M R E M M RITUS ET ARTES Traditions and Transformations
Series Board
Nils Holger Petersen Eyolf Østrem Mette Birkedal Bruun Danish National Research Foundation: Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals University of Copenhagen
Richard Utz Western Michigan University Gunilla Iversen Stockholm University Nicolas Bell British Library
Volume M R E M M
by
Eyolf Østrem and Nils Holger Petersen British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Illustrations vii
Introduction
The Religious and Ritual Context of the Earlier Italian Lauda
The Conceptual Universe of Lauda Practice
Musical Style and Background of the Polyphonic Lauda
‘Medieval’ Devotion and Musical ‘Avant Garde’
The Polyphonic Lauda in the Seventeenth century
The Historiography of Opera Reconsidered
Outlook: Medieval Ritual Reception and Musical Novelty
Appendices
Longo: Lodi e canzonette ()
Archivio dell’Opera di S. Maria del Fiore: Arch. mus II, and Supplementing Texts
Index
I
Plangiamo from the Cortona manuscript. Madonna santa Maria from the Cortona manuscript. Ave Maria from Ledesma’s Modo (), beginning. Recitation formulas from Longo’s lauda collection Longo’s formulas applied to the first texts in the Compendio. Reconstruction of the beginning of Ledesma’s dialogue set to the music of Longo’s formulas O vergin santa from Razzi: Libro primo (). Herod’ il volto mio (second part), from Razzi: Libro primo (). Da che tu m’hai, Iddio (beginning), from Razzi: Libro primo (). Crucifixum in carne, from Razzi: Libro primo (). Poliziano: La pastorella/Razzi: Lo fraticello (Libro primo, ). Deh, piangi aflitto core from Terzo libro (). Dolce, felice e lieta from Terzo libro (). O glorioso corpo from Il quarto libro delle laudi spirituali (). Per ch’in aspri dolori from Il quarto libro delle laudi spirituali (). Giesù, Giesù, Giesù from Ansaldi’s Dottrina cristiana (). Record of a Christmas Day service in the draft for the final Ricordi of the Raffaello. Record of the same service in the official Ricordi. Longo: Gioia et amore Longo: Chi non ama te, Maria Longo: Disposto ho di seguirti First page of the , beginning of Fredd’ e quel cuore Ho visto con mio danno, from Corona (), p. . Fredd’ è quel cuore, opening. Final cadence in Felici noi. Maria Vergin, version from Corona (upper) and corresponding phrases from the version in . Title page from the printed edition of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima et di corpo (Rome, ).
I
ccrebbe la devotione’ — ‘it increased the devotion’. This is perhaps not a characterization one would expect of a lavish performance of music ‘Afor a full ensemble of singers, a viol consort, violin, an organ, and an unspecified number of other instruments, but that is nevertheless what it is. It is used about a liturgical event that took place in the Compagnia dell’ Archangelo Raffaello, a youth confraternity in Florence, in August , and the description is found in the company’s own official records. The phrase accentuates the central theme of this book: the use of music in devotional contexts in Florence and Rome in the early modern period. It hints at the importance that was ascribed to the sensuous quality of music in the institutions where devotional music was performed: the beauty of music was invested with a theologically conceived quality of ritual efficaciousness. The material on which our account builds concerns music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as contemporary statements about music and its uses. It comes partly out of our own archival studies and partly from work pre• sented by scholars during the last decades. Through the materials and interpreta• tions presented in the book, we wish to emphasize the position of early modern devotional music in the array of topics which are central to traditional music his• torical accounts, and thereby to suggest a revision and a re•interpretation of its role in the development of Western art music and the establishment of modern music aesthetics.
CRS , (olim ), fol. v; ‘et ci fu Musica con voce sceltissime, et armonia di Viole concertate oltre al Violino, Organo, et altri instrumenti musicali, che accrebbe la devotione.’ Introduction
Florence: a Historiographical Test Bed
Florence has an undisputed position in music history as the birthplace of the opera, first conceived and cultivated in academies sponsored by noble amateurs, brought to the stage by singer•composers like Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini, and finally moved away from its intellectual origins to realize its fuller commer• cial and public potentials in the skilled hands of Claudio Monteverdi. In that third stage, Florence loses its place of pride to other cities like Venice and Naples and disappears from music history. In the introduction to his monumental study The Court Musicians in Flo• rence, Warren Kirkendale notes: Studies on musicians at the court of the grand dukes of Tuscany have long fo• cussed on single figures or on that small group generally referred to as the ‘Floren• tine Camerata’. The documents extant in the Archivio di Stato Firenze, however, present a quite different picture. They remain blissfully silent on the so•called ‘Camerata’, that cliché so beloved by aestheticians and compilers of music his• tory textbooks who seem to have imagined that all significant musical activity in Florence at the end of the sixteenth century took place in a small group of experi• menting intellectuals, formally organized like an academy. This quite precisely sums up the practical consequences of a historiography which takes as its point of departure what happened after the events that are studied and evaluates its materials not in terms of their importance and role in their own time, but rather those of some later time; or, conversely, interprets events of an earlier time as ‘pointing forward’ to something not yet existing, as links in a historical chain which necessarily ends at the point of perspective from which the narrative has been told — in other words, a teleological historiogra• phy, in some sense of the word. In the case of Florence, the main focus of interest has been the Camerata and other more or less formally organized circles of musicians and theoreticians who gathered in the homes of noblemen like Giovanni Bardi and Jacopo Corsi. The corresponding historical narrative has been one which emphasized how out of the experimentation in these circles new musical practices evolved, which in the very last years of the sixteenth century gave rise to a new genre, the opera, which has developed from there into the music dramas performed in modern opera houses. There is nothing wrong with such a focus and such a narrative, in principle. After all, our interest in history is primarily dictated by a quest for knowledge about how the things that we know came out of things that we do not know. In
Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici (Florence: Olschki, ), p. . See also below, p. . Introduction this particular case, posterity has found it most interesting to trace the begin• nings of the opera as we know it today or to follow ‘the development of classical music’ and the emancipation of instrumental music, giving rise c. to the idea of absolute music. This latter line, too, can quite meaningfully be drawn with a beginning in the early opera, or more generally in the ideas of the Floren• tine academies about how to let music represent words and poetical meaning. Here, the emphasis on the rhetorical potential of music as opposed to the former predomincance of a mathematical approach is most marked. With the transfor• mation of the sinfonia from an instrumental preparation for the spectacle to come to an independent musical piece, guided by principles that are not (or not only) shaped by the stage action, we are a long way towards a musical aesthetics sui generis. Such narratives are not only a natural choice, they are also unavoidable; writ• ing history is about selecting, shaping the chosen facts into a coherent narrative. But despite the obvious merits of isolating the most prominent features of a cer• tain period and leaving out details which seen from the point of view of some posterity were of no consequence, this also necessarily means deselecting other possible narratives, which in hindsight appear insignificant and hence remain untold, but which may have been equally rich in potential seen from the vantage point of the period itself and, possibly, a better or equally valid representation of society during the period in question. Alternative narratives like this may also enlighten the generally accepted stan• dard story. As one looks closer at a period, a milieu, or a personal biography and what is initially perceived as curious details that add colour to the received com• mon knowledge about the period, milieu, or biography, the picture grows in de• tail and wealth of interconnections. Eventually the accretion of more and more of these different elements, changes the former totality into a new and different picture, in which the dominant, received truth becomes just one piece among many others in the mosaic. It may still be a big piece, well worth studying in itself, but the overall picture also commands our interest, whether this ‘shifting of the gaze’ constitutes a full•fledged paradigm shift, in which basic assumptions will have to be discarded and the whole story rewritten from scratch, or, more modestly, an increased awareness of other elements which deserve our attention in addition to the dominant truth. The writing of music history — and, mutatis mutandis, other kinds of histor• ical writing—may on the one hand be governed by what could be termed the striving for authenticity, for seeing what was there at a particular time without primarily taking modern questions into consideration, or it may, on the other hand, be based on the urge to understand ourselves and the musical world in which we live, by way of historical narratives, placing what we know as modern musical culture, as the outcome of a narrative construed as meaningful. Introduction
Ultimately, the quest for authenticity is an illusion: authors can never es• cape their own concerns, and writing history should not be seen as an objective quest for the truth of history. However, as has already been emphasized, the striving for understanding also that which we find when we look beyond the ob• viously modern questions to history is important in order to supplement — or sometimes contradict — established mainstream narratives by incorporating or highlighting alternative elements of historical material and interpretation. In such a view, the writing of history takes the preserved musical materials seriously, asking, as far as possible, how they can be understood in the broader cultural context of the time, searching for ever wider contexts for our inter• pretations. Also the historical quest of trying to understand modern culture — collectively as well as on a more personal, ‘interior’ level — as the outcome of historical processes represented through historical narratives will be affected by the attempt to look for possible narratives beyond a dominant master narrative. As Jan Assmann has pointed out, modern Western societies have established a ‘cultural memory’ by way of institutions like libraries, museums, institutions for performing arts and for education, which store, represent, and interpret preserved artefacts in ways that have become generally accepted in that soci• ety through various cultural discourses — political, religious, philosophical, and others. Thus, the construction of cultural identity in a society (or in parts of it) is a dialectical process which depends on a wide array of discourses, which may be combined and recombined in different ways in different contexts and at differ• ent times, and where the cultural meaning of some individual element in such a cultural identity cannot be exhausted — or even, in a more emphatic version of the statement, studied meaningfully — in isolation or in relation to one such discourse alone. Fundamentally, the method outlined above is a version of what has been called ‘thick description’, the concept that Clifford Geertz borrowed from Gil• bert Ryle to emphasize the importance of the context of an event for the un• derstanding of the event. Ryle uses the term to distinguish a description where the context (the ‘code’ in Ryle’s terminology) of an event such as a wink is in• terpreted on the basis of the ‘thin’ description which only describes the event
Jan Assmann, Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: C. H. Beck, ), esp. pp. – and –, and Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis (München: C. H. Beck, ), pp. – and –. Introduction itself. Geertz took this to be the central concern of his own discipline, cultural anthropology. In our situation, this means to make detailed descriptions of documented practices and artefacts and micro•analyses of texts and music. The point of such an undertaking is not to lay bare more source material and thereby come even closer to the historical ‘truth’, but to come closer to understanding the ‘wink’: to characterize the systems of meaning which would have made up the conceptual framework through which music would have been understood at the time, to reveal, as best we can, how practices were understood and imagined and the norms that governed them: how people wanted them to be or thought that they ought to be. To this, we may also add a second motivation: to create a frame of under• standing for historical events and objects which is comparable or recognizable (in kind, if not in content) to the one we have internalized today, as a possible way to anchor these things of the past — be they pieces of music, theological treatises, or ritual practices — and the context through which they were made meaningful at the time, in our own world of understanding. This, in the end, is where the two versions, the traditional and the ‘new’, come together: by extending the thick description of late•Renaissance music practice with the devotional context, we hope to extend the frame of under• standing of these elements even in the form in which they are part of our own, modern world. Florence is an ideal test case. We have a dominating picture, consisting of the Camerata and other academies giving rise to the ‘birth of the opera’. This emergence has commanded the interest of the modern world, over and above any other features which may have been cultivated in Florence and can easily be fitted in with a trope of the ‘two cities’: the esoteric Florence and the booming Venice where the full commercial and popular potential of the opera eventually came to fruition, at the expense of Florence, which more or less disappears from the text books in music history after . On the other hand, Florence was a city of confraternities. The popular move• ment of lay religious companies was of considerable scope in the late Middle
Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, ), pp. –; Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Thinking of Thoughts: What is “Le Penseur” doing?’, University Lec• tures [University of Saskatchewan], (). Cf. also the notion ‘anthropological history’ introduced by Peter Burke, see for instance Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), pp. –. See Martha Feldman, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). Introduction
