[00:00:02] Speaker A: You're tuning into Salon Era, a series from Les Delices that brings together musicians from around the world to share music stories and scholarship with a global audience of early music lovers. I'm Deborah Nagy and this is the third episode of our fifth season, Enterprising Women.
Produced in collaboration with Boulanger Initiative, a research and advocacy organization promoting music by women across all time periods, Enterprising Women shines a light on two women composer performers from mid 18th century Elizabeth Turner and Elisabetta de Gambarini.
In this episode, we'll talk with two scholar performers doing groundbreaking work that celebrates and contextualizes professional women musicians in the Baroque era.
Harpsichordist Paula Maust has been doing painstaking research into the life and work of Elizabeth Turner, an acclaimed singer and keyboard player. Turner is survived by two a collection of songs from 1750 and a book of songs and harpsichord lessons from 1756.
Upon her death in 1756, the London Evening Post wrote that her extraordinary genius and abilities in music make her justly lamented by all lovers of harmony.
Music historian and harpsichordist Alison Desimone has written extensively on female musical entrepreneurship in the 18th century, with special attention given to Elisabetta de Gambarini, who cultivated career as a composer, singer, organist, harpsichordist, pianist, orchestral conductor, and even art dealer.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Born in London to minor Italian nobility.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: De Gambarini's musical pursuits were not merely genteel ladies accomplishments. She sang oratorios under Handel's baton and counted Handel and Francesco Gemignani among the subscribers to her publications of lessons for the harpsichord and English and Italian songs.
She also organized, conducted and performed in her own benefit concerts.
In this episode, we'll hear excerpts from both Turner's and Gambarini's harpsichord lessons performed by Paula Maust and Mark Edwards, plus songs by Turner and Gambarine recorded for the first time by Les Delices, featuring soprano Hannah DePriest.
I'm pleased to welcome Paula Maust and Alison Desimone to Solanira.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Welcome Allison. Welcome Paula, to Solanira. I'm thrilled to talk to you today about enterprising women.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:03:01] Speaker D: Hi everyone. It's great to be here.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Alison, you've written extensively about entrepreneurship, especially relative to women artists Musicians in 18th century London, and I was hoping that you could talk to us about what an entrepreneur is from an 18th century perspective.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: When we talk about entrepreneurship in the 18th century, I think we all have to keep in mind that this isn't the Jeff Bezos or the Elon Musk's of the world. We're talking about the beginnings of capitalism. And so in the early 18th century, we have all of these new avenues for professional musicians to kind of harness and find their ways in. And so a musical entrepreneur is simply a musical opportunist. There's someone who's taking advantage of new spaces in music making. And this is especially exciting for women because women had new abilities to find places for themselves in musical worlds. And I think we'll see this tonight with Elizabeth Turner and Elisabetta de Gambarini in terms of how they're publishing, how they're giving concerts, how they're advertising themselves to audiences, how they're performing for audiences, possibly teaching music, and all of the above. So a musical entrepreneur in the 18th century, especially for a woman, was someone who could pick and choose her path and do lots of different things at the same time in order to have a professional career.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Paula, you've been working on Elizabeth Turner, and I wanted to ask you how you first got introduced to her and her music.
[00:04:38] Speaker D: Elizabeth Turner, for me, was a very happy accident, actually. To discover her music. I was working on a completely different project. I was trying to find a good example of a descending third sequence for my music theory textbook, expanding the music theory canon, and I hadn't been able to find one. And I started searching through every score that I could find in some archival websites that I was going through that was published in the 18th century, thinking that surely I would find something there. And so I stumbled across a collection of harpsichord lessons by Elizabeth Turner. And on the first page of the first harpsichord lesson in G minor, there was a perfect textbook example of a descending third sequence. And so I was really excited for my other project.
But then I thought, you know, this is really exciting because here's a whole collection of harpsichord music that I know nothing about by a composer I've never heard of before. And so I took my computer downstairs to my harpsichord and sat down and played through. And, you know, this is great for teaching music theory, but it's also really exciting music, and I really like it. I want to know more about it. And so that really began my path towards looking into who Elizabeth Turner was and what her music is all about.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: What has been the most interesting or surprising aspect of your research on Turner?
