(It., from Lat. virtus: ‘excellence’, ‘worth’; Ger.: Virtuosin).
A woman musician of extraordinary talent and accomplishment, counterpart to the male Virtuoso (which term is also often applied to women). The term seems to have come into use in the late 16th century with the rise of the professional female singer, before which time opportunities for women musicians were extremely limited. Among the first women identified as virtuose were the singers in the famous concerto delle donne established by Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara in 1580. In 1598, the music publisher Giacomo Vincenti praised the young women of the Venetian Ospedale della Pietà as ‘virtuose giovani’ (Baldauf-Berdes, 1993, p.107). As in these early examples, the term has always been associated with performance rather than composition; such 17th-century women composers as Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini were called virtuose primarily on account of their vocal prowess. By the mid-17th century, the term became associated particularly with operatic singers, among whom Anna Renzie (c1620–c1661) was the most renowned. At the end of the century the term, as applied to operatic singers, yielded to Prima donna, although Benedetto Marcello still preferred virtuosa in Il teatro alla moda (c1720). In the 18th and 19th centuries the term was most often applied to instrumentalists. One early definition of the instrumental virtuosa also emphasizes the relation of the term to the quality of virtue: ‘Therefore the Italians call a person that has some good quality virtuosus or virtuosa, grounded upon the sentence of scripture that knowledge doth not enter into a wicked soul’, (T. Dart: ‘Miss Mary Burwell’s Instruction Book for the Lute’, GSJ, xi, 1958, p.45). Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (1745–1818), a violinist and singer as well as a composer, is one example of a virtuosa trained in the Venetian conservatories for girls. Clara Schumann (1819–1896) was named the ‘Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuosa’ in 1838. In the mid-20th century, the backlash against ‘empty virtuosity’ (an emphasis on technique rather than musical communication) meant that the term became a less common designation, but it has been resuscitated, with no negative connotation, for young women soloists.
S.C. Cook: Virtuose in Italy, 1600–1640: a Reference Guide (New York, 1983)
J.L. Baldauf-Berdes: Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations 1525–1855 (Oxford, 1993)
B.L. Glixon: ‘Private Lives of Public Women: Prima donnas in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Venice’, ML, lxxvi (1995), 509–31
B.L. Glixon: ‘Scenes from the Life of Silvia Gailarti Manni, a Seventeenth-Century virtuosa’, EMH, xv (1996), 97–146
F.H. Jacobs: Defining the Renaissance ‘Virtuosa’: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism (Cambridge, 1997)
ELLEN T. HARRIS