Ages and — as modern confraternity studies have shown — clearly played an im• portant role in shaping the face of urban life in Florence as well as in many other Italian cities. These companies — particularly when taken together — encom• passed all strata of society, from princes and clerics, to ordinary people (includ• ing ‘the poor and the orphans’, to quote a frequently encountered phrase). As an element in devotional ceremonies in the various confraternities, with songs of praise and penitence, the Italian lauda must have been far more influential for the general perception of music than ideas circulating in closed circles of intellectual ‘academicians’. Furthermore, the confraternities tap directly into spheres — conceptual sys• tems of meaning — which would have been essential to contemporary thought and the value systems against which music would have been judged: the church and the various lay religious movements. And while the source materials are limited, they are ample enough to add promising pieces to the mosaic. Finally, since all the protagonists of the ‘mainstream story’ — people like Peri, Caccini, Rinuccini, Corsi, and many others — were also involved in the musical activities of the confraternities, there is good reason to retell the story of their involvement. A different posterity might have given a different view on the pe• riod in question as well: we might imagine a narrative where the Camerata and the Florentine academies were mentioned in passing as a leisurely pastime for the towering musical figures of the early Oratorian tradition connected with the major musical institution of the time: the Confraternity of the Archangel Raphael.
The Polyphonic Lauda as an Object of Study
With the above argument in mind, we may ask: What is the point of studying the polyphonic lauda? The question, although polemically formulated, is seriously meant. It can be translated into two different questions: ‘What is the point of studying poly• phonic laude’ — i.e., what is the historiographical justification for devoting funds and energy to a tradition of music that most people will not even have heard of? And ‘What is the point of studying the polyphonic lauda’—i.e., whatis the justification for singling out this particular repertory, a musical genre which musically speaking does not appear to be overly interesting, even to those who
The terminology for the lauda varies in the sources. The most frequent form, which will also be used throughout this book, is lauda (sing.) and laude (pl.), but the masculine forms laude–laudi or lode–lodi are also common, as well as combinations such as ‘lauda spirituale’ etc. Introduction do know of it — at least compared to other genres, in which so many other developments seem much more rewarding and relevant, and with far wider con• sequences, especially during the period which we are studying. Edward J. Dent, who first introduced the polyphonic lauda to the English• speaking world in an article from , says this about the material he is pre• senting: The music with which this paper is concerned is in no sense great music. Some of it is trivial, a great deal of it is extremely dull, considered purely and simply as music; but it is not without its interest as a study of human nature, and also of certain phases of musical technique. His reference to ‘human nature’ concerns the simple but pure lay devotion of the lauda, and although his verdict may be on the harsh side as applied to the genre as a whole, it is easy to agree with Dent: ‘considered purely and simply as music’ there are far more interesting repertories to be studied than the typical polyphonic lauda of the sixteenth century — a short and simple strophical piece, predominantly homophonic, often using quite pronounced, fixed rhythmical patterns, where sterotypes and the functional aspects dominate and the directly musical interest is minor. A more thorough study of the music alone is hard to legitimize—and has rarely been undertaken—without reference to some other, external aspect which may take center stage in place of the ‘extremely dull’ music: the texts as expressions of lay devotion; their place in the development of lay religiosity (and thus also in the various religious reforms in the sixteenth century); or the lauda’s position in various institutions such as the confraternities and the educational programme of the Dottrina Christiana. Thisbook is no different in this respect, but at the same time, we have striven to avoid the other pitfall: to neglect the music because of the more tangible interest inherent in the theological or societal questions concerning the genre. Thus, the aim of Chapters and , where the focus on the musical aspects of the lauda is strongest, is to gain a firm foundation for what will be said in the surrounding chapters where the textual sources to the use of the lauda are discussed: what were the practical circumstances under which the genre was used; how was it used; which aesthetics does that use entail; and how does that
Dent’s paper is heavily based on Domenico Alaleona, ‘Le laudi spirituali italiane nei secoli e e il loro rapporto coi canti profani’, Rivista Musicale Italiana, (), –, ‘to whose writings I am indebted for most of the information given in this paper’, as Dent freely acknowledges (p. ). Edward J. Dent, ‘The Laudi Spirituali in the th and th centuries’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, (–), –, p. . Introduction relate to other genres (opera, oratorio) and other currents of thought (aesthetics, theology)? Of course, the Italian lauda has been studied by musicologists, literary schol• ars, and, to some extent but much less, by historians of religion for many years. Especially the early history of the lauda has been treated quite amply in the liter• ature, owing to its direct connections with the various lay religious movements from the thirteenth century onwards, and the emergence of a musical tradition in the vernacular. However, in a wider perspective one can hardly claim that the lauda and its role in the cultural setting of confraternities has loomed large in the general cultural history. It has remained a specialist topic for those concerned with the particular role of popular religious song or the particular devotional practices of medieval and early modern confraternities. The one exception to this picture is the connection to the genre of the ora• torio. Owing to the role lauda singing originally had in Filippo Neri’s Congre• gation of the Oratory (congregazione dell’oratorio) in Rome — a practice rooted in the Florentine Neri’s experiences from his home city — the lauda has been seen as part of the background for the oratorio genre. In this capacity it has been drawn into a larger music historical narrative as a point of departure for the construction of the beginnings of the oratorio. However, although an important genre in music history since the seven• teenth century, the oratorio has still been largely confined within the realm of religious music, also in spite of the ‘anomaly’ of secular oratorios. Thus, even in this larger perspective, the lauda and other musico•religious practices have often been isolated away from what has been considered the main historical de• velopment of music and aesthetics. One prominent historian of the early opera, Frederick Sternfeld, for instance, in his The Birth of Opera (), dismissed what he called ‘the religious branch of opera’ as ‘a comparatively minor branch of the main operatic stream’, thereby — from a preconceived point of view, as it seems—avoiding bringing Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione del’ an• ima et di corpo () into his discussions of the beginnings of opera. There are exceptions, but on the whole there can be little doubt that neither the lauda practices — even as ‘antecedents’ of the oratorio — nor even the oratorio have been given an important enough place in music history. As already intimated, traditional opera historiography has mainly been fruit• ful for the writing of this book as a point of departure for a critical encounter.
