurgent France.
It is in this context of dynastic power politics that Maria Magdalena commissioned the work that is most frequently associated with Caccini, by now a thirty-six-year-old veteran of court spectacles. The proposed entertainment would be performed in a space that Maria Magdalena ‘had infused with an almost defiant affirmation of womanly power’, the newly restored Villa Poggio Imperiale, in its commanding position above Florence, over a mile south of the Pitti Palace and its Boboli Gardens, through the Porta Romana, well beyond the city walls. Even today, taking a bus to the city gate, then walking up an immense tree-lined avenue, one gets a sense of why Poggio Imperiale was an ideal venue for Maria Magdalena d’Austria to display her power – as a regent, as a woman, as the ruler of Tuscany. She had the power to bring anyone who was anyone out of Florence, up to her palace, through her avenue of trees, into her domain, to see her entertainment, with music composed by her composer, Francesca Caccini.
The villa had, however, a disturbing female Medici ghost. Two generations earlier, in the building then known as the Villa Baroncelli, Isabella Medici-Orsini had been strangled by her husband, Paolo Giordano Orsini: her crime, an affair with his cousin. Isabella provided, if one were needed, a reminder of the dangers of Florentine life. Abandoned by her husband soon after their marriage, she was known, in her lifetime, for her love of literature and music, with her portrait even showing her holding a score. Paolo Orsini, on the other hand, was known for his love of prostitutes in Rome, women such as Camilla the Skinny, who describes finding Orsini with another prostitute, Pasqua, her rival’s threats, the men with Orsini who ‘had spurs in their hands’, and the injuries she received when they ‘touched her a little in the face with their spurs’. This not only reveals the more sordid aspects of the sex industry, but Orsini’s propensity, whether in Rome or dealing with his unfaithful wife, to use violence to achieve his ends.
Since Isabella’s murder, the villa had been abandoned. Now it glittered once more. Not only did Maria Magdalena cover the walls of her new palace with prestigious artworks, some such as Perugino’s Deposition plucked from Florence’s churches, but, as scholar Kelly Harness writes, she ‘commissioned canvases and frescoes depicting heroines from history, hagiography, and the Bible, including precisely the same protagonists of the religious musical spectacles performed at the court during her rule’. To an extent, Maria Magdalena was simply doing what her Medici predecessors had always done, using art to legitimize her rule. Her extra challenge was to show that she stood in a long tradition of women who had drawn their power and authority directly from God.
As soon as Maria Magdalena’s guests began their journey to the villa, they were witnesses to that power. As early as 1619, she had initiated a two-year, thirty-five thousand scudi project to widen the approach to the villa once travellers had left the city walls behind them. Now the road up from the Porta Romana was filled with hundreds of carriages. On arrival, guests were greeted by Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, arrived from Rome to support his sister-in-law. A lucky few might be permitted a ‘private’ audience with Maria Magdalena, whether in her audience room, antechamber or bedroom, all decorated with freshly painted frescos of exemplary, and powerful, women.
And then the spectacle begins. In only the first transformation of many, an aquatic scene morphs into the evil witch Alcina’s garden, with trees rising from the sea. The good witch Melissa enters on a dolphin, and explains what is going to happen. Then, as the synopsis of scene five puts it, in the ‘beautiful and luscious meadows’ twenty-four ‘maidens made their way dancing on sumptuously bedecked horses; and all the people gathered to watch them dance until Melissa, carried on a centaur, entered the site thus making the work’s epilogue’. The Boboli Gardens of the Medici Palazzo Pitti in the heart of Florence would only gain its famous amphitheatre designed by Giulio Parigi some five years later. In February 1625, the audience of La liberazione enjoy their entertainment in an equally sophisticated and theatrical garden at the Villa Poggio Imperiale.
