Maddalena Casulana

Biography

Maddalena Casulana (c. 1535 – c. 1590) was an Italian composer, lutenist and singer of the late Renaissance. She is the first female composer to have had a whole book of her music printed and published in the history of western music, dedicated to her female patron Isabella de' Medici.

Life and work

Extremely little is known about her life, other than what can be inferred from the dedications and writings on her collections of madrigals. Casulana appears to not be her given name, but rather acquired by marriage to her first husband, who was likely from Casole d'Elsa, near Siena.
Her first work dates from 1566: four madrigals in a collection, Il Desiderio, which she produced in Florence. Two years later she published in Venice her first actual book of madrigals for four voices, Il primo libro di madrigali a 4 voci, which is the first printed, published work by a woman in western music history. Also that year Orlando di Lasso conducted Nil mage iucundum at the court of Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria in Munich; however the music has not survived.
She evidently was close to Isabella de' Medici, and dedicated some of her music to her. In 1570, 1583 and 1586 she published other books of madrigals, all at Venice. Sometime during this period she married a man named Mezari, but no other information is known about him, or where she (or they) were living. Evidently she visited Verona, Milan and Florence, based on information contained in dedications, and likely she went to Venice as well, since her music was published there and numerous Venetians commented on her abilities. She made at least one voyage to the French imperial court in the 1570s.
The following line in the dedication to her first book of madrigals, to Isabella de' Medici, shows her feeling about being a female composer at a time when such a thing was rare: "[I] want to show the world, as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry, and that such gifts are never given to women."

Style

Her style is moderately contrapuntal and chromatic, reminiscent of some of the early work by Marenzio as well as many madrigals by Philippe de Monte, but avoids the extreme experimentation of the Ferrara school composers such as Luzzaschi and Gesualdo. Her melodic lines are singable and carefully attentive to the text. Casulana favoured dramatic dialogue in her polyphonic vocal works. This is demonstrated in her madrigal, "Morte - Che voi - Te Chiamo?", in which she alternates different voices to highlight the questions and answers of the text.
Other composers of the time, such as Philippe de Monte, thought highly of her; that Lassus conducted a work of hers at a wedding in Bavaria suggests that he also was impressed with her ability. A total of 66 madrigals by Casulana have survived.
In 2022 it was announced that a further 17 madrigals have been added to her surviving repertoire, with twelve of the pieces being performed for the first time in 400 years on 8 March 2022, by the Fieri Consort, as part of the BBC Radio 3's programming for International Women’s Day. The discoveries were made by Laurie Stras, Professor of Music at the Universities of Southampton and Huddersfield, who identified the lost alto partbook of Casulana's 1583 book of five-voice madrigals in the Russian State Library in Moscow, thought to have been looted from the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences during the Second World War, and still bearing Gdańsk's catalogue numbers.

Work Index

This index provides a list of Casulana's works and a reference from the original publication. Available recordings are provided in the third column.