Howard E. Smither, A History of the Oratorio, vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, –), , –. F. W. Sternfeld, The Birth of Opera (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ; repr. ), pp. – ; see the further discussion p. below. Introduction
It should be noted, however, that there are critical voices to be found in opera historiography speaking against teleology in music history. One such voice was recently raised in a short double article by Giuseppe Gerbino and Iain Fenlon. In his part of the article, Gerbino makes the point that ‘Rinuccini and Peri smoothed over the historical uncertainties of such a claim [that ancient theater was sung throughout] by appealing to the “opinion of many” in this matter. But the many were most likely to be very few’. In this way, he underlines the exclu• sivity of the new theories and ultimately also that of the court music drama at its beginning. Moreover, Iain Fenlon writes in his part of the article: While the earliest phase of court opera occupies a central position in the writings of those nineteenth• and twentieth•century music historians who have judged the phenomenon to be the fons et origo of the entire operatic tradition, the historical reality was different, as more recent writers have reminded us. Fenlon refers to Lorenzo Bianconi writing in , but as will be documented in Chapter , recent writers have not generally left the fons et origo model, at least not totally. Further, it should be noted that while Gerbino and Fenlon do not subscribe to a teleological historical narrative of operatic tradition beginning in Florence in , their narrative still places the court music dramas of Peri and Caccini in what is construed as the purely secular context of the academies referred to earlier and the court culture in Florence. What we argue is that the lauda defends its place in the history of aesthet• ics as any other musical genre of its time. As we intend to show, the cultural practices to which the lauda belonged in cities like Florence, in particular the confraternal contexts, gave rise to ideas which may be characterized as an aes• thetics avant la lettre. What is particularly interesting is the way in which these religious contexts seem to provide some of the strongest statements to such an effect without pointing towards secularization in any way. On the contrary, the musico•religious contexts of confraternities with which our account is con• cerned, is a context in which the interest in and praise of musical sensuousness is never separated from the contents of the devotional practices. What from a tra• ditional modern point of view appears as two separate discourses — a religious and an aesthetic — are here presented in a completely integrated way. The idea of the creation of the opera will be reconsidered in Chapter in the light of what otherwise constitutes the main parts of the book: the descriptions of how the laude and the practices of lauda singing were viewed in editions dur•
Giuseppe Gerbino and Iain Fenlon, ‘Early Opera: The Initial Phase’, in European Music –, ed. by James Haar (Woodbridge: Boydell, ), pp. –, p. . Gerbino and Fenlon, ‘Early Opera: The Initial Phase’, p. . See the further discus• sion of historiographic statements concerning the opera in Chapter , pp. –. Introduction ing the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries (Chapter ); a musicological presentation and discussion of the lauda collections in the same period (Chapter ); the ritual and devotional contexts and practices in which the singing of laude was practiced, with the main focus on one particular con• fraternal context, that of the already mentioned Confraternity of the Archangel Raphael, one of the old and prominent youth confraternities in Florence (Chap• ter ). In Chapter , a particular manuscript of nineteen polyphonic laude, now dated to the late seventeenth century, found in the Archives of the Cathedral of Florence, will be discussed and contextualized within the narrative context of the book, in particular in relation to Tarquino Longo’s early seventeenth•century collection of laude from Napoli, providing a perspective on the historiography and on the genre of the lauda altogether and emphasizing also at this late time a lack of separation between the secular and the spiritual. To approach historical narratives in this way, relative to materials of religious ritual and musical practices in early modern Western culture(s), and thereby to see Western music history in an alternative light, is broadly conceived the fundamental aim of this book. This is in agreement with the overall long•term ambitions of the series of books of which it is part, the Ritus et Artes: Traditions and Transformations. Similarly, it is in concord with the fundamental quest be• hind the centre at which the research has been carried out and the book series initiated: the Centre for the Study of the Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals. The centre and its research does not have as its aim to construct one master narrative for the artistic reception of medieval rituals but to study the various resonances of medieval rituals in the later Western culture, including the recon• textualizations and resignifications involved in such multifaceted processes.
