Caccini - La Liberazione di Ruggiero

The Guardian 60

Biscuola/Martellacci/Borgioni/Allabastrina/La Pifarescha/Sartori
(Glossa)

Francesca Caccini (1587-c1645) was in at the very beginnings of opera. She was part of a musical family who regularly played and sang at the Medici court in Florence, including performances of the earliest opera that survives more or less complete, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, first seen in 1600. Her father, Giulio, contributed to Peri’s score and published his own version of Euridice in 1602.

Caccini took her own first steps into musical theatre with music for the carnival entertainment La Stiava in 1607, and was hired by the Medicis as a singer, teacher and composer. She went on to contribute to more than a dozen court spectaculars, and eventually became the highest-paid musician at the Florentine court. Yet only two of her scores survive – a collection of songs and duets, published in 1618, and the opera, La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina, which was first performed in 1625. With a libretto by Ferdinando Saracinelli based on an episode from Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso, it’s not only the first opera known to have been composed by a woman, it was also the first Italian opera to be heard outside Italy when it was staged in Warsaw in 1628.