Maddalena Casulana’s newly rediscovered songs will feature on BBC Radio 3 to mark International Women’s Day

Sixteenth-century madrigals written by an Italian Renaissance female composer are to be performed for the first time in 400 years after the discovery of missing parts of the original music.

Maddalena Casulana became the first female composer to publish her own music at a time when such creativity was far from encouraged in women. She believed that men were making a “futile error” in assuming that women could not compose as well as they could and she brought out three books of madrigals under her name between 1568 and 1583, although only one of those collections has survived complete.