Volume 42, Number 17 · November 2, 1995
Women Musicians of Venice and The Red Priest
By Robert Craft
Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525–1855
by Jane L. Baldauf-Berdes
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 305 pp., $58.00
Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque
by H. C. Robbins Landon
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., $24.95
During the century and a half before the center of musical activities relocated in Vienna, the orchestras and choruses of the ospedali grandi, Venice's female charitable institutionscum-conservatories of music, were the most highly esteemed in all Europe. A Russian visitor, Count P. A. Tolstoy, noted in 1698 that 'in Venice there are convents where the women play the organ and other instruments, and sing so wonderfully that...people come to Venice from all parts of the world to refresh themselves with these angelic songs....' Henry III of France, Gustavus III of Sweden, Frederick IV of Norway and Denmark, the future Tsar Nicholas heard and admired them, as did Rousseau and Goethe, who described an oratorio in one of them as 'infinitely beautiful,' the 'voices, behind a grille'—'a delicate cage,' he called it—'were magnificent.' In the summer of 1771, Charles Burney, the music historian and father of Fanny, wrote that a Salve Regina performed in an ospedale was
Review, 5759 words
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