Vivaldi, veiling and revelation…

[ by Charles Cameron — some glorious music, Venice, Kandahar ]

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I was listening to Pergolesi‘s Stabat Mater the other day, and talk came around to the question of whether women would have sung the two solo parts – whether they were written for soprano and contralto, in other words, or for treble and counter-tenor – all of which reminded me that the “red priest” Vivaldi was, for over thirty years, maestro of the Ospedale della Pietà orphanage in Venice.

The Ospedale’s all-woman choir performed many of his sacred choral works in church, hidden from view if not speculation in a high balcony behind an iron grille…

The BBC has an hour-long documentary on the subject of Vivaldi’s Women, which features the Ospedale but also the contemporary choir and orchestra, Vivaldi’s Women, more properly known as the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi.

The (lower) image of the present-day women’s choir singing behind one of those grilles – accompanied by a voice-over reading from a fashionable “grand tour” diary of the day which reports that the “grilles conceal the angels of loveliness” (the writer was perhaps aware, perhaps not, that many of the orphans in Vivaldi’s day would have been scarred or deformed by the pox or their parents’ syphilis) reminded me of another contested icon of “women behind a grille” – this time, the traditional Afghan chadari (upper image)…

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I have exchanged greetings through a grille with Carmelite nuns in California, and they clearly appreciated the sanctuary that their enclosure offered them…

My point is not to argue the superiority of bikini over burqa or vice versa: it is to offer you a chance to hear some Vivaldi or Pergolesi, and to consider the issue of veiling and revealing — intimacy’s equivalent of secrecy and transparency — from what was for me at least an unexpected and fresh angle.