Barbara Strozzi was a Venetian composer and singer, baptized in 1619 and buried in 1677 in Padua, celebrated as one of the most prolific and distinctive vocal composers of the middle Baroque. The likely illegitimate daughter of poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi, who raised and promoted her, she studied composition with leading opera composer Francesco Cavalli and was showcased from adolescence at her father’s Accademia degli Unisoni, a Venetian salon devoted to music and debate. Unlike most female musicians of her era, she never held a court or church appointment, instead supporting her career through publishing her own music, issuing eight collections of arias, cantatas, and ariettas between 1644 and 1664.

Barbara Strozzi published more secular vocal music than any other composer of her generation, male or female, establishing herself as a major voice in the development of the Baroque cantata. Her intensely expressive, virtuosic vocal writing, exemplified by L’Eraclito amoroso and Che si può fare, helped shape the emotional and rhetorical vocabulary of Italian solo song. As one of the few women to sustain a composing career on published work alone, she remains a landmark figure in music history.

Sources:

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Barbara-Strozzi