PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC WOMEN: PRIMA DONNAS IN MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY VENICE

Abstract

As OPERA spread throughout Italy during the mid seventeenth century, an increased demand arose for professional singers, particularly women. For the first time, women were able to pursue well-paid musical careers outside the homes and palaces of the wealthy nobility. The popularity of opera and the increasing competition among markets helped to foster these women's sense of power as they bargained to offer their services to the highest or most influential bidder. Indeed, although throughout much of Europe operatic casts featured a combination of women, castratos, 'natural-voiced' men and, sometimes, children, during the middle of the century much of the attention, and the highest salaries, were showered on the leading women.1 These decades saw the emergence of the prima donna. It is often difficult, however, to know precisely who performed in many of the operas during this period and, moreover, to gain insight into their careers as singers. We can sometimes learn the casts from lists in opera librettos (although such lists did not become common until the end of the century), from the examination of court and chapel records, and from the surviving correspondence of singers, patrons and other interested parties. The papers of the impresario Marco Faustini now housed in the Archivio di Stato in Venice have long provided scholars with the opportunity to study the often chatty letters of a number of mid-seventeenth-century singers who had ties with the Venetian theatre network; the letters frequently supply otherwise unknown data about the correspondents' and other performers' activities.2 Yet another source of information is the notarial archive of Venice. Its documents can provide us with proof of a given singer's presence in Venice (still the centre of opera