Around seventy-five minutes in length, and one of the few full-length works of early modern music theatre by a single composer to survive, La liberazione is, according to its title page, un balletto composto in musica, in other words an entirely sung, plotted entertainment meant to end in dancing. The success of the work lay in its fusion of moving, stimulating music with an inspirational plot line. There are playful nods to convention (Caccini uses four trombones in a scene featuring some enchanted plants, when her audience would have expected trombones to depict the underworld), suggesting the composer’s confidence and wit. And with good reason: Caccini’s skills are everywhere in evidence, but most notably in her demonstration of the possibilities for character expression through recitative. A generation later, the aria would become the dominant element in opera, but in Caccini’s lifetime, moments of most intense passion were primarily created through dramatic and expressive recitative. Indeed, an envious French writer, writing in 1636, noted that the Italians succeed in representing:
As much as they can the passions and affections of the soul and spirit, as for example, anger, furor, disdain, rage, the frailties of the heart, and many other passions, with a violence so strange that one would almost say that they are touched by the same emotions they are representing in the song; whereas our French are content to tickle the ear, and have a perpetual sweetness in their songs, which deprives them of energy.
The self-appointed spokesman for the Italian music had, of course, been Giulio Caccini whose Le nuove musiche included helpful, practical explanations of the techniques that a singer required in order to move the listener’s soul, an aim that lies at the heart of any baroque artistic creation.
His daughter’s achievement is to deploy a range of musical techniques (harmonic juxtapositions, chromaticism, dissonance and syncopation) to create a sustained illusion of emotion. Wladislaw Vasa, Poland’s future king, was so impressed by Caccini’s work that, on his return to his own country, he set about establishing opera there. Vasa had been to Vienna and Rome, had watched and listened to Sant’Orsola a week earlier in Florence, but Polish court accounts of the performance on 3 February reveal it was Caccini’s work that day that ‘evoked a bigger interest in the audience’. Vasa had the text of La liberazione translated into Polish, and, a further sign of his appreciation of Caccini, commissioned two works (‘music dramas’) from the composer.
But is La liberazione an opera? All too often it is described as such, in part to bolster Caccini’s claim to a place in music history. In fact, La liberazione is hard to classify. The picture is complicated by the fact that the term ‘seventeenth-century opera’ encompasses a wide variety of music theatre from the earliest Florentine operas through the Venetian operas written for the public stage, Roman opera and Neapolitan opera to the French tragédie lyrique, English masque, English and Spanish semi-opera and Spanish zarzuela. Just as it is unhelpful to think of works in terms of a single definitive composer in an era of collaboration, generic definitions seem somewhat pointless in the face of this list. What is crucial is that Caccini is in at the start of something very exciting. As the musicologist and practitioner James Middleton points out, opera (whatever that may be) began as ‘experimental theatre of the most radical kind’.
It was, however, experimental theatre in the service of powerful women who sought to maintain power despite outright hostility to their sex. To give but one example: the Venetian ambassador at the time when Cosimo II became grand-duke attacked the grand-duchess Christine’s apparent desire ‘to govern everything absolutely, without any thought to the reputation and the benefit of her son’. For the women rulers of the Medici state, La liberazione stood as a high-risk attempt to confront, head on, the sexually focused, but politically grounded, fears and fantasies that surrounded women in power. Christine de Lorraine was only too familiar with these myths, having been brought up in the court of Catherine de’ Medici in France, a court that was the subject of a feverish account of what would today be designated lesbian activity. The account may stop short of denunciation, noting that so long as dildoes were not used then the women’s sexual activities were not a true threat to patriarchy, and might even, if one was being generous, prepare girls for marriage, but it was utterly indicative of the attitudes towards women and power.
La liberazione is a remarkable, and risky, assault on precisely these attitudes. Not only is its plot taken from what has been described as one of recent literature’s great gynophobic stories, Ruggiero’s rescue from the feminizing sorceress Alcina by the ‘bi-gendered’ (because she impersonates a man to achieve her goal) Melissa, but its performance at the Villa Poggio Imperiale was a reminder that the last woman to command entertainment in that house had been the murdered adulteress, Isabella. But both Christine de Lorraine and her daughter-in-law Maria Magdalena were clearly ready to take the risk. For years, they had sought to demonstrate that it was business as usual for the grand duchy of Tuscany. There was no dangerous interregnum; the (political) show would go on. La liberazione takes their message one step further. The final vocal scene of the work makes the crucial, and radical for its time, claim that men and women are fundamentally equal.