Ritual
Although the main context for the singing of laude was confraternal and usu• ally described as ‘popular’ and ‘lay’, one should not forget that the performance context was largely ritual: the musical practices were most often part of religious assemblies which were offshoots of the divine office from the monasteries and other liturgical traditions from the Medieval Church. The medieval liturgical practices had been adapted to the needs of the pious lay groups which during the late thirteenth century came into being and over the next centuries came to play an increasingly large role in the cities of Northern and Middle Italy. Our account will address questions concerning the role of music and the perceived meaning of particularly elaborate musical performances in some special confra• ternities. But although the concrete music and the musical understanding that Introduction is expressed in these institutions have moved a long way from the medieval state, the account is fundamentally a narrative concerned with medieval liturgical re• ception. A modern anthropological notion of ritual was not a part of the intellec• tual framework of the authors which we cite. However, there is a theoretical framework behind our historical descriptions and narratives in which the no• tion of ritual plays an important role. The anthropological discourse on ritual has demonstrated the weakness of this concept because of the lack of an accepted unified ritual theory. However, this does not necessarily affect our use of the concept so much, since the performative events which we conceive of as ritual are all based in a religious (Latin medieval and Catholic) context in which (fairly) stable Christian doctrines and a religious belief in the efficacy of the devotional events to be studied were commonplaces. These events did something to their participants by common consent. This is clearly so in traditional (medieval) liturgical ceremonies such as the mass or the divine office (and even more specif• ically for the sacraments which play an important role in the confraternities, especially in the post Tridentine period). These ceremonies have traditionally, throughout the history of Christianity, been viewed as strengthening the faith of the participants and their sense of belonging to a Christian community. Such ritual efficacy is well described also by the anthropological approach of Clifford Geertz, whose view, although not based on Christian traditions, claimed that rit• uals could be seen to build a bridge between the experiential and the imaginative approach to life. The efficacy of the devotional assemblies in confraternities is similarly strongly emphasized in much of the materials which will be discussed, especially in Chapter . Moreover, it is also a commonplace in these contem• porary documents that the efficacy is increased by the use of music as this was pointed out from the outset of this introduction — not just any music, but mu•
See for instance Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. and . See Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. by Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, ), pp. –, p. . Cf. also Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. – . For C. Clifford Flanigan’s appropriation of Geertz, see C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Compar• ative Literature and the Study of Medieval Drama’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, (), –, pp. –, and C. Clifford Flanigan, ‘Medieval Liturgy and the Arts: “Visitatio Sepulchri” as Paradigm’, in Liturgy and the Arts the Middle Ages: Stud• ies in Honour of C. Clifford Flanigan, ed. by Eva Louise Lillie and Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, ), pp. –, pp. –. See also Nils Hol• ger Petersen, ‘Ritual and Creation: Medieval Liturgy as Foreground and Background for Creation’, in Creations: Medieval Rituals the Arts and the Concept of Creation, ed. by Sven Rune Havsteen et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, ), pp. –, pp. –. Introduction sic which satisfies needs that in a modern account can only be described as both aesthetic and religious and in which the two criteria cannot be separated from each other. In anachronistic terms, such a discourse may also be described as a religious aesthetics of music. This does not mean that all authors have the same opinions about music or about the appropriateness of different kinds of music for a given use, but it does mean that in our alternative version where we focus specifically on particular historical contexts mainly of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, the larger narrative of how music aesthetics came into being is a narrative which takes into account the ‘religious aesthetics’ at the time, as it comes to expression in the sources we will be discussing, and points to the practices of singing laude in these companies as much as to the creation of a new operatic genre.
Acknowledgements
The attempt to bring an alternative music historiographical perspective to bear on lauda singing and its performative contexts does not mean, of course, that the book doesn’t build on huge amounts of older and more recent scholarship as well as on many well•known leading figures in traditional music history. In particular, our account could not have been written had not other recent schol• ars brought materials and institutions to our attention so that we were able to incorporate the research of others into our historiographic and historical inter• ests: musicologists like John Walter Hill and Edmond Strainchamps, who early drew attention to the Raffaello confraternity and its relevance for music history, broadly speaking; the theatre historian Konrad Eisenbichler whose monograph on the Raffaello confraternity has almost been our Bible in that part of our work and will appear in large numbers of footnotes. The thorough studies of the Italian spiritual lauda by Giancarlo Rostirolla have also been indispensable for the present work. Many other scholars have, of course, in broader or more specialized ways influenced our work. A number of individuals and institutions have been of great help to us. In particular, we want to thank Dr. Lorenzo Fabbri, the keeper of the historical archive of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore for helpful assistance during our visits to the archive and for permission to print facsimiles from the , the manuscript in the cathedral archives which is discussed in Chapter and tran• scribed in appendix . We also thank the staffs at the Archivio di Stato and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, the Biblioteca Vallicelliana and the Vatican Library in Rome, as well as British Library, London, and Detlef Kasten, librarian at the Kestner collection at the Stadtbibliothek Hannover, for helpful and friendly assistance. We are grateful to Dr. Nicolas Bell, Dr. Laura Nuvoloni Introduction
(British Library), Dr. Piero Scapecchi (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence), and Prof. Gabriele Giacomelli (University of Florence), who have been most helpful in our attempts to date the . We are also most grateful to Dr. Lars Berglund (Uppsala University) for discussing the differences and similarities be• tween Renaissance and Baroque musical practice. This project originated during a project on early modern music drama di• rected by Prof. Anthony Johnson (then Åbo Academy University, now Oulu University, Finland) supported by the NOP•HS, the Nordic Research Council of the Humanities. It continued as part of the Centre for the Study of the Cul• tural Heritage of Medieval Rituals sponsored by the Danish National Research Foundation during which time most of the work for this volume has been car• ried out. We are very grateful for the support given us to make the work possible, and we are grateful to our colleagues at and around the Centre for fruitful dis• cussions and support. We are also very pleased that the Centre work could lead to a book series at Brepols, the Ritus et Artes series, in which this volume is published. We thank Dr. Simon Forde of Brepols for a fruitful and stimulating collaboration. Both authors are co•responsible for the entire book. Even so, work has been to some extent divided so that Chapters , , and have mainly been written by Eyolf Østrem and Chapters , , and mainly by Nils Holger Petersen. Dis• cussions along the way and the final shaping of each chapter of the book have been done collaboratively. The musical transcriptions have been carried out by Eyolf Østrem. When nothing else is indicated, translations have been done by the authors. We thank Dr. Ettore Rocca, Copenhagen and Reggio Calabria, for checking our translations from Italian and Fran Hopenwasser, Leif Stubbe Teglbjærg, and Sophie Leighton, who have been language consultants for the book. We wish to record our thanks to the perceptive and helpful remarks from the anonymous reader, though of course any errors that remain are our own.
