She was funny.

Twenty years later, in her “Diporti di Euterpe” (“The Pleasures of Euterpe”), she set Pietro Dolfino’s text “Lagrime mie,” which starts like this: “Tears of mine, why do you hold back? Why don’t you wash away the pain which takes my breath and crushes my heart?” With the right singer, this song feels like crying. The arresting opening sounds a high note with a long falling melisma on the syllable “la” and a very sparse bass line. Voice and accompaniment clash on words like “torment.” Sung passages are interrupted by vocal sighs; they take the singer’s breath away.

This was an era of self-performance — of ephemeral, unrecorded shows and of rapid-fire fights in print; think Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. And then, as now, powerful women upset powerful men. Praising Strozzi’s voice, Nicolò Fontei wrote, “If I could transfer to the written page the boldness and seductive charm with which this great singer performs, one would need the qualities of Ulysses to resist the temptations of such a siren.”

The one surviving painting of her highlights the temptress. Bernardo Strozzi (no relation) depicted her as St. Cecilia, with a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunction and eyes pointed directly at the viewer, breaking codes that required women to avoid making eye contact with men. When she was 18, a rival of her father had already made a not-very-veiled allusion to her plucked chastity: “It is a fine thing to distribute the flowers after having yielded the fruit.”

Strozzi used the dedications of her texts as weapons in this battle. In her first publication she called herself a new Sappho, but clearly knew her virtue would come under fire: “I must reverently consecrate the first work which as a woman I publish all too anxiously, so that under an oak of gold it may rest secure against the lightning bolts of slander prepared for it.” By her fifth book she had taken on a proto-feminist tone, embracing her own compositional voice: “Since I am no more held back by feminine weakness than by any allowance made for my sex, I fly on lightest leaves, in devotion, to bow before you.”

There were some arenas into which even a brilliant woman like Strozzi couldn’t venture. Though 17th-century Venice was the launchpad for public opera, she stayed completely removed from that audience. The decline of court culture and the moral conservatism of the Counter-Reformation were not good for women, and neither did anything to dispel the Aristotelian idea that women might not have souls or the biblical association of women with sin. But Strozzi shared a world with some outspoken feminists who made themselves heard. In 1612, Artemisia Gentileschi reported the teacher who raped her. He was exiled, and she went on to become a famous painter. Lucrezia Marinella, Moderata Fonte and Angela Tarabotti all wrote against a patriarchal culture, calling out the fact that powerful men depended on the subjugation of women for their worth.

In classical music, it can sometimes feel hard to fully feel the relevance of a composer who has been dead for centuries. But when it comes to Barbara Strozzi and her anniversary year, there are some striking reverberations in the present, as women’s voices have made their impact, despite the inevitable nasty backlash. Strozzi and her work make clear what we’ve long known: Women knew power and pleasure before the sexual revolution, and they cried it out with clarity and beauty.

Bonnie Gordon is an associate professor of music at the University of Virginia and the author of “Monteverdi’s Unruly Women.”