Musicatlas
Music
Leonora wrote a set of seven abstract fantasies, called Symphonies, for a consort of five viols.
Life
Leonora Duarte was a composer. She belonged to a wealthy Portuguese-Jewish family.
While traveling through the Low Countries, the famous English diarist John Evelyn wrote on 6 October 1641 an account of a concert held in the Duarte’s luxurious palace on the Meir in Antwerp: “In the evening I was invited to Signor Duerts [Duarte], a Portuguese by nation, an exceeding rich merchant, whose palace I found to be furnish’d like a prince’s; and here his three daughters, entertain’d us with rare musick, both vocal and instrumental, which was finish’d with a handsome collation.”
The pieces Leonora wrote display a remarkably talent for a musical amateur and let us suppose that she must have had a teacher for composition, perhaps even the English composer John Bull who lived in Antwerp since c. 1615.