La liberazione was a political and musical triumph, whilst also serving as a reminder that Caccini’s career depended on the existence of Christine de Lorraine and Maria Magdalena d’Austria in positions of power. Caccini could not merely serve, she could embody their political agenda. Put simply and powerfully by one musicologist: ‘If Francesca got away with something in history, she did so in tandem with Christine and Magdalena.’ What she ‘got away with’ was a huge body of compositions, only a fraction of which survive.
The Medici women did not only use music and spectacle to support their claims to (female) power. Prior to La liberazione, they had commissioned a massive literary work from Cristoforo Bronzini: Della dignità, & nobilità delle donne (Of the Dignity and Nobility of Women). Bronzini argued that the equality of men and women was not only an absolute value, but that it was politically necessary to the health of the state. More astonishing, the work pointed the finger of blame at men, whose ‘most insolent tyranny’ had resulted in their taking power ‘unjustly in every sphere of life’. Bronzini offers a vision of a non-violent woman’s world, epitomized by mercy, piety and compliance, and Caccini is none other than its poster girl. Twenty-three pages of praise extol her virtue, revealing a woman who, through her music, could heal the sick, transform violence into peace, evil into goodness and invite ‘every breast (even if opposed to chaste intentions) to pure continenza and onestà’. There is even a spiritual dimension. Caccini’s music, writes Bronzini, allowed her listeners glimpses of ‘celestial things, such that she transformed (I dare say one could say) human beings into gods’.
A perfect, all-powerful, even God-like, Caccini becomes part of a sustained public relations exercise, designed to legitimize the power of the Medici princesses. So far so good, but Bronzini’s insistence, over-insistence maybe, on Caccini’s virtue, to include her onestà, castità and continenza, actually points up the elephant in the room: the fear of precisely the opposite qualities, which were traditionally located in the body of the music-making woman. As one contemporary put it, expressing a formula found throughout the writings of the time: ‘When music combined with visual beauty, it served as a double invitation to the pleasures and dangers of love, for body and soul were thus twice besieged and rational man deprived of his physical senses.’ Every female musician operated in the shadow of this image of the lascivious whore, who used music as a form of entrapment, destroying ‘rational man’. This mindset might explain why Bronzini writes, distinctly unflatteringly, that Caccini was not ‘favoured by the gifts of nature’, but that she is:
Nonetheless friendly and admirable, never tiresome or resentful but merry and charming, and presented herself first of all with sweet and graceful manners toward everyone. And whether playing, singing, or pleasantly talking, she worked such stunning effects in the minds of her listeners that she changed them from what they had been.
Caccini, in impressive style, breaks the still prevalent model whereby a woman is judged by how she looks, rather than what she does, but Bronzini’s praise is motivated by his concern to show that the composer’s powers of transformation are not dangerously linked to her physical beauty.
This mindset also helps to explain the cultural phenomenon whereby female singers were subjected to so-called virginity tests, all in an attempt to stave off the horror of the unchastity associated with their art. Physiological ‘evidence’ was drafted in to support these views. As one social historian explains, ‘chastity existed as a moral category and as a physical state, both of which singing implicated’. It was, then, an easy step to imagine the throat ‘as the sieve through which chastity leaked out in the world and which rendered singing an activity that could prove the singer anything but chaste’. A whole range of treatises dealt with the ‘problem’ of the female voice, even when the female in question was considered virtuous. Silence, it was believed and asserted, was a natural female condition, condoned by famous verses from the Old and New Testament. ‘Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’ (1 Tim. 2:11–12) was just one of the most explicit.
This is the powerful landscape of belief within which Caccini worked as a singer, teacher and composer. It is a landscape that will reappear in almost every chapter of this book, and it served to complicate the praise she received from Bronzini in 1622. If ‘whenever it suited her’ Caccini ‘so ignited wonder and daring in the breasts of people that they would have done anything, no matter how difficult’, then surely that made Caccini dangerously powerful, a woman entering the territory of the sorceress or courtesan?
