# Francesca Caccini (1587 - 1641)



## Taggart

Francesca Caccini, also known by the nickname, 'La Cecchina' or the 'song bird', was an eminent music composer, poet, singer and music teacher belonging to the early Baroque era. Her work 'La liberazione di Ruggiero' is noted for being the first opera composed by a woman. The compendium of vocal music Il, 'primo libro delle musiche', published in 1618, was one of the best collections of her early solo songs.

Francesca Caccini was the first-born child of two singers then on salary to produce chamber and theatre music for the Medici court-Lucia Gagnolandi, and Giulio Caccini. At 13 Francesca sang in the first more-or-less publicly performed opera,_ L'Euridice_, joining her sister Settimia, her step-mother Margerita. At 17, she so impressed the King of France, Henri IV, with the literary sensitivity of her singing in French that the King asked to have her as a musical servant to his household. However, Francesca Caccini could not join the Parisian court following objections from the Duke of Florence.

Sometime before she was 20, Tuscan Granduchess Christine de Lorraine noticed her talent, and arranged for her to study counterpoint, to marry a handsome, impoverished, respectable tenor on the court's staff, Giovanni Battista Signorini, and to be hired as a musician of the Granducal court.

Francesca was the highest paid musician at the Medici court, an intimate of the royal's domestic spaces and a person whose special gifts to the court were her ability as a composer to make her patrons "laugh from the heart" and her ability, as both a singer and musician, "to make her listeners do whatever she wanted…"

Two major works by Caccini survive: _Il primo libro delle musiche a una e due voci_, a collection of 32 songs and four soprano and bass duets; and her opera _La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina_, which was first performed on 3 February, 1625, at the Ville Poggio Imperiale in Florence. Other surviving work includes the arias "_Dove io credea_" in Constantini's _Ghirlandetta amorosa_ (1621) and "_Ch'io sia fidele_" in Robletti's _Le risonanti sfere_ (1629). She is also known to have contributed music to several court entertainments.

After Giovanni's death in December, 1626, Francesca left Florence to enter the service of Lucchese banker and diplomat Vincenzo Buonvisi. In Lucca she married patron and aristocrat Tomaso Raffaelli and a year later, in 1628, gave birth to a son, also named Tomaso. Her second husband, Tomaso Raffaelli, was noted for the richness of his instrument collection. Widowed once more in 1634, Francesca and her children returned to Florence, where she served under Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine and the new Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere

In May, 1641, Francesca left Medici service. The last record of her is February, 1645, when guardianship of her son passed to his uncle, Girolamo Raffaelli. The exact date of her death is unknown.

So, sang in the first opera, wrote the first opera by a woman, probably the most influential female composer in Europe between 12th and 19th century and yet almost unknown.


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