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Who were the members of the famous Concerto Caccini? Caccini himself, but also a few of his students; his wife, Margherita della Scala (who was the step-mother of Francesca and Settimia; their mother, also a singer, was Lucia Caccini); his son, Pompeo; and finally, Francesca and Settimia, his daughters. It is to Francesca and Settimia that this article in the series on women musicians will be dedicated. Singing under the stage names of La Cecchina and La Flora, the two sisters were born into an environment that determined their destiny from birth.
Francesca, more than her sister, has passed into posterity: singer, composer and poet, but also harp, guitar and harpsichord virtuoso (indispensable complements to her declaimed song), she was also the first woman in the history of music to compose an opera. When she arrived at the French court with her family she was seventeen years old. The sole portrait that is known of her, a cameo, scarcely permits a physical description of her. What is certain is that her voice, heard for the first time in public at the royal marriage of 1600, so seduced the couple that an offer of a thousand ecus was made if she would remain in their service. But Ferdinand I, in Florence, refused to be separated so quickly from a member of the Caccini clan.
The Caccinis returned to Florence in the summer of 1605. A strange and necessary fandango then began for Francesca: seeking out a permanent position, with a husband offered as a premium by the sovereign employer, such was the practice. Francesca, or her father, or the both of them, had character, and knew what they did and did not want. Francesca then made a brief sojourn at the Este court in Modena. Then negotiations with the princess Margherita della Somaglia Peretti fell through. Finally in 1607 Francesca was officially salaried to the court in Florence, and promised in marriage to one of the singers of the court: Giovanni Battista Signorini. Now she was daughter, sister and wife of singers. She soon was also to be mother of another singer, for after the wedding ceremonies, celebrated on Nov. 15, 1607 at Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence, she was to give birth to Margherita, a future singer and nun. 1607, the year of her appointment to the court also marks, and this is certainly related, the beginning of her career as composer. She collaborated in numerous works, notably for the carnival celebrations, and then for the festivals of the Florentine court, writing her own vocal part, according to the usual practice. She improvised songs with her students. Her employment also obliged her to perform during Holy Week and the great religious feasts. Finally, she performed numerous concerts with her husband, many of them outside Florence. For the carnival of 1607 she composed for castrato voices a stage work, now alas lost, the torneo La Stavia, after the poem Il Giovane of Michelangelo Buonarroti, poet of the court and good friend of the Caccinis. For that of 1611 she composed a recitative and a trio for women for the incidental music for La mascherata delle ninfe di Senna (in collaboration with her sister Settimia, Peri and Da Gagliano), and that of La Tancia. Her music for the balletto Il passatempo (1614), and the Ballo delle Zingare (1615) is also known.
The major event of her composing career is the publication in August 1618, by Giulio Caccini himself, of the collection Il primo Libro delle musiche of his daughter Francesca. It contained nineteen sacred works, seven of them in Latin, and seventeen secular works, including four duos for bass and soprano. The collection constitutes a document essential to our knowledge of the beginnings of accompanied monody. Francesca brought a special care to the detailed notation of the ornamentation and the rhythm, and to the preservation of the purity of the melodic line, saving the ornaments for the caesuras, the final syllables, or the essential words of the sonnets and madrigals.
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