On a more practical level, Bronzini’s praise, not to mention his vision of male/female equality, makes a mockery of Caccini’s everyday working conditions. Although she certainly benefited hugely, and possibly suffered silently, from being born a Caccini, and although her father undoubtedly provided her with a way in to the life of a professional musician, the reality was that, from the moment Francesca became la musica in 1607, the famiglia of the Medici court controlled her. To enter the court meant surrendering rights over one’s art, one’s marriage, the very place where one lived. In return, those who joined the Medici famiglia received favour in the form of assistance with dowries, jobs, pensions, housing allowances and income, not to mention the possibility of valuable gifts from visiting princes. It was not a glamorous life for any musical servant, who might, as one husband-and-wife team were, be commanded with half a day’s notice to perform for two and a half hours at a certain palazzo. The couple complied, of course, but, as the husband reported to a friend, it was hard. His wife ‘did as well as possible, sang a few things, although with very great difficulty, because she is in her sixth month of what has been a very difficult pregnancy . . . I can assure you that she could hardly breathe, and as a consequence could not sing at her usual level.’ It was a world in which, just as the father was the head of the family, controlling the lives of his children, so was the noble at the head of the court in relation to the adults in his or her employ.
It is no surprise, therefore, that within months of Francesca’s appointment as la musica back in 1607, a marriage had been arranged for her to a fellow musician, Giovanni Battista Signorini. Marriage could be, and was, the end of a professional woman’s career. In a previous generation, a scandal led to the composer Laura Bovia losing her place at the Medici court. On her return to her home city of Bologna, ‘her uncle-become-father arranged a nice marriage for her’ (in the laconic words of one music scholar). She never composed again.* Marriage, far from marking the end of Caccini’s career, would mark its true beginning, tied as it was to her appointment as la musica. From the little that is known of her husband, thirty-one at the time of the wedding, and from the artisan class, he was handsome and easy-going. It did not appear to trouble him that his wife’s career was far more successful and lucrative than his own and, indeed, he acknowledged in his will the huge imbalance in their respective financial contributions, a document that expresses only goodwill towards Francesca.
Francesca and Giovanni probably lived in one of her father’s properties at first, but eventually her dowry was invested, as was customary, in property. This was on the via Valfonda, now an unprepossessing road running behind the main railway station but, in its time, a street that encapsulated the subtle gradations within the class system in Florence, from patrician households with servants out to much smaller, poorer homes.* The Caccini/Signorini house was their primary workplace and, if it was anything like other musician households of the time, it is likely that musical instruments (many on loan from the court), manuscripts and other tools of their trade were scattered throughout the building. One musician couple used their pantry to store about half their music books, alongside a larder full of food.
For the first fifteen years of the marriage there were no children. Since the vast majority of women had a child shortly after marriage in early modern Europe, this long period of childlessness is unusual. Francesca may have become pregnant and miscarried. Perhaps the couple used, discreetly, the limited contraception that was available, such as condoms made from animal intestines or bladders. It is impossible to know. Caccini certainly never expressed any regret about her prolonged childlessness, despite the prevalent view that procreation was the prime function of marriage, not to mention the equally prevalent view that childlessness was always the fault of the woman.
But then, on 9 February 1622, and with Caccini aged thirty-four, a daughter, Margherita Signorini, was born. Neither Margherita’s arrival, nor indeed the pregnancy, appears to have had any impact on Caccini’s life as a composer and performer in a culture in which advanced pregnancy did not stop women singers performing, and sending babies out to be nursed was standard practice for those who could afford it. Caccini, with her starring role in Bronzini’s Della dignità, & nobiltà delle donne and her regular court commissions, could certainly afford a nurse, and there was no interruption of Caccini’s professional career by the time of Margherita’s third birthday in 1625. Indeed, with the success of La liberazione, and commissions from Prince Wladislaw, the composer apparently had a glittering future ahead of her.