[00:06:01] Speaker D: There's so many things. For me, I think the most surprising thing that I found is how many subscribers she had. I know we're going to talk about subscribers probably later in the episode, but it was releasing the vast number of people who subscribed to her publications compared to those of many of her peers and colleagues, and seeing and reconstructing all of who they were and what her network was like and how large her network was. I've spent countless hours going through so many documents, and I still can't tell you the exact year she was born. I have an approximate idea, but I can't tell you exactly when. I don't know who her parents were and I don't know who she studied with. And for us as musicians, that's. Obviously, those are details that we really like to have about a person, because it helps us to immediately contextualize them and put them into maybe perhaps a box of what we expect them to be.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Well, we're about to hear some of her music for the first time on this episode. And this, I believe, is from the fifth harpsichord lesson. The first movement, allegro moderato.
[00:07:10] Speaker D: I think Elizabeth Turner in her harpsichord lessons had so many musical influences, which is really exciting to be able to go through and look at this repertoire. Each lesson has several different movements. And if you look at the collection as a whole, you can see that there are French influences. There are character pieces very in the style of Couperin and Rameau. There are also a lot of Italian influences. There are clear influences from her contemporary English composers in the mid century. And in this particular movement of lesson five, there's really significant influence from Scarlatti. And Scarlatti's Esorcisi, which was a collection of some of his sonatas, were published in London, actually, where Turner was working in 1739. And they remained really popular as keyboard literature and teaching method into the following decades, which is when Turner would have been studying and then composing her own music. And so in this particular movement, you see. See that she utilizes almost the entire range of the instrument in the stylo Scarlatti. It's also formally in balanced binary form. So the structure is like a Scarlatti sonata. And probably most significantly is that there is a lot of hand crossing in both the A section. So the first half and the second half, there's hand crossing. And this is something. A technique for harpsichord playing that was really codified by Scarlatti. Some people really liked it. CPE Bach happened to say it was really trashy.
But a lot of other keyboard composers then began to emulate this style of virtuosic playing.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Let's listen.
Paula, thank you so much for sharing that beautiful performance with us. I freely admit that I actually had not really heard of Elizabeth Turner before I was introduced to your work on her and was very excited about the idea that you are planning to record her complete harpsichord works. At that same moment, I learned actually that her songs have never been recorded. And so I thought this was a great opportunity for Les Delices, maybe not at this particular moment to record them complete, but at least to be able to give listeners of this episode and much farther afield a taste of what her vocal music was like. Do we know or do we have any indications of what contexts Turner's songs would have been heard in?
[00:14:13] Speaker D: I think they were most likely performed in domestic settings. I don't see the titles of them showing up in other concert advertisements, and many concert advertisements from the time actually very helpfully list the entire program of repertoire that was to be performed. What I think is particularly interesting about her songs is that I don't know that they had so much of a performance trajectory during her lifetime, but they seem to become quite popular. Three decades after she passed away. Beginning in the 1780s and going through almost the end of the 18th century, her music starts to reappear. Her songs specifically start to reappear in a publication called the Ladies Magazine, which was specifically a London publication, and there were 15,000 subscribers. It came out once a month, and every month there was a printout, a pullout leaflet that included a song. Turner, I think, has the fifth most number of songs published in the Ladies Magazine during those two decades. So she had this kind of wide domestic audience of very active literary women who were very invested in music and the arts and culture and current events, who would have had access to her songs. Those 15,000 readers were surely playing through and singing her songs in parlor settings, in salons, in any kind of domestic situation where music making would have been taking place.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Well, we'll listen in just a moment to Tell Me Thou Soul by Elizabeth Turner, which, when we talk about influences, reminds me strongly of song Spike, her contemporaries like Thomas Arne. It's very beautiful. It's very effective. There's even, like traces of. Of purcel. It really is English song at its very best. So let's enjoy Tell Me Thou Soul by Elizabeth Turner.
