“The young singers, just mentioned, are absolute nightingales; they have a facility of executing difficult divisions equal to that of birds. They did such things in that way, especially the Rota, as I do not remember to have heard attempted before…. The able master was discoverable in all the cadences of these young performers, the instrumental parts were very well executed, and the whole indicated a superior genius in the composer and conductor of the performance.”
—Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 1771
Recapturing the past, whether it’s last week or 800 years ago is just a fact of life for musicians. Even practicing a piece of music means recapturing that moment when you played it five minutes ago. It’s part of making music.
Not just long ago, but disappeared
The job gets complicated when the music of the past that you’re trying to recapture is not just long ago but has almost entirely disappeared. That’s the case for musicians trying to recapture the spirit of the Venetian Ospedali’s orchestras. They know that the Ospedali were a musical phenomenon that lasted for almost 150 years from the 1650s on—it’s a reported fact. They know that music lovers flocked from all over Europe, swooning at the transcendent beauty of the Ospedali concert-going experience.
That’s fact. But the other stuff? The music, the people, the magic? Not only is that gone, but it was gone by 1800. Times changed, politics changed, the Ospedali went out of business, records and libraries deteriorated and were dumped, Napolean’s armies wreaked havoc in 1797, people moved on, people forgot. Case cold, case closed.
Until now, when people have become ravenously curious about just this time and place in cultural history. The question is raised but it’s hard to answer: just what exactly was the fuss about? What was the wonderful thing that was happening that so many people enjoyed, that so many people fell in love with? And how can we present-day enthusiasts get some?
Which is why it is so exciting to come across vivid, first-hand impressions of a contemporary visit to the Ospedali by a good writer jotting down his first impressions and growing enthusiasm for what he’s hearing. And in English to boot.
Enter: the Travel Blogger
Francesco Bartolozzi after Joshua Reynolds
Etching and engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Commons.wikimedia.org
In 1770, Charles Burney, English critic, writer, composer, and member of the most powerful circles of the London cultural elite (where he was friends with, among others, Haydn and Handel) took a working holiday. He set off on a year-long trip through Europe’s music capitols to research the four-volume History of Music that would occupy his next decade.
After returning home, Burney pulled together the notes he’d taken during his trip and rushed them to press as pocket-sized volumes of travelogue. The Present State of Music in France and Italy, 1771, contains his Venice trip. You can leaf through digital copies of the second edition on imslp.com. It’s adorable.
Naturally, he’d hit Venice, birthplace of opera, arriving on August 4. Practically the very next day, a tip from one of his greeters sent him hurrying to a performance at the Incurabile, one of the four Ospedale Grandi.*
“Unluckily when I arrived there, the performance was begun; however, I had only lost the overture and part of the first air [a Salve Regina by Baldessare Galuppi]. I knew not whether I was most delighted with the composition, or with the execution; both were admirable.”
Ingenious! Entertaining! Elegant!
It is safe to say that the distinguished Dr. Burney was blown away.
“This ingenious, entertaining, and elegant composer abounds in novelty, in spirit, and in delicacy, and his scholars did his music great justice. Several of them had uncommon talents for singing, particularly Rota, Pasqua Rossi, and the Ortolana….”
Concert hall of the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, one of the four Ospedali Grandi
Note the metal grille to screen performers on the left side
After that, he went full fan boy. Burney seems to have spent much of the following two weeks attending concerts at one or another of the four Ospidali as often as possible. A week later, back at the Incurabile:
“… where I was so pleased, both with the composition and performance, that in speaking of them I find shall find it difficult to avoid hyperboles….
“[In a program of Latin Psalms by Galuppi,] out of ten or twelve movements, there was not one that could be pronounced indifferent…. There were several admirable accompanied recitatives, and the whole abounded with new passages, with good taste, good harmony, and good sense….
“I must likewise do justice to the orchestra, which is here under the most exact discipline; no one of the instrumental performers seemed ambitious of shining at the expense of the vocal part, but each was under that kind of subordination which is requisite in a servant to a superior….[and regarding the vocalists] in their closes [cadenzas], I know not which astonished me most, the compass of voice, variety of passages, or rapidity of execution; indeed all were such as would have merited and received great applause in the first operas of Europe.”
