Francesco Guardi, “Il concerto delle dame,” 1782. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Europe’s first salaried professional women musicians were Venetian orphans, and their workplace was a charitable home. The Ospedale della Pietà, on the Riva degli Schiavoni, took in abandoned girls. Some of them were chosen for music and formed the group the documents call figlie di coro. They played, sang, taught the younger girls, and were paid.
The mechanism deserves to be seen for what it was, without sentimentality in either direction. Venice had four institutions of this kind, the Pietà, the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Derelitti, each with a choir and an orchestra. They were charities funded by bequests and donations, and the music was no pastime for the residents: it was the economic engine of the place. People came to listen, and those who listened left money. An institution with a good choir collected more offerings than one with a mediocre choir, so it made sense to invest in first-rate masters and good instruments.
Everything else follows. In 1703 the Pietà hired a twenty-five-year-old priest as violin master, Antonio Vivaldi, who worked there on and off for decades. Alongside him, the choirmaster was Francesco Gasparini. The music they wrote was not easy music: it was difficult music, written for performers who had the time, and the obligation, to practise every day.
On the surviving autograph parts, the girls’ names appear. Anna Maria dal Violin, who had a very long career and for whom Vivaldi wrote concertos made to measure. Pellegrina dall’Oboe. Prudenza, Chiaretta, Michielina. With no surname of their own, they took the name of their instrument. In an age when a woman could not step onto a stage except as an opera singer, with everything that profession carried socially, here were girls playing the violin, the cello, the oboe, the bassoon, the organ, the timpani.
The public hardly saw them. Performances took place behind grilles, in the gallery, and for eighteenth-century listeners that was part of the appeal: music arriving from an invisible place, played by people of whom one knew only the first name. Jean-Jacques Rousseau recounts in the Confessions that he was literally enraptured and insisted on meeting them; when they were finally shown to him, he writes, he found himself facing ordinary women, some of them scarred by smallpox, and the spell broke. It is an unpleasant and instructive page, because it says exactly what the audience was buying.
The employment was real, and binding. The figlie di coro received board, lodging and a wage, had internal ranks, and the older ones became teachers charged with training the newcomers, which kept the system running without paying outside instructors. In exchange came strict obligations: no playing outside the institution without permission, and a girl who left to marry did so with a dowry and, in several documented cases, with a commitment not to perform in public again. The talent belonged to the house.
Some chose to stay for life, and it is not hard to see why. Outside, for a woman without a family, there was no trade that put an instrument in her hands, a teacher, an orchestra and an audience. Inside, she was the first performer in the city.
The system died with the Republic. When Venice fell in 1797, the revenues that kept the institutions going dissolved, and the choirs with them. What remains is the paperwork: registers, rolls, lists of wages, and above all hundreds of concertos that are performed in concert halls today with almost no programme note explaining for whom they were written.
The point that still matters today is this: those girls did not become musicians through natural talent or through a public competition. They became musicians because an institution had a concrete economic reason to train them well, and trained them every day, for years, inside the place where they would then work.