Ave Suavis Dilectio

In
1636 16-year-old Isabella Leonarda entered the Convent of Saint Ursula
in Novara, where she would remain for the rest of her life, eventually
ascending to the role of Mother Superior. Despite composing nearly 250
works in her lifetime, Leonarda was at pains to point out in the
introduction to her mass for the Vespro della Beata Vergine, that her composition never took her away from her duties in the convent.

Leonarda’s
music is striking in its difference to her male contemporaries for
while her works are published up until the 1690s – the same period as
Corelli’s Op. 1-4 – her idioms suggest the 1640s and 50s, a musical
language like Barbara Strozzi’s. However, her use of interesting
harmonies pushes this language to further extremes than most male
composers of the day.

Like
many nun-composers, Leonarda is thought to have written many of her own
texts, and her language use is also musical in the extreme. While
betraying an Italian-inflected Latin, with occasional uses of Italian
rather than Latin words, she nonetheless has a poetic and musical flow
to her texts. This is most obvious perhaps in the continuous use of
similar-sounding words with different meanings, mensa immense, cibus cibans,
almost amounting to puns. The smoothness and unity of sounds gives a
particular flow to the text, which fits inextricably with the music.