Chapter
T R R C E I L:F S F S (–)
wo famous Florentine figures who are generally seen as opposites never• theless have that in common that they are known as writers of texts for Tlaudas at the end of the fifteenth century. One is Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici (–), who ruled the republic of Florence until his death. His lauda O maligno e duro core was published in a laude collection c. and was supposed to be sung to the tune of one of Lorenzo’s carnival songs to which he had prominent composers write settings, among them Heinrich Isaac (early s–), maestro di cappella of San Giovanni, the Baptistery, who could be the composer of the setting used for O maligno e duro core. The other is Girolamo Savonarola (–), the controversial Dominican friar who became unofficial leader of the republic of Florence during a short period in the late s until his fall and execution in . His Laude al crocifisso, ‘Iesù, sommo conforto’, was first printed in . According to its modern Italian literary editor, Mario Martelli, it strongly reflects the general Florentine lauda tradition of the fifteenth century.
See Patrick Macey, Bonfire songs: Savonarola’s musical legacy (Oxford: Oxford Univer• sity Press, ), pp. –. The text is printed with an English translation in Savonarolan Laude, Motets, and Anthems, ed. by Patrick Macey (Madison: A•R Editions, ), pp.xxii–xxiii; the musical setting as preserved in Serafino Razzi, Libro Primo delle Laudi Spirituali da diversi eccell. e divoti autori, antichi e moderni composte. Le quale si vsano cantare in Firenze nelle chiese doppo il vespro. Con la propria musica e modo di cantare cias• cuna Laude (Venice: Francesco Rampazetto, ad instanzia de gli heredi di Bernardo Giunti di Firenze, ) is given on pp. – (with notes on p. ). In Razzi’s original edition, this setting is found on fols v–r followed by Lorenzo’s words on fol. v. See Girolamo Savonarola, Poesie, ed. by Mario Martelli (Rome: Angelo Belardetti, ), pp. –. The text of the lauda is edited on pp. –. An almost identical text Chapter
Lorenzo’s O maligno e duro core has the refrain: O maligno e duro core, fonte d’ogni mal concetto, ché non scoppi in mezzo il petto, ché non scoppi di dolore? O hard and evil heart, source of every evil notion, why do you not burst in that breast, why do you not burst with sorrow? The first stanza describes how the heart does not listen in spite of the signs of Nature after the death of Jesus (paraphrasing the biblical references to the earthquake, the dimming of the sun and the splitting of the temple veil as Jesus died, for instance Matthew . –). The second stanza then exhorts the heart to melt, to be crucified with Jesus, and to let the lance that pierced Jesus also pierce itself. The third stanza goes on: O cor mio, così piagato fa di lagrime un torrente come dal santo costato versa sangue largamente; gran dolcezza, o cor mio, sente chi accompagna Iesù santo; se la pena è dolce tanto, più dolce è, chi con lui muore. O my heart, thus wounded,let the tears flow in a torrent, just as from that holy breastthe blood freely pours out. Great sweetness, o my heart, is feltby whoever follows holy Jesus. If the pain is so sweet, sweeter stillis it for those who die with Him. The fourth and last stanza expands this theme and concludes with the line ‘Non muor mai chi con lui muore’ (‘they who die with Him will never die again’). is given with an English translation in Savonarolan Laude, pp. xlii–xliii together with four settings preserved from the sixteenth century pp. – (with notes on pp. –), one of which is from Razzi’s collection, where the setting is found on fol. v and the text on fol. r. See also Girolamo Savonarola, A Guide to Righteous Living and Other Works, trans., with an introd., by Konrad Eisenbichler, Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, ), ‘Introduction’, p. , with a translation of this lauda on pp. –. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Laude, ed. by Bernard Toscani (Florence: Olschki, ), p. . English translation quoted from Savonarolan Laude, pp. xxii–xxiii, with minor modifica• tions because of the small and insignificant differences between the Italian texts given by Toscani and Macey. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Laude, p. ; English translation from Savonarolan Laude, p.xxiii. Lorenzo de’ Medici, Laude, p. ; Savonarolan Laude, p. xxiii. THE RELIGIOUS AND RITUAL CONTEXT OF THE EARLIER ITALIAN LAUDA
The refrain from Savonarola’s ‘Iesù, sommo conforto’ reads: O gran bontà, Dolce pietà, Felice quel che teco unito sta. Oh mercy great,And piety sweet,That man is glad who lives as one with you. Among the ten short stanzas very similar themes to those just highlighted in Lorenzo’s lauda are found. We quote stanzas , , and : Oh! Quante volte offeso T’ha l’alma e ‘l cor meschino! E tu sei in croce esteso, Per salvar me tapino. Iesù, fammi morire Del tuo amor vivace; Iesù, fammi languire Con te, Segnor verace! La Croce e ‘l Crucifisso Sia nel mio cor scolpito, Ed io sia sempre affisso In gloria, ove egli è ito.
