was a talented musician who became a nun at the Milan convent of Santa Maria Annunciata, where she spent her life and wrote sacred works. Her work was original, ambitious, and among the most notable of her time. More than half the women who published music before 1700 were nuns and developed their craft in the convents where they lived. About the Work Occhi io vissi di voi (Eyes, I have been sustained by you) was first published in 1613 in a Venetian collection, Canoro pianto di Maria Vergine sopra la faccia di Christo estinto. In the works in this collection, Mary, the mother of Jesus, meditates on different parts of Christ’s anatomy after his death; in this short intensely mystical aria, with a text by Angelo Grilli, Sessa focuses on Jesus’s extinguished eyes. The devotional aspect of the song in which Christ’s death is a source of sustenance is heightened by rapid melismas (a group of notes sung to one syllable of text) on the words ‘morte’ (death) and ‘gioire’ (to rejoice in) followed by a slow, hesitant descent, interrupted by slow trills. This work has been transcribed for guitar in a particularly poignant arrangement. Occhi io vissi di voi mentre voi fosti voi ma spenti poi vivo di vostra morte Infelice alimento che mi nutre al tormento e mi manca al gioire per far vivace morte al mio martire.
ISAAC ALBÉNIZ (1860–1909) Suite española, Asturias, Op. 47, No. 5 About the Composer The Catalonian composer/pianist Isaac Albéniz made and lost a fortune playing piano in Latin America and playing in New York waterfront bars; finally, he went to Germany, where he studied with Liszt. In Leipzig he met Spanish composer/musicologist Felipe Pedrell, who encouraged him to explore the musical resources of Spanish music; consequently, Albéniz became very important in the creation of a truly national music, incorporating Spanish rhythms and melodies in his music and participating in the modernismo movement of the resurgence of Catalan culture in Barcelona in the 1890’s. About the Work Albéniz’s masterpiece is the large piano cycle Iberia (1905), which depicts the regions of Spain. Its grandeur long overshadowed the charming but more modest works he wrote earlier, which include the Suite española (1886) in which each movement evokes the place whose name it bears. All eight movements of the Suite are written in triple meter, and all but the second piece, Cataluña, have ternary (three-part) form made up of two similar outer sections and a contrasting middle, a copla, which was originally an improvised song section placed within a dance. In 1911, two years after the composer’s death, the German publisher Friedrich Hofmeister published the Summer 2021
