The Siren of Heaven—A Glimpse into the Life and Works of Francesca Caccini by Juliet Fraser (soprano) and Jamie Akers (theorbo) (review)

The elegant Picture Gallery of the Foundling Museum provided a congenial setting for a lecture–recital devoted entirely to the life and works of the Tuscan composer, singer, and teacher, Francesca Caccini (1587–after June 1641). Opportunities to hear a live performance focused entirely on Caccini's compositions are rare, let alone in a venue possessing such intimate associations with both women and music. A visit to the Foundling Museum is a poignant reminder of the plight of generations of mothers forced by circumstance to give up their infants; it charts the history of eighteenth-century philanthropist Thomas Coram, who founded the "Hospital for the Education and Maintenance of Exposed and Deserted Young Children" in 1739 and whose legacy continues today through the registered charity that bears his name. Among the many who supported the cause was George Frideric Handel, whose benefit concerts raised more than £7000 for the Hospital during his lifetime.

Today, the Museum organizes a wide range of musical and other public events; this lecture–recital was the first of a new series of "Friday Rush Hour" concerts, bringing together two experienced performers of early music. Soprano Juliet Fraser has sung with renowned ensembles including the Monteverdi Choir, the King's Consort, and Collegium Vocale Gent. Jamie Akers is an acclaimed specialist in lute and early guitars who enjoys a varied career as soloist, accompanist, orchestral, and session musician. Anna Beer, a cross-disciplinary historian and Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, contextualized the music through a selection of readings about Caccini's life and times taken from her recent book, Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music(2016).

To describe Francesca Caccini as a forgotten composer is something of an overstatement. Musicologists have long been interested in her life and music, among them, the distinguished scholar, Suzanne G. Cusick, whose magisterial study, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power(2009) makes a substantial contribution to the recent body of literature concerning women and their role in early modern Europe. Caccini lived at a critical time in European music history, when the rise of solo song and the birth of opera led to the development of experimental formal structures and novel expressive techniques. Her father and teacher, Giulio Caccini, was an important early proponent of this new style, which was predicated on the primacy of the text in the compositional process. His Le nuove musiche(1602) is a practical demonstration of the power of the solo voice to move the listener through clear communication of the words and by imitating the rhetorical conceits underlying the text through flexible dynamics and purposeful ornamentation. This collection of songs is remarkable for its preface, which addresses not only the background and aesthetics of the "new music," but also the practicalities of acquiring the formidable techniques required to perform it. Francesca was immersed in this style of virtuosic solo song from early childhood, and by the age of thirteen, she was sufficiently skilled to sing in Jacopo Peri's L'Euridiceand Giulio Caccini's Il rapimento di Cefalo, two musical entertainments produced for the marriage celebrations of Marie de' Medici and Henri IV in October 1600. Her compositional début with the carnival entertainment, La stiava(1607), was described as "una musica stupenda," securing for her a professional position at the Medici court under the patronage of Christine de Lorraine, Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Caccini served the Medici as a singer, teacher, and composer for some twenty years, working across church, chamber, and theatrical settings. She was a prolific composer, especially of music for court entertainments, but much of her output has not survived. Her extant works comprise a single scene from Michelangelo Buonarotti the younger's comedy...