Isabella

Highlights from the varied output of a prolific female 17th-century composer. Born into a noble family, Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) entered the Ursuline Convent in the Piedmontese city of Novara at the age of 16. Having taken holy orders she lived there for the rest of her life as a religious sister, though the relatively liberal code of the Ursulines as a teaching order enabled her to travel from time to time. In due course she became the director of music in the convent and its Mother Superior. She evidently showed musical promise from an early age, further nurtured within the convent, as the first of her published collections of music dates from as early as 1640, when she was just 20 years old.

In the circles of early music lovers, documented information about performance practice is so important as to be obsessively searched for by musicians and musicologists. While iconography sometimes cannot be relied on as evidence because of its symbolic meaning, a piece of information on the aesthetics of a performance, the making of an instrument, the composition of a group of instruments, or the repertoire performed is all the more valuable if it comes from a document, be it official or private, such as a letter. Considering that Isabella d’Este was a passionate lover of music and also a musician herself, it is easy to understand that the massive corpus of letters written and received by her can be an extraordinary mine of this type of information.