Agata, Orfana di Venezia

directed by Douglas Lawrence AM
U N C E L E B R A Z I O N E
A G A T A
O R F A N A di V E N E Z I A
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AGATA’s CANTATA performances
Saturday 23 April 2022
Thomson Memorial Church, Terang, Victoria
Sunday 24 April 2022
St John’s Flinders, Victoria
Saturday 30 April 2022
Church of the Resurrection, Macedon, Victoria
Sunday 1 May 2022
Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, Geelong, Victoria
Saturday 7 May
Scots’ Church, Melbourne, Victoria
Saturday 13 April 2024
St Andrew’s Church, Hamilton, Victoria
Sunday 21 April 2024
Basilica of St Mary of the Angels, Geelong, Victoria
Sunday 5 May 2024
The Scots’ Church, Melbourne, Victoria
Saturday 25 May 2024
Church of the Resurrection, Macedon, Victoria
Tuesday 16 July
Sala Grande, Palazzo Pisani, Venice
ON DEMAND on ACCess
https://access.auschoir.org/#/item/81064
Watch free of charge with the discount code, IwasTHERE

INTRODUCTION
It is rare that a piece of music written in Europe is
premiered in Australia. But this is the case with Agata’s
Cantata. Thanks to the Biblioteca Benedetto Marcello,
the manuscripts of this work have been safely preserved,
so that the work can now be heard by modern audiences.
Agata, born without the fingers of her left hand, and
abandoned to the Ospedale della Pietà, would likely not
have received any significant recognition for her
compositions during her lifetime.
This evening, we celebrate Agata. She can now add to her
list of achievements ten performances of her Cantata,
her first radio broadcast (on Australia’s ABC Radio
National), her first commercial CD recording and her first
performance in Venice after a silence of some 300 years.
Agata’s Cantata, written for the all-female orchestra of
the Pietà, made famous by Antonio Vivaldi, is heard on
this evening’s program as part of a celebration of
Venetian music from the 17 th and 18 th centuries.
Elizabeth Anderson
“the Australian Chamber Choir has revealed a composer
who combined technical rigour with expressive warmth”.
– The Age, Melbourne, 7 May 2022

Agatha’s First Recording
Keys to Heaven, available today
on CD, includes Agata’s Cantata,
Ecce nunc, Palestrina’s Tu es
Petrus and Missa Aeterna Christi
Munera, Allegri’s Miserere and
Christus resurgens.
Click here to browse CDs.
Programma
CLAUDIO MERULO (1533–1604)
Gloria, dalla Missa Cara la vita mia, Venezia, 1609
CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI (1567–1643) Lauda Jerusalem,
Venezia, 1651
AGATA della Pietà (1712–69) La Cantata, Ecce nunc,
Venezia, c.1744
Cover illustration: Matthäus Merian (b. Basel, 1539, d.
Schwalbach, 1650), Venezia (1636), engraving, detail
Rosalba Carriera (b. 1675, Venezia, d. 1757, Venezia),
Young Lady of the Le Blond Family (c.1730), pastel on
paper, Galleria dell’Accademia, Venezia

GLORIA DALLA MESSA CARA LA VITA MIA
Claudio Merulo
Born in Correggio, Italy, 8 April 1533; died in Parma, 4 May
1604.
Any history of early instrumental music will note Claudio
Merulo’s copious and virtuosic enrichments of the
keyboard repertoire. He issued five collections of organ
pieces; the first dates from 1567, the last from the year of
his death. All five reflected and augmented his fame as
the greatest Italian organist of his epoch, employed first
at Venice (where his colleagues included both Andrea
and Giovanni Gabrieli), latterly at Parma. The fact that
Merulo also wrote choral music is much less well known.
Indeed, this posthumously published (1609) Mass setting
might well have received its first performance on
Australian soil thanks to the ACC. It belongs to the
Renaissance genre which scholars refer to as the ‘parody
Mass’: a classification unconnected with any satirical
intent, that simply means a Mass that alludes to a preexisting
work, often one by someone else. Merulo used
as the Mass’s thematic basis Cara la vita mia, the secular
madrigal from the pen of Giaches de Wert. While the
Council of Trent (1545-1563) had actively discouraged the
quotation of profane melodic sources in Catholicism’s
liturgical writing, Merulo – along with, let it be said,
several other composers of his time – acted as if no such
discouragement had ever been voiced.