[00:16:20] Speaker E: Satan.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to today's episode of Salon Era, which features world premiere recordings by Les Delices of songs by Elizabeth Turner and Elisabetta da Gambarini, as well as recorded live performances of Turner's harpsichord lessons shared with us by Paula Mouse.
In a moment, we'll return to our conversation with Paula and Allison, but in the meantime, I hope you'll consider making a tax deductible gift in support of Salan Era.
With your support, we can continue to collaborate with engaging guests from across the country and around the world. You can support Salanira by subscribing to this podcast and by
[email protected] your donations make every episode possible.
Thanks again for supporting Les Delices and Solanira by listening and subscribing to this podcast.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Welcome back, Alison. Paula. I wanted to shift our focus now from Elizabeth Turner to Elisabetta de Gambarini. How is her story and or her music different from Elizabeth Turner?
[00:20:14] Speaker C: Elisabetta de Gambarini, we know a little bit more about her biography, I think, than Elizabeth Turner. And I think that's in large part due to the fact that Gambarini came from the moneyed class. Her father, Charles Gambarini, Carlo Gambarini, claimed to be an Italian count, whatever that means. We do know that he and his wife Gianna, who was an opera singer, they moved to London. And Carlo Gambarini started a kind of art antiquarian business. He collected paintings and he sold paintings to wealthy London patrons. And so we believe that Gambarini probably had some money and she certainly had connections to this, you know, sort of wealthy upper crust of London society. We know that because of who her subscribers were. One of the subscribers to her Opus 2 publication was the Prince Lopkowitz, who was a very prominent Bohemian nobleman who spent some time in London. And so she definitely had these connections. It's interesting because Gambarini was really able to draw upon that network, I think, for the people who were buying her music that we see in the subscribers list, but probably also for the people who were coming to her concerts. She came from connections and she definitely came from money. But we also know a little bit about her personal life, which I also think is really interesting and important to share.
Gambarini married in the last year of her life in 1764. She died in early 1765. She married someone who worked for the French ambassador to England. And this man, Stephen Chazelle, we know from lawsuit documents of court records, actually abused her and her mother quite extensively, was really, really horrible. And what these documents outline is Gambarini's story, bringing this lawsuit against him and basically, you know, trying to get out of this horrific relationship that she was in. Steven Chazelle fled to the diplomatic residence. They tried to arrest him on that property. And of course, you know, that just exploded into this diplomatic disaster. And still Gambini, in the last year of her life, she was still giving concerts, even as a married woman as Mrs. Chazelle. But her story kind of fades out from there. We don't really know much more. We think she died in childbirth in early 1765. We don't know what happened to her husband. Even though we know a little bit more about her, there's still a lot of mysteries kind of surrounding her life.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: It's hard enough to know about someone's professional life from that period, but to have this window into her personal life, which seems like it was quite tragic. The research that you did to kind of uncover this history, going through all these court documents is. Is so cool and just, of course, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the web of information and influences that. That we try to bring together to make these names, 3D characters, not just reduced to who their teacher was or who their father was and things like that. Like Turner, Gambarini published both songs and harpsichord lessons. And how do you describe her work to those who are not familiar with it?
[00:23:32] Speaker C: I think Gambarini's work is very much promoting her virtue as an elegant upper class woman.
And I think her music is very much geared towards that same demographic in terms of who she was writing for. So her music is very gallant in style, probably more so than Elizabeth Turner, by which I mean, you know, more balanced phrases, not necessarily like a sort of extravagant counterpoint going on in her music, but very beautiful melodies nonetheless. We know that Elisabetta Gambarini started her career as a professional singer, like her mother had been an opera singer as well. And so I think her music, even the pieces that are just for keyboard and not voice, are very vocal. But, you know, within them, you also do find little hints here and there of the same things that Paula was bringing up. So, you know, contemporary English composers, definitely some Scarlattian influence. Gambarini also wrote a number of variation sets. These variation sets progress in difficulty as the player goes through them, sort of signifying, hey, yeah, maybe young women at home who were also, you know, practicing their virtue by learning the harpsichord, learning an instrument could play through these and get a little bit better each time.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: You have often described de Gambarini in your writing as an impresario. Impresario is a big, beautiful, loaded term that makes me think of like, Barnum and Bailey Circus in the late 19th century. What does that encompass?
