Angels Behind the Walls

By Craig Monson

In 1664, a Bolognese clergyman extolled the music he had heard while playing tourist in Milan:

At Santa Radegonda (a convent of nuns), we couldn’t tell if the singing voices were from down here, below, or celestial. They sang a Regina Coeli, which plainly showed that they had learned from the angels how to salute their Queen of Heaven. The church was so packed with the nobility that one couldn’t breathe in the heat. Foreigners who pronounced upon this music were unashamed to say that it is second, neither to that of the Austrian Emperor nor to any performed in Italy!

It may come as something of a surprise that during the Baroque, nuns’ singing exerted such a powerful fascination for aristocratic connoisseurs and others on the European Grand Tour. In Milan, the best choral singing could be heard, not at the cathedral but at the Convent of Santa Radegonda (home to Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, who appears on this program). Nuns’ vocal attractions were enhanced by the fact that they remained invisible: their disembodied voices echoed from behind the grilled screens of their choir lofts, often high up, near the vaults of their churches.

The pseudo-privacy of their screened choir lofts allowed nun singers to perform respectably, without the social taint then associated with a woman’s singing in public. After all, sight had recently displaced hearing as the second most powerful provocation of lust, according to Catholic confessors’ manuals. As one fifteenth-century influencer on family values had put it, “The speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs.”

But convent performances also required careful negotiation on the cloistered singers’ part: the church hierarchy remained suspicious of musical performance by nuns, who were supposedly “dead to the world.” One disapproving cleric lamented, “While their bodies remain within the sacred cloisters, music causes them to wander outside in their hearts, nourishing within themselves an ambitious desire to please the world with their songs.”

Most Baroque women who “went public” by publishing their compositions turned out to have been nuns. Over seventy percent of published collections containing women’s music between 1568 and 1700 were the work included on this program), Chiara Margarita Cozzolani published four volumes of her music.

It is worth remembering, however, that during the Baroque, audiences flocked to nuns’ churches more for the singers than the composers. Dozens of male composers dedicated works to notably musical convents or to individual, “star-quality” convent musicians. Diarists commonly displayed greater interest in the performers than the specific works they sang. As co-creators of the musical experience with composers, convent singers eclipsed them in the public imagination.

This was also true at Venice’s renowned foundling hospital for abandoned girls, the Ospedale della Pietà, where female voices also resounded from behind choir loft screens. These girls, carefully trained as singers and instrumentalists, lived regimented lives behind their walls, but enjoyed somewhat greater freedom. With permission from the Ospedale’s governors, the best (and best-behaved) musicians could leave the Ospedale for the day to perform at noble households, provided that they returned before sunset. The Ospedale also received a few foreign girls, sent by German courts to be trained at their monarchs’ expense. The Ospedale’s governors were careful to extract assurances, however, that these girls were of impeccable virtue and would never perform in public theaters.

Despite his current reputation, Antonio Vivaldi remained a tangential figure around the Ospedale. After his initial appointment in 1703, he served there sporadically, commonly as maestro del violino, not as director of the Ospedale’s more prestigious choral performances. At their annual elections, the governors off-and-on, as a choral director between 1713 and 1717, when he provided most of his choral music (including the earliest version of his Magnificat). One contract in 1723 carefully stipulated that senior, female teachers “must always be present when the said Reverend Vivaldi shows up to teach the girls.” (Did they fear possible improprieties during his lessons?) After a decade’s absence, in 1737 he was one of several music masters hired piecemeal to direct the choir and provide appropriate music (including an updated version of his Magnificat). But a year later, the governors let him go once-and-for-all. During his periodic affiliation with the Ospedale, he never enjoyed the esteemed title of maestro di coro. they only sang in the choruses. I was nearly in despair. I scarcely dared return to their Vespers service. But I still found their singing delightful and their voices so embellished their persons that, despite my eyes, I continued adamantly to think them beautiful.”

The Ospedale’s choral performances eclipsed those of the girls’ instrumental ensembles, which Vivaldi more commonly directed. As the singers’ voices echoed from behind the church’s choir loft grills at Vespers, their invisibility enhanced their mysterious allure. Enthusiastic audiences down below, forbidden to applaud within the sanctuary, could only express their approval by coughing heartily, loudly blowing their noses, and shuffling their feet instead.

Perhaps no audience member was more enraptured than the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions (1782) reveal just how entranced he was by these hidden voices. One of the governors agreed to take him to tea with the invisible singers. “On entering the salon,” he wrote, “which contained these beauties I so longed to see, I felt an amorous trembling as never before. Monsieur le Blond presented these celebrated female singers to me, one after another, whose names and voices were all I knew of them.

Craig A. Monson is Paul Tietjens Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St Louis, where he has taught for three decades.

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