How often have my soul | And dismal heart offended? | But you stretched on the cross | To save a wretch like me. Jesus, now let me perish | From this your living love; | Jesus, now let me suffer | With you, my Lord most true! And in my heart be sculpted | the Cross and Crucifix | And may I dwell forever | In glory, where He’s gone. This brief presentation of two poems of Italian laude from the late fifteenth century both dealing with the theme of the Passion of Christ is meant to serve as a point of departure for the following attempt to present a historical perspective behind the practices of lauda singing in the late Renaissance. In order to exemplify differences and continuities between the earliest known lauda practice and the late fifteenth•century tradition, we will bring in a third lauda, approximately two hundred years older, copied in the earliest preserved collection of laude, the laudario di Cortona from the second half of the thir• teenth century.
Savonarolan Laude, p. xlii, Savonarola, Poesie, p. ; English translation by Konrad Eisenbichler, in Savonarola, A Guide, p. . Savonarola, Poesie, pp. –, see also Savonarolan Laude, pp. xlii–xliii; translation by Konrad Eisenbichler, in Savonarola, A Guide, pp. –. Chapter
Whereas the fifteenth•century lauda texts — exemplified here through the laude by Lorenzo de’ Medici and Savonarola — clearly are works of skilled po• ets, the early lauda is usually seen as the product of popular religious movements. Traces of such a popular pious background have normally been sought for in the Franciscan friar Salimbene de Adam’s late thirteenth•century descriptions of the popular religious revivals of the early to mid•thirteenth century and also in early references to the Canticle of Brother Sun by Francis of Assisi (–). These references will briefly be reviewed in order to contextualize the differences between the two layers of lauda singing: those of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. The account which started out with pointing out the similarity between the two fifteenth•century laude, will return to Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo Savonarola again toward the end of the chapter. At that point, however, fundamentally different ideas and practices of piety between the two prominent Florentine figures will be highlighted and discussed: On the one hand Lorenzo’s Rappresentazione di S. Giovanni e Paolo, a pious entertainment written for a high•society fifteenth•century youth confraternity closely associ• ated with the Medici family, on the other the austere ideas concerning music and devotion expressed by Girolamo Savonarola in his controversial preaching during his last years, calling for repentance. The main objective of the chapter is to raise and discuss questions of continuity and change concerning the differ• ent historical forms of laude and their ritual contexts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century as a background for the main topic of this volume: the various practices of lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as in the way such practices were understood.
The Early Monophonic Lauda Tradition
Consider the refrain of one of the earliest preserved laude, the Plangiamo from the thirteenth•century Laudario di Cortona: Plangiamo quel crudel basciar[e] ke fe’ per noi Deo crucïare. Let us lament that cruel kiss Which crucified God in our stead. Here follows all five stanzas of the poem: Venne Iuda, traditore, bascio Li dié de gran dolore; lo qual fac[c]iam noi per amore a Lui fo signo di penare. Quel fo signo a [l]i Iuderi: non cognoscevan Suo misteri, THE RELIGIOUS AND RITUAL CONTEXT OF THE EARLIER ITALIAN LAUDA
Iuda li feci v[id]eri, per un suo bascio ’L fe’ pi[g]liare. Ad Anna principe El menaro; inudo nato Lo spoliaro, battîrLo forte et sí ’L legaro et fêrLo tutto insanguinare. Anna sì L’ebbe mandato a Cayfàs so[mmo] prelato, quelli ke ’L mandò a Pilato per Lui più vituper fare. Pilato ad Arode El mandòe, perké molto El domandòe, cercò molto e nol trovòe, poi Lo fe’ rapresentare.
