Viva Brighton October 2015 Issue #32

ighton early music festival
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The musical Borgia
Music-loving princess Leonora D’Este
There is, officially, no surviving
music by Leonora d’Este,
Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter.
It’s known that she was
talented; other 16th century
musicians said so. It’s also
known that she had various
keyboard instruments, and
back then “if you played a
keyboard instrument, to play
beyond a certain level, you
almost de facto composed,”
says the musicologist Laurie Stras. But as a
woman, a nun, and a princess of that era, any
music Leonora did publish would almost certainly
have been issued anonymously.
Leonora grew up in a convent, as her mother
had died and there were no suitable family
members to look after her. “Growing up, she
had arguments with her father because she
was the only princess, and a princess’ value to
a ruling family was as collateral - she could be
married off to form alliances,” says Stras. “She
didn’t want to marry; she wanted to stay in the
convent. That meant she could carry on studying,
and playing music.”
Leonora’s convent, Corpus Domini, had a good
musical tradition. There were ‘servant nuns’
and ‘choir nuns’, and the latter “probably spent
more time singing than they did any other
activity, even sleeping,” Stras says. “There must
have been extraordinary music going on in this
convent, but they kept it very private.”
Stras, though, is a “musicological bloodhound”
of 20 years’ experience, with a particular
interest in 16th-century Italian music. Flicking
through a catalogue of publications by the
Venetian Girolamo Scotto, she
spotted a title, something about
a ‘Bride of God’, and wondered
if it was by a nun.
She got a reproduction from a
library in Germany. The book
contained various choral works,
with no composers’ names
given. “I started to transcribe
the music, and virtually the
whole book was just screaming
‘nuns’ music’ at me.
“There are lots of very strong signs that they
were written by a nun who lived at the same
time as Lucrezia Borgia’s daughter, in the same
kind of convent, and with the same kind of access
to the same kind of music.
The evidence is “kind of esoteric stuff”, involving
the timing of feast days, knowledge of the
private music of the d’Este chapel, and requests
for the Virgin Mary to intercede on behalf of
‘the devoted feminine sex’. Stras sounds pretty
convinced that the works were composed by
someone from Corpus Domini, with Leonora
being the strongest candidate.
“My frustration is that I haven’t yet been allowed
into the convent to see the archives. The
nuns are very polite, but they won’t let me in,
I haven’t yet gained their confidence… They
do have an archive, and I know they have her
papers. I don’t know if they have the absolute
proof there, but I’m not going to know unless I
get in and have a look for myself.”
Steve Ramsey
St Barts, Sat 24th Oct, 7.30pm. Lucrezia Borgia’s
Daughter is part of Brighton Early Music Festival.
bremf.org.uk
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