Maddalena Casulana Mezariaus renaissance

Maddalena Casulana Mezari (* uncertain: c. 1544 in the province of Siena, Italy; † unknown) was an Italian composer, singer, lutenist and composition teacher. She published several volumes of 3- to 5-part madrigals between 1566 and 1586, mainly in Venice. These are considered the earliest printed music by a female composer.

Composer

Maddalena Casulana is described several times in the literature as a self-confident, professional composer, including the fact that she was apparently the first woman to make use of the opportunity to become known through printing. Her collaboration with the Venetian poet and actor Antonio Molino, as well as her own texts, three of which Molino set to music, show that she was in the midst of a discourse on the merging of text and music on the way to “monody”. Further material on this can probably be found, for example, in the dedications to her. Her surviving compositions, secured for her, are almost exclusively 3-5 part secular madrigals and were almost all published in Venice, the city of early music printing.

Madrigals, which advanced the stile moderno and at the same time the “monody”, the expressive individual singing, were at that time the musically highest secular art form. It is not known whether Casulana’s solo vocal recitals, which she accompanied herself with the lute, were adaptations of her own madrigals or possibly solo compositions that have disappeared today. One such recital by the “Casolana famosa” at a banquet in Perugia in 1582 is described in an old source by Giambattista Crispoldi as “cantò al liuto di musica divinamente” (see above).

On 20 August 1582, the publisher Angelo Gardano dedicated to her a volume of Madrigali a tre (3-part) Philippe de Montes, with a request that she also compose 3-part madrigals. About 10 years later, the three-part harmony became popular with the three singers of the famous Concerti delle Donne of Ferrara.

That Casulana was not only welcome as a composer in the world of men can already be read in her dedication of 1568, for she justifies the dedication of her first independent volume to Isabella de’ Medici Orsina Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci as follows (excerpt):

“… to point out to the world (at least in the form which is granted me in the profession of musician) the foolish error of men who magnanimously believe of themselves that they alone are the masters of high intellectual faculties. And they think that these faculties cannot exist in women in the same degree.”

We conclude that as a female composer she knew difficulties related to her composing as a woman. Nevertheless, a second volume of madrigals followed in 1570 and a third in 1583 Il primo libro di madrigali a cinque voci, that volume on the title of which she is called “Maddalena Mezari detta Casulana Vicentina”, from which we infer that she was by then married. In total, more than 65 madrigals by her were published.

Her works also underwent new editions, such as Il primo libro di madrigali a quattro voci, which saw a second edition in 1586, as well as a 3-part madrigal, known only in its 2nd edition of 1586.
Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maddalena_Casulana