[00:25:06] Speaker C: Impresario, at least in the ways that I defined it, and I think it was defined in the 18th century, is simply someone who's putting together a big event. So, of course, in the opera world, an impresario Is someone running, managing an opera house, you know, like Handel did with the Royal Academy. They're the ones hiring the singers. They're the ones organizing the music, the rehearsals, all of that. We know Cambarini did that because she has many concert advertisements. And in almost all of them, it talks not only about her performing and composing, but also quote, unquote, conducting. And it's unclear if that means waving her arms around. Probably not, but rather conducting as an organizer, right? Conducting as in managing, making sure everything is going smoothly and that the event goes off without a hitch. So in that way, she was quite entrepreneurial. There were not many. There were some, but not many women doing this as well as then performing and composing for their own concerts too.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Let's listen now to Gambarini's Sedir Nonnice, a new performance recorded by Les Delis.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Let's listen.
[00:32:02] Speaker E: It.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Welcome back, Paula and Allison. We were talking a few minutes ago about, you know, needing to look at court cases and all kinds of amazing documentation bringing these amazing women into a fuller focus, seeing their work in context and aspects of their personality and influences. What have you been learning, Paula, about Elizabeth Turner based on her publication, subscriber lists or other sources?
[00:33:10] Speaker D: Subscriber lists in the 18th century were the gofundme essentially of the time, because printing a musical score was a really expensive endeavor in advance. Subscribers would pay, in the case of Turner, it was five shillings, which is actually a pretty significant amount of money for. For the mid 18th century in London, they would each pay five shillings. A few months later, when the book was printed, there would be another notice in the newspaper letting everyone know that the books were ready and the addresses where subscribers could go and pick up their books. And so in the case of Turner, she had two different publications. She had a 1750 book of songs and a really impressive 464 people subscribed to that book. And then her 1756 publication was a collection of songs, and then it also included the six multi movement lessons for the harpsichord. And 356 people subscribed to that publication. Combined together, there were 79 people who subscribed to both publications. So if you factor those people out, there were 741 individuals who subscribed from that. We can kind of see first of all, that she had a really wide and big network. And I think that's in part because, you know, as you were talking about being an impresario, Allison, with Gambarini, that with Elizabeth Turner, she had this multifaceted career. She was a professional soprano. She was singing on the prestigious concert series at the castle. Charles Burney, who also subscribed to her music, wrote later in the century about how he loved hearing her perform. And so from those 225 people, we can see that quite a lot of them are landed gentry. But we also see that she had a lot of lower level, kind of aristocrats and noble men and women who were subscribing. There were many other musicians who subscribed, including a lot that she collaborated with and performed with on a regular basis. Handel subscribed to her 1756 book, and Handel only subscribed. Subscribed to 15 total publications during his time in London. So that's, I think, a really significant factor for that book. For her, there were actors that subscribed, actresses, lots of politicians, two of whom would go on to become prime minister.
The majority of them were in London and other places throughout the uk. But we also then can learn that there were about 10 subscribers who were in Barbados and Jamaica. Most of them were owners of plantations and enslaved people in the British colonies at that time. We also see that some of their daughters were subscribers, which I think is fascinating. I haven't been able to find anything about whether Elizabeth Turner's books were being shared in the networks of Caribbean women and other colonial women. There were merchants in Aleppo and in Constantinople, there was an ambassador in St. Petersburg, musicians in Italy and France. So her music ended up traveling to not just a very large number of people, but it also ended up spreading to kind of really far away places.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: We're going to listen now to two additional movements, the second and third movements of Turner's fifth harpsichord lesson. Let's.