MERULO
Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus
bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te,
benedicimus te,
adoramus te,
glorificamus te,
gratias agimus tibi propter
magnam gloriam tuam,
Domine Deus, Rex caelestis,
Deus Pater omnipotens.
Domine Fili unigenite,
Jesu Christe, Domine Deus,
Agnus Dei,
Filius Patris,
qui tollis peccata mundi,
miserere nobis;
qui tollis peccata mundi,
suscipe deprecationem
nostram.
Qui sedes ad dexteram
Patris, miserere nobis.
Quoniam tu solus Sanctus,
tu solus Dominus,
tu solus Altissimus,
Jesu Christe, cum Sancto
Spiritu: in gloria Dei
Patris. Amen.
Gloria a Dio nell'alto dei
cieli e pace in terra agli
uomini di buona volontà.
Noi ti lodiamo,
ti benediciamo,
ti adoriamo,
ti glorifichiamo,
ti rendiamo grazie per la tua
gloria immensa,
Signore Dio, Re del cielo,
Dio Padre onnipotente.
Signore, Figlio unigenito,
Gesù Cristo, Signore Dio,
Agnello di Dio,
Figlio del Padre, tu che
togli i peccati del mondo,
abbi pietà di noi ; tu che
togli i peccati del mondo,
accogli la nostra
supplica ;
tu che siedi alla destra del
Padre, abbi pietà di noi.
Perchè tu solo il Santo,
tu solo il Signore,
tu solo l'Altissimo,
Gesù Cristo con lo Spirito
Santo nella gloria di Dio
Padre. Amen.

LAUDA JERUSALEM Claudio Monteverdi
Baptised in Cremona, Italy, 15 May 1567; died in Venice, 29
November 1643.
Two different Monteverdi works to these particular
words – from Psalm 147 – survive. Of these, the betterknown
one is the one which the composer included in his
celebrated 1610 Vespers. The lesser-known one is the
present one, taken from a collection entitled Messa a
quattro voci et salmi concertati, which Monteverdi
neither supervised nor beheld. This collection first
appeared only in 1650, when he had been seven years
dead. (Until something like a modern mass market for
published music arose with Haydn’s European fame in
the late eighteenth century, nearly all the greatest
composers left more pieces behind them in manuscript
than they ever had hopes of seeing in print. Monteverdi,
in this regard, fared better with publishers than most.
Couperin, a hundred years after Monteverdi, fared better
still.) The Lauda Jerusalem setting in today’s concert
minimises the boisterous antiphony of the 1610 version,
and comes somewhat closer to Monteverdi’s
predecessors in the solidity of its counterpoint.
Nevertheless, the imperious dramatic gesture of
sonorous syllabic chords beginning at the words Gloria
Patri confirms – not for the first time in Monteverdi’s
liturgical output – that while you could take the man out
of the theatre, you could never take the theatre out of the
man.

MONTEVERDI
Lauda Jerusalem
Dominum;
lauda Deum tuum, Sion.
Quoniam confortavit seras
portarum tuarum;
benedixit filiis tuis
in te. Qui posuit fines tuos
pacem,
et adipe frumenti satiat te.
Qui emittit eloquium suum
terræ:
velociter currit sermo
ejus.
Qui dat nivem sicut lanam;
nebulam sicut cinerem
spargit.
Mittit crystallum suam
sicut buccellas:
ante faciem frigoris ejus
quis sustinebit?
Emittet verbum suum, et
liquefaciet ea;
flabit spiritus ejus, et
fluent aquæ.
Qui annuntiat verbum
suum Jacob,
Loda il Signore, o
Gerusalemme,
loda il tuo Dio, o Sion,
perché ha rinforzato le
sbarre delle tue porte.
Ha benedetto i tuoi figli
dentro di te, ha dato la
pace ai tuoi confini
e ti sazia col fiore del
frumento.
Egli manda
sulla terra la sua parola,
il suo messaggio corre
veloce;
egli dà neve come lana,
sparge nebbia come
cenere,
manda Il ghiaccio come
sue briciole,
chi resisterà di fronte al
suo gelo?
Egli manda la sua parola e
lo scioglie,
il suo spirito soffia e le
acque scorrono.
Egli annunzia la sua parola a
Giacobbe,

MONTEVERDI
justitias et judicia sua
Israël.
Non fecit taliter omni
nationi,
et judicia sua non
manifestavit eis.
Gloria Patri, et Filio, et
Spiritui Sancto:
Sicut erat in principio, et
nunc et semper, in saecula
saeculorum. Amen.
i suoi statuti e le sue leggi a
Israele.
Egli non si è comportato
allo stesso modo
con tutte le nazioni
e non ha manifestato loro
le sue leggi.
Gloria al Padre e al Figlio e
lo Spirito Santo
come era nel principio e
ora e sempre e nei secoli
dei secoli. Amen.
https://lyricstranslate.com/it/rv-
609-lauda-jerusalem-rv-609-loda-ilsignore-o.html
ECCE NUNC Agata della Pieta
Born probably in Venice, 24 March 1712; died in Venice, 17
October 1769
When the Australian Chamber Choir premiered this work
on 23 April 2022 in the Victorian town of Terang, the
audience witnessed the performance of a piece of music
that had not been heard at least since Agata’s death in
1769. This is to date the only surviving work composed by
an orphan educated in one of the music schools of the
Venetian ospedali maggiori.