It was not to be. Giovanni Baptista Signorini died on 29 December 1626. His will, dictated just six days before his death, shows that he acknowledged to the last the talents of his wife of nineteen years standing, not least her ability to bring in the money:
The entire cost and value of these [houses] and the improvements, decorations and other additions to them were all executed from the effects and the money of the aforementioned Signora Francesca his wife, and therefore as he said above he intends and wills that the aforementioned houses belong to her as her own property.
Caccini kept her own property, but Signorini also bequeathed her the responsibility for paying for the funeral, prayers for the dead and a dowry for an unnamed girl. This came on top of the need to provide a dowry for the couple’s own daughter, Margherita, now four years old. The funeral, which took place the day after Signorini’s death, saw him buried in the tomb kept by his burial society, the Compagnia del Santo Rosario della Gloriosissima Vergine Maria, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, close to the family home in via Valfonda. If his wife conformed to the usual practices of her place and time, she would not only have put on mourning clothes, but also shaved her head in readiness to lead the ritual laments that were the women’s part in this final religious office. As so often, she would not have been seen in a public space, since the female mourners occupied a separate room, their laments filtering through to the men in the main body of the church.
Signorini’s death would have far more impact upon Caccini’s life as a composer and performer than had the birth of Margherita. As a widow, Francesca had, according to her society’s conventions, three options: dependency upon the Signorini family; a return to her own Caccini family who would then arrange for a second marriage; or, risky, rare, but possible, to support herself and, as a working widow, to provide a dowry for Margherita.
It was a bad time to be seriously considering the challenging route of independent widowhood. The Italian peninsula was entering a period of economic decline, after a period of relative stability and, by the 1620s, the Florentine economy had slipped into depression, economic historians pointing to a deepening crisis in agriculture, the arrival of English and Dutch shipping in the Mediterranean, the competition of northern textiles, costs of production in Italian cities and a series of banking crises. More pertinent still, the young Arch-Duke Ferdinando was approaching his majority, and his mother and grandmother were focused on preparing their male heir for power. Just at the moment when Francesca’s personal life was in crisis, so too was her professional world, with the shift from a female court to one that was unmistakably male, and masculine. The shift left little room for Caccini’s particular kind of expertise. Why would Grand-Duke Ferdinand need, or want, an exemplary female composer to bolster up his claims to power?
In the end, a fourth option emerged, in part an indication of the value placed on Caccini by the Medici family, but also an indication that she was expendable in the new political climate. By October 1627, Francesca, together with, it seems, her daughter Margherita, had left Florence and the grand duchy of Tuscany, and were settled in the small, independent republic of Lucca, some forty-five miles west, and at least two days’ travel. She was now the wife of Tomasso Rafaelli. This second marriage, probably brokered by the Medici, offered a new arena for her talents, and also a major step up the social hierarchy. Tomasso was a member of one of the 104 Lucchese families qualified by birth to serve in government. In sharp contrast to Signorini, ever and always the artisan musician, Rafaelli was a leading figure in musical and intellectual academies of Lucca, wealthy enough to be a collector and patron, rather than a mere performer. Indeed, a combination of dynastic and cultural ambition may have led to Rafaelli’s decision to marry the forty-year-old Francesca Caccini. He was fifty-six and had never married. A contemporary describes him as a ‘Ganymede’ (a reference to the beautiful boy adored by the god Jupiter), an unsubtle term to describe a man who preferred men. But even a Ganymede needs an heir. Tomasso, a son, was born to Francesca and Tomasso in 1628.
Caccini offered her husband more than a son. Away from the Rafaelli Palace in that street of magnificent palaces, the via Fillungo in Lucca, out on the slopes of Monte San Quirico, there were ‘many beautiful villas owned by gentlemen’ in which there were ‘very large gatherings for conversation’. Out in the hills, in those beautiful villas, Lucca was being ‘transformed into a new Parnassus’ by Rafaelli and his friends. That was the vision, anyway, and Francesca Caccini was the woman to help achieve it.