Judas the traitor came, He gave Him a kiss and great pain; What we do out of love Was for Him a sign of suffering. To the Jews it was a sign; They had no knowledge of his mysteries, But Judas nonetheless fulfilled these: Through a kiss He was seized. At first they took Him to Annas; They stripped Him as naked as an infant, They beat Him hard and bound Him And left Him bathed in blood. Annas then sent Him onward To Caiaphas the Prelate, Who sent Him to Pilate To be subjected to more scorn. Pilate sent Him to Herod Because he was much sought after; He looked for Him and couldn’t find Him; Then He was placed on trial. The appearance of the new type of song, referred to as the lauda, during the thirteenth century — the earliest repertory of vernacular religious song to be pre• served in the European culture — belongs primarily to the institutional context of laudesi and disciplinati confraternities in the landscapes of Tuscany and Um• bria. The earliest collections of laude were books for use in these new religious establishments which — taken together as one phenomenon — constituted one important outcome of the popular pious movements of the mid•thirteenth century. These should — in a longer perspective — be seen in the context of
Trans. by Blake Wilson in CD booklet for Medieval Italian Spiritual Songs, Musicians of the Early Music Institute, dir. Thomas Binkley. Focus (Bloomington: Early Music Institute, Indiana University School of Music, ), p. . Original text in Laudario di Cortona, ed. by Anna Maria Guarnieri (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto Medio• evo, ), pp. –. See, however, John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. , pp. –, who points out that there were confraternities (congregationes and scholae) of various kinds already in the tenth to twelfth centuries in some North•Italian cities. From the scattered evidence preserved, they seem to have been Chapter the popular ‘Jesus movements’ that had begun in the late twelfth century and formed the main background for the establishing of the mendicant orders in the beginning of the thirteenth century, orders which became of central significance for the actual establishing of these religious confraternities as well as for their daily lives and ceremonial. Only two laudarii (confraternity books of laude) with monophonic melodies have been preserved in spite of the large number of extant laudarii with only texts: a thirteenth•century manuscript from Cortona, which will be briefly discussed in the following, and a Florentine manuscript from the fourteenth century (Biblioteca Nazionale, Firenze, Banco Rari ). Part of an explanation for this could be that the melodies for the early laude were orally transmitted. This would be in agreement with the idea of a popular back• ground for this type of song. It seems characteristic that the lauda was primarily cast in the form of a bal• lata, a secular song form probably originating from the dance•song although the variation of the musical forms in the earliest laudario, the late thirteenth•century Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale, ms —in which the Plangiamo is found—is relatively substantial. More specific information about how a repertory of lauda melodies came into being is not known. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it became common for confraternities to hire professional singers for polyphonic performance of laude. Religious confraternities—in general—had become a well•established part of the urban societies in the Northern part of Italy. In Blake Wilson’s words concerning the professionalization of the singing of laude: ‘The reasons for this development are various, but may be traced to the rapid growth of a popular religious devotion under the management of guilds• rather different from the new confraternities established in and after the thirteenth cen• tury, both in terms of organization and function. Henderson’s point is mainly to point to the existence of an idea of fraternal organization prior to the mendicant movements. For general introductions to the history of the rise of religious confraternities with an emphasis on song and devotion, see Cyrilla Barr, The Monophonic Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the late Middle Ages, Early drama, art, and music monograph series, (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, ), p. ; Martin Dürrer, Altitalienische Laudenmelodien: Das einstimmige Repertoire der Handschriften Cortona und Florenz, Bochumer Arbeiten zur Musikwissenschaft, , vols (Kassel: Bärenreiter, ), and Blake Wilson, Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. . See also Blake Wilson, ‘Lauda’, in Grove Music Online, ed. by L. Macy, hhttp:
//www.grovemusic.comi [accessed Apr. ]. Concerning the development of the music for lauda texts, see especially Barr, The Monophonic Lauda, pp. – and –, Dürrer, Altitalienische Laudenmelodien, I, pp. –, only dealing with the monophonic lauda; and Wilson, Music and Merchants, pp. –, and –, who also treats the rise of the polyphonic lauda. THE RELIGIOUS AND RITUAL CONTEXT OF THE EARLIER ITALIAN LAUDA men’. Also vernacular dramatic ceremonies became part of the spiritual exer• cises in the confraternities, sometimes in the form of dramatic laude (gradually) developing into fully staged music•dramatic vernacular representations deriv• ing from the verbal dialogue texts in some laude, and sometimes in terms of incorporation of the traditional sung laude into a staging of spoken sacre rapp• resentazione. Blake Wilson, who writes about the urban context of the early mendicant spirituality, stresses how the lay religious companies were encouraged by the friars and — in terms of religious content and devotional practice — governed by the same ideals. In terms of administrative structure, however, the contem• porary guilds provided the model. An important redefinition of the relationship between the secular and the spiritual world was the outcome: ‘the secular made sacred’. This development and the way it influenced the literary as well as the musi• cal composition of laude lies between the Plangiamo and the two lauda texts first mentioned above (by Lorenzo de’ Medici and Girolamo Savonarola). This must be kept in mind when comparing early and later laude. As will be discussed below, the broad popular social background seems to have been significant for the beginnings of the lauda even if the earliest development of the song style is difficult — not to say impossible — to trace. Concerning the aforementioned early Cortona collection (compiled between and for a Cortonese con• fraternity associated with a Franciscan church), Blake Wilson writes: A striking feature of its forty•six laude is not so much the flexible adoption of the ballata scheme, but its pervasive adoption, here and throughout the lauda repertory of the next century. This clearly indicates a widespread, uniform, and institutional practice, the dissemination of which might easily occur through the mobile network of mendicant convents. It is not difficult to find traces of what traditionally might be associated with popular oral traditions in a song like the Plangiamo. Its construction seems straight•forward, a paraphrase of chosen elements from the Gospel Passion nar• ratives up to the final trial without involving any doctrinal terminology. Also, the chosen individual episodes are basic in terms of emphasizing the tangible signs of Jesus’ suffering: the false kiss, the beating, the blood, Jesus being sent around from one authority to another. All the statements are simple; there is
Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. . Barr, The Monophonic Lauda, pp. –; and Giulio Cattin, Music of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . Wilson, Music and Merchants, pp. –. See Wilson, Music and Merchants, p. . Chapter little or no theological or poetical complication in the account. At the same time, the refrain establishes the traditionally most important theological point concerning the Passion of Christ: that He — God (as part of the Trinity) — was ‘crucified in our stead’. Also musically, the song is simple with a strong musical link between the refrain and the melodic conclusion of each strophe (see Figure ).
Plangia moquel cru del ba scia r[e] Ke fe’ per no i De o cru ci a re