Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen, virtuoso inheritor of the great Tartini, who composed the first violin concertos that we have by a woman
Born in 1745 into impoverished Venetian nobility, she was enrolled at seven into one of the girls’ orphanages in Venice, San Lazzaro, which still has its elaborate metal grille that screened the girls performing from the gaze of the audience. Clearly she excelled at violin, because by the time she was 14 she was already teaching, and having arrived at the limit that San Lazzaro could offer she approached the great Tartini, the greatest virtuoso of the age. She wrote to him asking to be taken on as his student, letters that still exist. And he did take her on and she had lessons with him on and off, travelling from Venice to Padua for years.
To be freed from the orphanages you had to marry; and this she did at the age of 22, becoming henceforth Madame Sirmen. But the record does not stop there. He too was a violinist and they immediately embarked upon a grand tour of the continent – first to Dresden where they had an appointment at court, then on to Paris where she became the star of the Concerts Spirituels. Then London – two hundred concerts straight. Then Catherine the Great heard about her and so in the 1780s off they were to St Petersburg. And that is not all: in 1770 she published her Opus 1, a collection of string trios. Highly virtuosic violin duets followed. String quartets when they were still in their infancy, the first collection after Haydn. And those violin concertos she was playing were her own: no fewer than six, the first we have by a woman, admired by the Mozarts and so popular they occasioned a storm of transcriptions to play at home. The “Lyre of Orpheus”, they called her.
Her husband gave up performing to work as her manager; and when she had a baby girl, in 1771, it was he who stayed behind to care for her at home
Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen (1745 – 1818)
MUSIC: Violin Concerto in B-Flat, Op.3 no.1
Il Pomo d'Oro / Zefira Valova, violin
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
