Lacrime amare: Bianca Maria Meda Motets by Candace Smith and Cappella Artemisia (review)

For nearly thirty years, Cappella Artemisia has been dedicated to the performance of music composed for and by monastic women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1991, when Candace Smith founded the group, this might have seemed an overly specialized niche, but as scholars scoured the archives and discovered records of a highly developed musical culture in convents up and down the Italian peninsula, as well as printed volumes of music by the denizens of those institutions, it became clear that an important repertory of beautiful music had been ignored or overlooked. Cappella Artemisia began to fill in the lacuna with their first compact disc of selected works from this repertory in 1995 (Canti nel chiostro, Tactus 600001). A number of their successive compact discs are also anthologies of music by both nuns and the men who composed for them. Of particular interest, however, are those albums dedicated to works by a single nun: Raphaella Aleotti, Sulpitia Cesis, and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. Lacrime amare, the ninth recording by the group, also focuses on the compositions of one female monastic, Bianca Maria Meda.

As with many women who became nuns in the seventeenth century, it is difficult to know whether Meda had a vocation or was simply destined for the convent since birth. Many aristocratic Italian families of the time allowed only one daughter to marry, both saving on the enormous dowries that were then common and providing their clan with a font of spiritual capital—women whose job it was to pray for their salvation. What little we know about Meda comes from Emily Wilbourne's research on the female monastery in Pavia known either as San Martino del Leano or San Salvatore del Leano. From her survey of the scant documentary evidence, Wilbourne speculates that Meda was born around 1661 and died around 1732–1733, making her about thirty years old when she published her only volume of musical works, the Mottetti a 1, 2, 3 e 4 voci con violini, e senza (Bologna, 1691).

The 1691 collection contains twelve motets, nine of which are featured on this recording. (One of the excluded motets, Ardete, can be found on an earlier album by Cappella Artemisia, Rosa mistica, Tactus 600003.) The texts consist of devotional poetry in Italianate Latin (perhaps written by Meda herself or a sister monastic) and they take up subjects dear to the hearts and souls of early modern nuns. Spirate vos zeffiri is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, as is No, non tentate, which, however, seems to be more a meditation on the ills of the world and a desire not to be tempted by them than an encomium to Mary. Since holy women considered the sacrament of communion to be an encounter with the physical body of Christ, it is no surprise to find that In foco ardentissimo gives voice to the ecstasy that some of them experienced in receiving the Eucharist, described as a "burning fire," an "angelic banquet," and "celestial manna." According to rubrics in the 1691 print, the remainder of the motets are "all-purpose" works (per ogni tempo), but Anime belle is clearly Marian inspired, and the rest also take up themes important in the cloister. The texts of Vibrate, O quante contra me, and O lacrime amare contain strong imagery of storms, seas, and wind to evoke the harsh journey through a world full of temptations in search of the path to divine redemption. Volo vivere expresses a similar desire to avoid earthly snares in order to seek God. In Jesu mi clementissime, the supplicant frames Christ as her heavenly lover and desires to suffer as he did on the cross.

The vocal writing in Meda's collection suggests that she had a musically skilled group of women in her own convent. The range for both alto and soprano voice is wide (and high for the latter), and melismatic passages abound, especially on...