AGATA
Elizabeth Anderson explains the feats of musicological
sleuthing that enabled her to revive the six-movement
Ecce Nunc, which incorporates words taken from Psalm
134 (Psalm 133 in the Latin Vulgate translation):
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that
female orphans in eighteenth-century Venice
were given an excellent education in music. At the
Ospedale della Pietà, Antonio Vivaldi directed the
first all-women’s orchestra, which became
famous throughout Europe for the high quality of
its performances. I first learned about this during
a high school music appreciation class in the town
of Launceston, on the island of Tasmania, where I
grew up. My imagination was ignited, and my mind
immediately left the classroom: on an island on
the other side of the world, girls were given a
rigorous musical education and performed in a
professional choir and orchestra under the baton
of one of the world’s most famous composers. I
pondered the idea that there might be
compositions by the orphan girls of the Pietà to be
rediscovered.
Some four decades later, when my husband,
Douglas Lawrence and I decided on a
performance of Vivaldi’s Gloria for the ACC’s
2022 season, the search began. From articles
about music education in the Venetian ospedali

AGATA
maggiori, I found the names of three orphan
composers of the Pietà – Agata, Michielina and
Santa.
Pio Ospedale della Pietà, before the early 18 th century construction of the facade of the
adjacent church (detail), anon, 1686, Venice, private collection
My search narrowed to the Biblioteca Benedetto
Marcello in Venice: I’m grateful to Consultant
Librarian, Silvia Urbani, who gave me advice and
furnished me with copies of the surviving
manuscript parts. You can imagine my excitement
when, the day after requesting the manuscripts
for Agata’s cantata, the set of yellowed images
arrived in my inbox. The set consisted of a
complete first violin part and a complete cello
part, as well as choir parts for alto and bass voice.
The choir parts were for three of the six
movements, with the remaining three movements

AGATA
marked tacet. The three movements in which the
choral singers were silent were solo arias.
“I keyed in the available material for the opening
movement for choir and orchestra to create a
skeletal full score, from which we could assess
the composition and calculate how much work
would be involved in a possible reconstruction.
After an hour’s work, it was clear that we were
dealing with an exciting piece of choral and
orchestral writing similar in style to the music of
Vivaldi. At this point, Douglas Lawrence and I knew
that we had struck gold!
Page one of the first violin part of Agatha della Pietà’s Cantata, Ecce Nunc

AGATA
I’m grateful to our son, Jacob Lawrence, (who
recently completed a Master’s degree
specialising in early music at the Schola Cantorum
in Basel) for his assistance in reviewing the drafts
of my reconstruction.
It is a privilege to ensure that Agata, after some
300 years of silence, can receive the recognition
that she deserves.
The composer, whose surname is unknown – the records
identify her purely as ‘Agata’ – had been born without
the four fingers of her left hand. She was given up to the
Pietà, probably on the day of her birth, in 1712, via a small
revolving door, known as a scafetta, in the orphanage’s
façade. Admitted to Vivaldi’s famous Coro at the age of
eleven, Agata learned singing from Apollonia, also an
orphan of the Pietà, about twenty years her senior. Agata
soon shone as a star student. Two composers, Andrea
Bernasconi and Giovanni Porta, left manuscripts of
cantatas that specifically identify Agata as a soprano
soloist.
Agata never married and continued to live at the Pietà,
employed first as a teacher of singing and later also as
the institution’s Priora, or administrator. She is mentioned
in a poem, of unknown authorship, which describes the
Pietà’s musical life. Program notes © Robert James Stove 2021, 2024
Read more about Agata’s life at https://www.auschoir.org/who-was-agatha/

AGATA
Soprano, Coro
Ecce nunc benedicite
Dominum,
Soprano
omnes servi Domini:
Qui statis in domo
Domini, in atriis
domus Dei nostri.
Contralto
In noctibus extollite
manus vestras in sancta,
et benedicite Dominum.
Coro
Benedicat te Dominus ex
Sion, qui fecit caelum et
terram.
Duetto – due soprani
Gloria Patri,
et Filio,
et Spiritui Sancto:
Soprano, Coro
Sicut erat in principio,
et nunc et semper,et in
saecula saeculorum.
Ecco, benedite il
Signore,
voi tutti, servi del Signore;
voi che state nella casa del
Signore
durante le notti. Alzate le
mani verso il tempioe
benedite il Signore.
Da Sion ti benedica il
Signore,che ha fatto cielo
e terra.
Gloria al Padre
e al Figlio
e lo Spirito Santo
come era nel principio e
ora e sempre e nei secoli
dei secoli. Amen.
https://www.biblegateway.
com/passage/?search=Salmi
+134&version=CEI

You have been listening to the singers of the
Australian Chamber Choir
SOPRANO
Victoria Brown
Alex Hedt
Kristina Lang (solo sop.2)
Katherine Lieschke
Kate McBride (solo sop.1)
Jennifer Wilson-Richter
ALTO
Elizabeth Anderson
Neda Bizzarri (solista)
Melissa Lee
Katie Renner
TENOR
Matthew Bennett
Will Carr
Joshua Lucena
Sam Rowe
BASS
Thomas Drent
Kieran Macfarlane
Tom Reid
Lucas Wilson-Richter
and the instrumentalists of the Conservatorio Benedetto
Marcello
VIOLINO I
VIOLONCELLO
Nome e Cognome
VIOLINO II
Nome e Cognome
VIOLA
Nome e Cognome
Nome e Cognome
VIOLONE
Nome e Cognome
CLAVICEMBALO
Nome e Cognome