Paula, thank you again for sharing these live performances of Elizabeth Turner's keyboard lessons. And it's been so interesting to get to know her music through the creation of this episode and through this project. So I want to switch now and talk about Gambarini as a keyboard player.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: Well, we know that she played harpsichord. Obviously she was writing music for it, but she also played the organ, which is pretty special for a woman to be publicly performing in the organ in the 18th century. And we know that she did because of her concert advertisements. But as far as her keyboard works go, you know, we only know what she published. I think what it shows is that she was incredibly accomplished, but also writing keyboard music for a very specific audience, which would have been domestic women. We believe that she took music lessons from Francesco Geminiani, who of course is a very famous violinist based in London. She's absorbing musical style from him. She's absorbing it from all of her contemporaries. She's absorbing it from her mother, who, again, was a professional opera singer. The piece I think we'll listen to, Love her Go and Calm Thy Sighs really reminds me of a sort of less contrapuntal, harmonious Blacksmith Variations by Handel. So, yeah. So Elisabetta di Camberini shows in her keyboard music that she was very aware of her context, both in terms of who else was composing keyboard music and also in terms of who she was writing for.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Let's listen.
[00:45:18] Speaker E: From all eyes.
The God of love shall be thy guide the God of love shall be thy guide Be faithful and in him confide and in him confide the God of love shall be thy guide the God of love shall be thy guide Be faithful Undign him to all.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: Allison, I wonder if you could talk more in detail about what these women are selling or how they're going about selling it, where these advertisements appear, what audiences are finding captivating and that they're going to show up for.
[00:51:00] Speaker C: It's important to remember, and it's so different from today, but the first daily newspapers started being published in England, I think. I think it's 1701, like, very, very beginning of the 18th century. So even the advertisement itself, in that format, like coming out every day, was still pretty new by the time we hit the 70s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. So advertisements, they often do say who's performing? Because that's what everybody was going to go see. The famous singers of the day, the famous instrumentalists of the day. So advertisements will often include lots of names of people, which can be really helpful in reconstructing musical networks. And they'll also pull out some novelty stops, such, as I mentioned earlier, Gambarini performing in the organ, which would have been very rare to see in a public space in the 18th century. Another thing that she did to get audiences to come to her concerts is that her father passed away. She inherited his art collection of paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and she didn't want to keep them. So we see advertisements for her where she is performing concerts in conjunction with. With showing these paintings for the intention of finding a buyer. So, yeah. So these advertisements often will have a little taste of something interesting or new or unique in them, which I think then goes back to the idea of musical entrepreneurship.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: One other thing that I wanted to ask you to help clarify is benefit performances in the 18th century. It's not quite the same thing as we think about a benefit today, usually for charity of some kind.
[00:52:37] Speaker C: Yeah. In the 18th century, there were all types of benefits. So there were charity benefits and those would be advertised very specifically as that. But generally speaking, the benefit was for the featured performer. And really what a benefit meant was that the performer had worked out a kind of financial deal with the space in which they were performing to take a certain portion of the profits. So a lot of the performances the Camberini gave were benefits for herself to benefit her professional.
[00:53:07] Speaker B: Let's take a moment now and we have a very specific advertisement for one of Elizabeth Turner's concerts that I would love to unpack for the benefit of Ms. Turner at the Great Room in Dean Street, Soho, this day, March 1, will be performed a concert of vocal and instrumental music as follows. And it lists then out act one with a whole bunch of very specific pieces naming their composers as well as performers like Handel, Boyce and others. And then it tells you even what's on the second half of the concert, starting with an overture from Arrio Dante by Handel. And it goes on and on. Paula, would you like to unpack this a bit for us?
[00:53:55] Speaker D: This one happens to be my favorite because this is the only one of her concert advertisements where we see that she actually has programmed some of her own musical publications to be on the program. And so you can see in Act 2, there's a lesson on the harpsichord, Ms. Turner, and then also a song composed by Ms. Turner. And those two pieces are both from her 1756 book. And this concert would have been March 1, 1756, and her book was printed in May of 1756. And so this is seemingly like a final kind of advertising push to promote her music.
