Women and music in 18th century Portugal

Women musicians have been performing in Portuguese stages since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first opera company to perform in Lisbon was directed by Italian Alessandro Paghetti, with his daughters Angela, Anna, and Elena as singers. But not only foreign women performed in Portuguese stages. Notorious soprano Luisa Todi, famous beyond Portuguese borders, started her career in Lisbon in the 1770s, and her older sister Cecília was also a frequent presence on the capital’s stages. But one singer was decisive on women’s presence on public stages: the Venetian soprano Anna Zamperini. She arrived in Portugal in 1772 and conquered a great part of the court: Women
wanted to look like her, men wanted to be with her. The turmoil created by Zamperini led to drastic measurements. From the mid-1770s, women were forbidden to perform on public stages. From that moment on, the only venues one could hear professional female voices were the convents, where the music performed reached a remarkable level. Finally, in 1793, female artists were allowed to perform again in public spaces. Among the first singers to step on a public stage was the Afro-Brazilian soprano Joaquina Lapinha, who conquered the audience on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper aims to discuss the
role of women in eighteenth-century Portuguese music, their origins, education, and careers. Beyond all, the proposal intends to discuss the important role performed by female musicians in a deeply conservative society, where women were even more deprived of a social life than in other European countries, and the legacy left by some of these women despite all the restrictions imposed to eighteenth-century women in Portugal.