L'AMANTE SEGRETO (the Secret Lover) combines music of two of the seventeenth century’s greatest virtuosi: Barbara Strozzi and Giovanni Kapsberger. These two master performer-composers may have come from dramatically different life circumstances, but each rose to become significant figures in the music culture of their time. Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (1580-1651) – known to Rome as Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger – was in much demand among Rome’s social elites due both to his family’s noble status in the court of Austria’s Imperial House and his own reputation as a virtuoso performer on the theorbo.
Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), on the other hand, did not come from a noble background. The probably daughter of Giulio Strozzi, a wealthy poet and librettist living in Venice, she was the student of the preeminent opera composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676). Strozzi rose to prominence in Venice through the Accademia delgi Unisoni, a social club set up by Giulio Strozzi in Venice in 1637 for the purpose of providing the young virtuoso cantrice a place to perform.