The dream was to be sadly short-lived, for Rafaelli at least. Already struggling with the fallout from the collapse of the Lucchese Buonvisi banking empire in 1629, by the beginning of the following year he was seriously ill. By 16 April 1630, Rafaelli was dead. He had dictated his will in February and, like Signorini, was generous to a fault. The difference was that Rafaelli had something to leave. He named Francesca ‘padrona, donna, e madonna’ of all that he owned, expressed his respect for her, and conferred upon her, as far as he could, a place in Lucca’s elite. He even made a bequest to his stepdaughter Margherita, in gratitude for her ‘many kind gestures’ towards him, gestures made as if he were her ‘true father’.
At first sight, Caccini’s situation in 1630 was enviable. As a forty-two-year-old widow with her own means she did not need to work again. And yet, Rafaelli’s death did not signal the end of her career as composer, performer and teacher. The needs and desires that drove Francesca Caccini forward at this stage in her life had, it seems, very little to do with money. At first, indeed, she was driven by the very real fear that she would lose her daughter, Margherita, ironically to the Medici family who had previously promised to protect and support the girl. Medici protection might well have seemed like a valuable offer at one stage, but now, widowed and far from Florence, Caccini could not bear the thought that her daughter would be in ‘the hands of strangers’, her future determined by the whims of the Medici famiglia. Emotional and professional concerns are painfully entangled. Caccini does not want to have ‘laboured in vain, in continuous study for forty years’ without being able to pass this on to Margherita. Her daughter’s achievements must be her true legacy. Alongside the anguish, some of Caccini’s more familiar pride and temper seep through, when she writes that she is hurt that a Medici representative came to her house and ‘spoke with my daughter as if I were not her mother, or were not even in the world’. Caccini also reminds her correspondent that she is ‘absolute guardian’ of her son, Tomasso, and ‘free padrona while I live of all that there is’. Why can she not ‘return if I want to my homeland’? After all, she has not ‘committed crimes for which I deserve exile’. Lucca was exile; Florence was home.
Caccini’s arguments worked. She was given permission to continue to raise and teach her daughter in Florence, but the journey was not made – because plague, the living nightmare of the seventeenth century, arrived in Lucca. Desperate attempts were made to placate an angry God, with St Antonio’s remains borne through the city. Four hundred people were cured, but it was a temporary respite. Women and children under sixteen were forbidden to leave their homes, with just one person from the household permitted to go out for provisions, but only on Tuesday and Fridays. There were to be no ‘assemblies and gatherings of people in times of contagion’, schools were closed, and all games and entertainments stopped. By August 1631, eight thousand people had died in Lucca alone, one-third of the population.
Francesca Caccini, and her son and daughter, survived. At last, in February 1633, almost three years after her husband’s death, the quarantine was lifted, and a return home beckoned, only to be prevented by a further outbreak of plague, this time in Florence. More months passed. At last, probably late in 1633 or early in 1634, Francesca Caccini was able to return home, to her professional life as a singer, teacher and composer.
She was again immersed in a woman’s world. ‘Widow Francesca Caccini’ was permitted to ‘enter the monastero of La Crocetta, with her girl’. This rare glimpse of Caccini’s name in the archives indicates that her new centre of female activity would be the Dominican Monastero di Santa Croce, a convent, not a court. La Crocetta was, however, no ordinary convent. Back in 1619, one of Christine de Lorraine’s daughters, Maria Maddalena, had expressed a wish to enter La Crocetta. Accordingly, the Medici architects spent two years creating a suitable palazzo with an enclosed garden that could adjoin the convent, for the princess and her resident staff of four unmarried adult women and two seventeen-year-old donne. In addition, two of La Crocetta’s resident servants were to cook and clean for the princess’s household, and another three or four would be sent daily by Christine. Maria Maddalena’s presence at La Crocetta led to the monastery becoming the urban home of a number of unmarried princesses and, by 1633, the now elderly Christine de Lorraine was using the convent increasingly as a retreat. Of course, the usual restrictions on nuns’ movement did not apply to these Medici women or indeed to their servants, much to the dismay of the church authorities, but it was only after Christine’s death that the passageways which connected the monastery with the new-built palace were sealed by Florence’s archbishop.
