Footer
Maria Cattarina Calegari was an Italian Baroque composer, singer, organist and Benedictine nun. Born Cornelia Calegari in Bergamo in 1644, she became known in religious life as Maria Cattarina after entering the Benedictine convent of Santa Margherita in Milan. She was admired in her own time for her vocal abilities and became one of the notable women musicians active in the rich musical culture of seventeenth-century Italian convents.
Calegari is especially important as a very young published composer: in 1659, at the age of fifteen, she published Motetti à voce sola, a collection of solo motets. Her musical output also included sacred and vocal works such as masses for six voices with instruments, vespers, madrigals and canzonettas. Contemporary accounts suggest that her music was expressive and technically ambitious.
None of Calegari’s music is known to have survived. Its disappearance is usually connected with the restrictions placed on convent music in Milan in the 1660s, as well as possible conflicts within the convent. Even though her works are now lost, Calegari remains an important figure in the history of women composers and of sacred music in Baroque Italy.