Chiara Margarita Cozzolani
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Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602 — c. 1678) was a Baroque composer, unusual in that she was a Benedictine nun, who spent her adult life cloistered in the convent of Santa Radegonda, Milan, where she became abbess and stopped composing. More than a dozen cloistered women published sacred music in seventeenth-century Italy.[1]
The Cozzolani were a wealthy Milanese family. She must have received extensive musical training before she entered the convent in 1619, when she was of marriagable age.
Her four musical opere were published between 1640 and 1650, which is the date of her Vespers, perhaps her best-known single work. There is also a Paschal Mass.
As abbess she defended the nuns' music, which came under attack from Archbishop Alfonso Litta, who wanted to reform the convent by limiting the nuns' practice of music and other contact with the outside world. The archbishop's qualms could not have been reassured by the exstatic report of Filippo Picinelli, in Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670) who found that "the nuns of Santa Radegonda of Milan are gifted with such rare and exquisite talents in music that they are acknowledged to be the best singers of Italy. They wear the Cassinese habits[2] of St. Benedict, but they seem to any listener to be white and melodious swans, who fill hearts with wonder, and spirit away tongues in their praise. Among these sisters, Donna Chiara Margarita Cozzolani merits the highest praise, Chiara in name but even more so in merit, and Margarita[3]for her unusual and excellent nobility of invention...".
Donna Chiara Margarita Cozzolani disappears from the convent's lists after 1676. The first modern edition of her complete motets, for one to five voices and continuo, was edited by Robert L. Kendrick, 1998 ISBN 978-0-89579-402-4 .[4]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chiara Margarita Cozzolani
- ^ Their habits were black.
- ^ Chiara, "pure white"; margarita, "a pearl" (Noted by [http://www.hoasm.org/VG/Cozzolani.html Chris Whent, WBAI's "Here Of A Sunday Morning"].
- ^ "Recent research in the music of the baroque era"
[edit] Further reading
- Robert Kendrick, "The Traditions of Milanese Convent Music and the Sacred Dialogues of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani", in C.A. Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (in series Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization) University of Michigan Press 1992.