The convent as it was in Caccini’s time no longer exists, but a map from the period shows a substantial building, dominated by the chapel and with a large garden, one of the benefits of a location on the extreme edge of the otherwise overcrowded city. Two cavalcavia (covered walkways) do still straddle what is now the via Laura, providing the link between the former palace of the Medici princesses and the convent. Of the convent’s interior, only a small part of the chapel survives, now part of the Hotel Morandi Alla Crocetta. When I visited in 2014, the charming hotel receptionist scurried off to check whether the chapel was being used. After a few moments waiting, envisaging the spiritual sanctuary that I was about to see, complete no doubt with candles and incense, the receptionist ushered me into a hotel bedroom, which was also one end of a chapel. It was a strange moment: past and present colliding, spiritual and secular colliding even more. Then again, that was what La Crocetta was all about, at least when Caccini was working there: a perfect example of what has been called the permeability between convent and the outside world.
The composer herself lived less grandly on Borgo Pinti, just behind the convent, in a neighbourhood of ‘many households, few shops, some patricians, some households with servants, many households without surnames and many widows’. Caccini, the widow, joined their number, and continued to teach her daughter Margherita, now eleven, as she had wanted (young Tomasso, now five, would present a different challenge). Her move to La Crocetta was therefore far from a complete break with the outside world, let alone from the Medici family. Indeed, in some respects it was as if the years in Lucca had never occurred. She was working again with Michelangelo Buonarroti, another survivor. Despite having supported Galileo in his heliocentrism in the 1610s, and then again when the astronomer was condemned by the Inquisition at the very time of Caccini’s return to Florence, Michelangelo had managed to keep himself out of trouble. Now in his sixties, he was flourishing, according to the evidence of a bust sculpted in 1630, which creates vividly in stone the writer’s still-luxuriant hair, his sumptuous clothes, his expressive hands and, above all, an energy, even arrogance, of expression. Michelangelo had been commissioned to provide eight stanzas of verse ‘at once erudite and witty’ for a surprise birthday party ‘the following Sunday’ for Christine de Lorraine’s granddaughter, Vittoria della Rovere. Vittoria, betrothed as an infant to her cousin, Ferdinando II, had entered La Crocetta with her mother as a baby in 1624. Along with entertainment, the cook had been commissioned to create a sugar palace for the thirteen-year-old princess. Chests would be filled with Christine’s presents to her granddaughter (‘gloves, handbags, and other galanterie’). The doting grandmother’s secretary noted that ‘the direction of the singing will be good, because Signora Francesca Caccini and her daughter are here, even though neither of them yet knows this thought of Madama’s’. As ever, Caccini’s ability to compose music at the drop of a Medici hat is utterly taken for granted.
Taken for granted or no, in La Crocetta Caccini may well have found a satisfying creative environment during her second widowhood. Convents are only now being understood as crucial creative hubs for many musical women in the seventeenth century. It is not simply a matter of numbers (in that more than half the women whose music was published before 1700 were nuns) but the nature of the music being produced, music that blurred the boundaries between spiritual and secular, music that revealed that the wall between convent and outside world was permeable, and not just for a Medici princess. Scholar Laurie Stras, an expert in composer nuns, has, for example, found convent music to be ‘colourful, varied, witty, and sophisticated, continually resonating with practices and references from the secular culture the nuns had officially forsworn’. The witty interplay between the sacred and the secular is visible in one of the favourite musical devices of the time, the instruction ‘cantasi come’, which asked nuns to sing (in the words of Radio Four’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue) one song to the tune of another, and resulted in sacred words sung to popular melodies.* This kind of crossover between sacred and secular, most vividly demonstrated in the renowned, even notorious, concert series performed by some religious houses, was precisely the thing that led to severe condemnations from the church authorities.