Two days later, he was at another Ospedale, the Ospedaletto [nickname for the Derelitti] for a performance of Antonio Sacchini’s oratorio Macchaboeorum Mater. It included a duet sung by Domenica Pasquati and Ippolita Santi:
“The young singers, just mentioned, are absolute nightingales; they have a facility of executing difficult divisions equal to that of birds. They did such things in that way, especially the Rota, as I do not remember to have heard attempted before…. The able master was discoverable in all the cadences of these young performers, the instrumental parts were very well executed, and the whole indicated a superior genius in the composer and conductor of the performance.”
Ahhh, the nightingales
On his last Wednesday in Venice, Burney packed four concerts into his schedule. The first three were in churches and, sadly, the third, at the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, was a disaster:
“The organ was out of tune, the instruments out of time, and the voices were both; then the composition seemed just such stuff as a boy who was learning counterpoint would produce after the first two or three lessons…. I ran away from this music to the Incurabile, where Buranello’s [Galuppi’s] nightingales, the Rota and Pasqua Rossi, poured balm into my wounded ears….the performance was ravishing; and it was not without regret that I reflected upon this being the last time I should hear it.”
Thanks to Tempesta, Burney’s regret is one that we are now, joyfully, spared. The great Ospedali black-out is ending!
Musicologists like Vanessa Tonelli and historians like Mickey White have done mammoth work in disinterring and interpreting the remaining physical record. And early music performers have avidly followed them. Over the course of the past three years, Tempesta di Mare has taken a national lead into a comprehensive and in-depth look at the amazing women, men, music and audiences of the Venetian Ospedali. They’ve turned the spotlight back on. They’ve brought them back in play.
Spotlights “On”
Tempesta gave their first Ospedale-related concert, The Women Behind the Screen in May 2023, following it with Vivaldi’s Juditha Triumphans in March 2024, Faustina and Santina in May 2025, Agata’s Cantata in November 2025 along with a symposium and performance salon, and Le Donne Musicali upcoming in February 2026. They’re diving deep into the Ospedali and taking their audiences along with them.
They’re finding what those “nightingales” were singing, playing, and writing and they’re learning about the nightingales themselves, the Santa Toscas, the Agatas, Anna Marias and Pelegrinas. They’re taking a close look at the male composers associated with the Ospedali (even the ones not named Antonio Vivaldi) like Galuppi and Sacchini, like Porpora, Paradies, Porta, Farrandini and Gasparini. And everybody—Tempesta’s musicians, singers, audience members—everybody is getting blown away.
Last spring, audiences didn’t want to let Gabriela Estephanie Solís and Meg Bragle go after tremendous performances of arias by Leonardo Leo and J. A. Hasse. Next week, Solís will be coming back to sing music by Nicolò Porpora and by Pietà alumna Anna Bon—and a reprise of arias from Agata’s Cantata.
The music, the people, the magic. This must indeed wonderful thing that was happening that so many people enjoyed, that so many people fell in love with. May it continue!
NOTES:
You can find The Present State of Music in France and Italy here: https://imslp.org/wiki/The_Present_State_of_Music_in_France_and_Italy_(Burney%2C_Charles)
*About those Ospedali: in the 18th century, some of the best music in Europe came from a most unusual source: four Venetian residential charitable institutions serving the sick and destitute. Music instruction in the Ospedali (literally, “hospitals”) had developed from a vocational program in earlier years into a challenging music conservatory program for women. There were four Ospedali Grandi: the Ospedale della Pietà, founded in 1346 to provide for illegitimate children; the Ospedale degl’Incurabili, for syphilitics and sex workers; the Ospedaletto dei Derelitti, for the homeless, and the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, for beggers and orphans. All four Ospedali offered a regular schedule of public concerts—albeit with the weird stipulation that Ospidale orchestra members be screened from public sight for modesty’s sake. Tourists flocked to the concerts and wrote home about the heavenly spiritual effect of the disembodied voices, often at the expense of crediting the expertise of highly competent, fully fleshed professional musicians.
But to his credit, Burney didn’t, or not that much. He seems to have truly been there for the music, not the myth, allowing his comments to be a vivid glimpse into this lost world.
Anne Schuster Hunter is a writer and art historian living in Philadelphia, www.anneschusterhunter.com.
