A NUN’S LOVE: The Music of 17th-Century Italian Benedictine Rosa Giacinta Badalla

On November 5 at 7 p.m., at St. Catherine’s Church in Vilnius, the international early music ensemble Canto Fiorito will give its only concert featuring the forgotten Baroque music of Rosa Giacinta Badalla, a 17th-century Italian Benedictine composer whose works are filled with passionate love. For what may be the first time in the world, audiences will be presented with a comprehensive portrait of this unknown yet remarkably talented author.

To achieve this, a group of Baroque music specialists from France, Italy, Spain, and Lithuania has joined forces; immediately after the concert they will record an album of premiere Badalla’s recordings. In St. Catherine’s Church — itself part of a Benedictine monastery — music written by a Benedictine nun will resound for the first time, harmoniously blending with the church’s architecture and iconography.

In 17th-century Italy, between 12 and 15 percent of all women lived in convents, and among the aristocracy this number reached up to 75 percent. For musically gifted women, convents offered a rare opportunity to develop their talents: during Catholic feasts, immense choirs and soloists performed, and sisters played a variety of instruments. Their musical skill was compared to that of professional opera singers and instrumentalists — and, according to some listeners, even surpassed them. Despite the many restrictions of monastic life, convents allowed women greater freedom to cultivate their creative voice than the secular world. It was in 17th-century Italy that the number of women composers began to rise sharply — and more than half of them were nuns.

Rosa Giacinta Badalla (1660, Bergamo – c.1715) was a Benedictine nun from the Monastery of Santa Radegonda in Milan. Nothing is known about her life before entering the convent or about her musical teachers. Only one printed collection of her works survives — Motetti a voce sola (1684) — and two cantatas, Vuò cercando (c.1680) and O fronde care (c.1695). These compositions reveal her exceptional mastery and distinctive style, marked by vocal virtuosity, a passionate ostinato bass, inventive melodies, striking Baroque contrasts, and assured compositional technique.

In this concert, Badalla’s works will be complemented by two instrumental sonatas by another nun composer, Isabella Leonarda of Novara, published around the same time as Badalla’s motets.

Scholars have identified Badalla’s cantatas as secular works. But could a nun write secular music about love? One of them tells of a happy gardener offering her beloved master a humble gift — flowers. Who is this beloved? His name is never spoken in the cantatas. The answer comes from Badalla’s sacred motets, which are equally filled with the rhetoric of the most ardent, tender love — but this love is directed toward the divine beloved, to whom all emotions are devoted. Without knowing the text, one could easily mistake this music for expressive secular love songs. In Baroque sacred music, passion and emotion unfold just as freely and vividly — only the addressee is God.

The concert program was created by mezzo-soprano Renata Dubinskaitė, a singer who has for several years been researching women composers of the Baroque era. The ensemble and artistic direction are led by Rodrigo Calveyra (Brazil/France), a distinguished cornett and recorder player, who will enrich vocal works with his florid improvisations and the beautiful timbres of his wind instruments. The voice will be accompanied by the delicate, heavenly sounds of the Baroque harp, played by Italian musician Margherita Burattini. The virtuosic bass part will be performed by Rodney Prada, a viola da gamba master from Milan, who will also play the soprano viola da gamba, replacing the violin part. The historical keyboard instruments, both harpsichord and organ, will be played by Spanish musician Javier Núñez Rivera.

International Early Music Ensemble “Canto Fiorito”

Rodrigo Calveyra – artistic director, cornetto, recorder (Brazil/France)

Renata Dubinskaitė – mezzo-soprano, programme author
Margherita Burattini – Baroque harp (Italy)
Rodney Prada – viola da gamba (Italy)
Javier Núñez Rivera – harpsichord, positive organ (Spain)

The Vilnius-based early music ensemble Canto Fiorito, directed by the internationally renowned cornetto and recorder player Rodrigo Calveyra, started its activities in 2013. The ensemble is dedicated to researching and performing Renaissance and Baroque music, and pays special attention to musical life in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century.

Canto Fiorito has performed in various countries, including Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the UK, Estonia, Latvia, and the Netherlands, and has initiated a major European project entitled ‘The Hanseatic Way’, funded by Creative Europe. The project includes concerts in Lithuania, as well as performances at the Brighton Early Music Festival, Hanseatic Days in Rostock, the Jeunesse festival in Vienna, the Glasperlenspiel festival in Tartu, the Bach Chamber Music Festival in Riga, and in Amsterdam.

In 2017, Calveyra initiated the Kretinga International Early Music Festival, dedicated to the oldest organ in Lithuania (1680), in Kretinga’s Franciscan church. Every year, the festival presents the world’s greatest artists and early music ensembles at concerts that are free of charge to the public.

Canto Fiorito’s repertoire also includes opera performances, such as Händel’s Alcina, Alessandro Stradella’s La Circe and Johann Sebastiani’s Pastorello musicale, the earliest surviving German opera.

In 2014, the ensemble released a CD entitled Deus Deus Meus, featuring the music of Giovanni Battista Cocciola, a composer who worked in Vilnius in the 17th century. Furthermore, in 2021, Brilliant Classics released the album Barbara Strozzi. La voce sola, which Canto Fiorito recorded together with the ensemble’s soloist Renata Dubinskaitė. Marking its 10th anniversary, Canto Fiorito recorded the CD From Rome to Vilnius (2024, Brilliant Classics) revealing Italian influence at the Vasa’s court.

The artistic director Rodrigo Calveyra was born in Porto Alegre in Brazil. He studied the recorder at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and simultaneously specialised in the recorder and Medieval music under Pedro Memelsdorff at the Civica Scuola di Musica di Milano in Italy. He later took an MA in the cornetto at the Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen in Germany. Calveyra is a regular member of the renowned Cappella Mediterranea, and is musical assistant to its director Leonardo Garcia Alarcon. He has played as a soloist and conducted orchestras in Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina and Lithuania. He performs regularly in prestigious early music festivals in Europe and South America. He was artistic director of the Brazilian-based ensemble Instrumentarium, which gave around 150 concerts in South America and Europe, with musicians such as Maria Cristina Kiehr and Manfredo Kraemer. He has recorded for labels such as Sony, Harmonia Mundi France, Alpha, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Ricercar, and many others.