[00:54:37] Speaker B: We are going to close our episode with a song by Elizabeth Turner with words by a lady. And I mention that because the words are really rather funny. It reads a bit like a personal ad from the point of view that the speaker in this text is making a long, rather long list of all the things that she would like to see in a potential partner. You know, everything from his wit to his dancing ability to that he have some money, but that he let her control the purse or even what her allowance should be. And she would really like £10,000 a year, but she would settle, she would settle for three. Don't tell anyone.
She'll take a discount. You know, he better be good looking, but not, not better looking than she is. Paula, what do you think we should make of this text and or what it tells us about Turner or her fans?
[00:55:31] Speaker D: Turner's song texts have such a range of themes and So I think it's really, it's very interesting that she chooses this text to include because some of the other ones are on much more serious kinds of topics. And so it's, I think, also showing the breadth of styles that she's incorporating. It's not just musical styles, but she also has these different textiles and these different themes of the human experience that she's including. I can see this as being a really fun piece at a party that you might be singing with a couple of close friends, perhaps all of your girlfriends together, thinking about being a late teenager and thinking about marriage, or perhaps in kind of a mixed gender kind of setting where everyone is just being rather jovial about the whole thing.
[00:56:21] Speaker B: Thank you both so much for joining me for this episode of Salon Era. It's been a great pleasure not only to talk to you, but to get into the music of these amazing women.
Thank you so much for sharing.
[00:56:34] Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:56:36] Speaker B: Let's enjoy Elizabeth Turner's A Man that's Neither High Nor Low.
[00:57:07] Speaker E: Break a Let him not be a learned fool who knows the most books who eats our dreams is and we the woods and looks and we the WS and looks Let him be easy free and free of dancing never T have always something small to say yet silent willingly bo yet silent will rebound Let him be rich not covetous nor genres to excess we think that I should keep and please myself in dress and please myself in dress A little courage lighting on from infants to protect me Provided the is not so grim as ill to contradict me as ill to contradict me £10,000 a year I like but if so much cannot be you Saving from the 10 good strike I I'll be content with grief I'll be content with.
[00:59:21] Speaker D: Three.
[00:59:31] Speaker E: Here's a face no matter if it's plain but you do not be fool can be sure my heart to win who can with discomf who can with this compare and if some lord should chance agree with this of our description?
Though I'm not fond of.
[01:00:30] Speaker A: Tune in on April 7 for the premiere of Myth Then and Now, which considers mythology's contemporary resonance. Her conversation will span classical mythology, Catholic hagiography and Confucian philosophy as we sample recent performances of myth inspired cantatas by Rameau and Montaclear. Guests Sophie Michaud and Adam Simon of Tiny Glass Tavern share a recent performance centering St. Cecilia and Les Delices previews their recent world premiere of A Moment's Oblivion by composer Viet Quang featuring tenor Nicholas Pan.
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Solan Era. This episode was created by ME Executive Producer Deborah Nagy, Associate Producer Shelby Yaman and Hannah DePriest, our scriptwriter and Special Projects Manager. Our guests were Paula maust and Allison DeSimone.
Support for Salon Era is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and audience members like you. Special thanks to our episode sponsors Mark Vincent and Alex Nahlbach, Tova Klein, in memory of Bob and Nancy Klein and one anonymous sponsor, as well as those listeners who sponsored our guest artists for this episode, Jerry Fautauer and Paula Mendez and George Gilliam. A big thanks as always to Solanira's season sponsors Deborah Malamud, Tom and Marilyn McLaughlin and Greg Nosen and Brandon Rood.
This episode featured musical performances by members of Les Delices and by harpsichordis Paula Maust. A one hour filmed version of this episode is available on Solanira.org where you can also get full performance details and learn more about the music and information shared in this and any episode. Please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps the show.
