La Pellegrina Information

In the first years of La Pellegrina the courses were held in Italy, with historical dance and -music as subject. Since 1991 the courses have acquired a much wider scope and take place in Czechia, this summer for the 30th time. Alison Cooper: "What I like best is playing all this ancient music in such ancient surroundings - the monastery, the church, the castle..." Margo Huggers: "I often skip lunch to go for a walk. Just outside the town, the woods and the river are lovely." What does La Pellegrina mean? La Pellegrina (the Pilgrim Woman) is the name of a Italian play from the 16th century. When this play was to be performed at the marriage of Ferdinand I de' Medici, grand-duke of Tuscany, with Christine de Lorraine, granddaughter of the former queen-mother of France, they decided to make the play a little more lively. Between the play's five acts they added intermedii, musical interludes which were sung, played and danced. They also used spectacular machines which could make gods fly down from the sky and make boats float on stage. These intermedii made a huge impression, which eventually led to the birth of opera as an art form. The Intermedii per La Pellegrina from 1589 was in fact one of the first opera-like productions. Without it, Orfeo from Monteverdi would not have been imaginable. In 1988 Dorothée Wortelboer and Dirkjan Horringa were invited to do a master class in Italy with the Intermedii per La Pellegrina as main subject. The inviting organization then went bankrupt. Dorothée and Dirkjan decided overnight to organize the summer course themselves. To facilitate this they had to found an company and to choose a name for it; La Pellegrina was the obvious choice. Although in the beginning the focus was on the historical dance and opera, La Pellegrina nowadays doesn't focus on these subjects exclusively anymore, but covers a much wider scope of vocal and instrumental music from the renaissance until now. All periods