La Crocetta embodied a number of these virtues – or vices, depending on one’s viewpoint. It had been known as a musical convent for some years before Christine de Lorraine and her daughter became more closely involved. But with the arrival of the Medici princesses, La Crocetta stepped up and embraced most of the so-called abuses of female monastic life. Apparently, the residents still refer to the period as the ‘epoch of the princesses’. The noble women would move in and out of the monastery at all times of day and night; have servants; receive guests; indulge in conversation, jewellery and secular books. Musical entertainments at La Crocetta even borrowed costumes from the court. As soon as Christine died, the nuns were told in no uncertain terms that the convent had become a ‘court of princesses and ladies, and you became so many courtiers’.
Yet, for all this vibrancy, and the opportunities for music making and music teaching, for all that La Crocetta’s corridors literally led, eventually, back to the centre of power, the convent was disconnected from matters of state. La Crocetta may have allowed Caccini to be musically active, and satisfied her desire to be with, and to teach, her daughter, but the composer would never, as Cusick points out, ‘again make music in a way that was important to the public record’.
It is quite possible, however, that Caccini had a different agenda by this stage of her life. In January 1637, plans were being made for a series of entertainments to celebrate the prospective consummation of the marriage between Vittoria della Rovere and Ferdinando. (The marriage itself had taken place back in 1633, when Vittoria was only eleven.) Caccini’s daughter Margherita was expected to sing. The composer refused. This seems astonishing at first sight: surely Caccini had worked all these years so that her daughter could replicate her own success as la musica to the Medici? Margharita was already recognized as a rare talent, chosen to sing to the ailing grand-duchess. What had changed? Now, ‘the mother is the one who opposes it, on the premise that by being seen on a stage the daughter could lose her future and have that much more trouble either marrying or becoming a nun’. Another letter from the time mentions the potential detrimental impact on Tomasso Rafaelli from having his half-sister perform on stage. Caccini, as the widow of a nobleman of Lucca, and as the mother of his son, could not function as a professional musician without, to an extent, dishonouring the Rafaelli name. Indeed, Caccini made one final attempt on her own behalf to become a true dama, to complete the journey from artisan/servant to lady of the court, an attempt that, for reasons that remain unclear, the seventy-six-year-old Christine de Lorraine blocked. It was to be one of the duchess’s last actions confirming, if confirmation were ever needed, that Caccini to the last remained a servant, if a very special, honoured servant. Her exceptional status, eventually frustrating for her, if rewarding to those of us who love her music, is captured in the inscription in the records of her name between the Medici gentlewomen and their servants.
Caccini’s quest for other, and to her mind better, futures for her children was more successful. Margherita would enter a Franciscan monastery where she continued to be known for her singing: a safer, if more limited, path than the one taken by her mother. Then, in 1671, Tomasso’s daughter, Maria Francesca Rafaelli, became a dama in the court of Vittoria delle Rovere, marrying a minor Florentine nobleman, fulfilling her grandmother’s social ambitions but bringing to a close, after only two generations, the Caccini composing dynasty.
* As late as 1694, John Playford’s English translation of Caccini’s work told his readers that they could approximate the sound of the trillo by shaking the finger upon the throat, and also that it could be done by imitating the ‘breaking of a sound in the throat which men use when they lure their hawks’.
* This chapter draws heavily throughout on Suzanne Cusick’s groundbreaking academic study, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which notes for example this shift in the balance of power.
* Laura is buried at the church of San Giacomo in the village of Castelfranco, sixteen miles from Bologna, where her husband’s family chapel can still be visited, with its Madonna still wearing the silver crown that Laura’s husband gave her, four centuries ago.
* The city end of the street was drastically changed by the building of the Santa Maria Novella train station in the 1930s, whilst the coming of the railway some hundred years earlier destroyed the more rural part of the street.
* On at least one occasion, it appears the nun composer played a trick on her performers, inserting potentially crude references into her lyrics, which the unfortunate singer would have to perform whilst maintaining a straight face. The famous theorist of Renaissance social behaviour, Baldassare Castiglione, recommended that women should pretend not to understand the double-entendres so frequently present in elite carnival humour. How much more pressure was there upon a nun who had the misfortune to read aloud an equivocal text?