Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, A Dance in the Country, ca. 1755
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1980.67)
This program features music written by composers forced to hide their identities—social, religious, ethnic, racial, or otherwise—during their lifetime. We will consider the beauty of William Byrd (1540–1623) and Richard Dering (c. 1580–1630), two Catholic composers writing illicit church music in Protestant England; Leonora Duarte (1610–78), a Jewish woman composing in the home while forced to live as a converso, or New Christian, in 17th-century Antwerp; Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729), whose lost works reemerge with a vengeance in our own time; and others.
This concert is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.