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Claude Le Jeune, Adrian Willaert and the Art of Musical Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Richard Freedman
Richard Freedman
Affiliation:
Haverford College, Pennsylvania
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Extract

In calling for a new history of French music and musical life of the second half of the sixteenth century, Howard Mayer Brown's paper has presented scholars with a number of formidable challenges. It admonishes us to re-examine nearly every facet of what remains largely an enigma of music history. Simultaneously exacting and encyclopedic, it considers in turn each of four themes: the relation of words and music; the means and character of print culture; musical styles and genres; and (perhaps most important of all) the social context of the chanson itself – what Brown called ‘the anthropology of the French chanson’. His essay concerns the problems and perspectives of Renaissance musicology: how we hear and how we explain the music of the past in relation to those who first made and heard it. It thus requires us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature and workings of historical change, the status of canonical styles and those who promoted them, and the very place of music in culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Early Music History , Volume 13 , October 1994 , pp. 123 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Further on Willaert's habits as a musical reader, see Brown, H. M., ‘Words and Music: Willaert, the Chanson, and the Madrigal about 1540’, Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations, 2 vols. (Florence, 1979–1980), ii, pp. 217–66Google Scholar; the same article appeared in French translation as ‘Paroles et musique: Willaert, la chanson et le madrigal vers 1540’, La chanson à la Renaissance, ed. Vaccaro, J.-M. (Tours, 1981), pp. 209–42Google Scholar. More recently on madrigal texts and their musical readers, see Feldman, M., ‘The Composer as Exegete: Interpretations of Petrarchan Syntax in the Venetian Madrigal’, Studi Musicali, 18 (1989), pp. 203–38Google Scholar.

2 The text given here follows that printed in Willaert's seven-voice setting from the Musica nova of 1559. See Willaert, A., Opera omnia, ed. Gerstenberg, W., 13 vols., Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 3 (Rome, 1965), xiii, pp. 103–7Google Scholar. This reading differs slightly in wording, but not rhyme scheme or overall syntax, from the one transcribed from the Opere del preclarissimo poeta Miser Pamphilo Sasso (Venice, 1519)Google Scholar by Lavaud, Jacques in Un poète de cour au temps des derniers Valois: Philippe Desportes (1546–1606) (Paris, 1936), p. 181Google Scholar.

3 The reading here follows the one used by Le Jeune in his Le printemps of 1603 rather than the slightly different text given in the Amours de Diane of 1573. See Le Jeune, , Le printemps, 3 vols., ed. Expert, H., Les Maîtres Musiciens de la Renaissance Française 12–14 (Paris, 1900–1901; repr. New York, 1963), iii, pp. 112–33Google Scholar, and Desportes, P.Les amours de Diane, ed. Graham, V. E., 2 vols. (Geneva, 1959), i, p. 73Google Scholar. The Italian model for Desportes's sonnet was first publicly identified by Vaganay, H., ‘Un modèle de Desportes non signalé encore’, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 10 (1903), pp. 277–8Google Scholar. See Vianey, J., Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVIe siècle (Montpellier, 1909), pp. 227–35Google Scholar, on Desportes's early borrowings from Italian sources. Victor Graham and others have since uncovered direct Italian models for a number of Desportes's lyrics.

4 Levy, K., ‘The Chansons of Claude Le Jeune’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1955), p. 221Google Scholar.

5 The printed Ebs at ‘douce beauté’ in bar 57 simply realise alterations demanded by the polyphonic context, and would in any event have been added by Willaert's readers as early as 1559. The direct chromaticism of bar 16, of course, returns in Le Jeune's other experiments with the antique genera. See his Quell' eau, quel air from the Livre des meslanges of 1585, transcribed in modern edition in Le Jeune, , Mélanges, ed. Expert, H., Les Maîtres Musiciens de la Renaissance Française 16 (Paris, 1903; repr. New York, 1965), pp. 4–10Google Scholar.

6 The entire print, together with its dedications and prefatory poems, was issued in modern edition by Henry Expert (see note 3 above).

7 The contents of Willaert's Musica nova, to take an obvious example, are organised by the size of the vocal ensemble required. The same plan is observed in Le Roy and Ballard's famous retrospective Mellange de chansons of 1572. See Lesure, F. and Thibault, G., eds., Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955)Google Scholar.

8 See Bonniffet, P., Un ballet démasqué: l'union de la musique au verbe dans ‘Le printans’ de Jean-Antoine de Baïf et Claude Le Jeune (Paris and Geneva, 1988), pp. 345ffGoogle Scholar. Bonniffet nevertheless seems unaware that Le Jeune's composition reworks material by Willaert.

9 Le Jeune's additional poetic stanzas for Le chant de l'alouette and Le chant du rossignol were drawn from the same section of Du Bartas's long poem. See Du Bartas, , La sepmaine, ed. Bellenger, Y., 2 vols. (Paris, 1981), ii, pp. 229–30Google Scholar (Premier semaine, Ve jour, vv 615–18, for Le chant de l'alouette and vv. 619–34 for Le chant du rossignol). Levy (‘The Chansons of Claude Le Jeune’, pp. 140–1) seems to have been unaware that the additional poetic stanzas for Le chant du rossignol came from the same sourceas those for (Le chant de l'alouette. A modern edition of Janequin's Or sus vous domes trop (Le chant de l'alouette) appears in Janequin, C., Chansons polyphoniques, ed. Merritt, A. T. and Lesure, F., 6 vols. (Monaco, 1965–1971), i, pp. 106–14Google Scholar. First issued in 1528, this chanson was reprinted as late as 1559, when it appeared in a book issued by the firm of Le Roy and Ballard. For a modern edition of Le Jeune's version of this composition, see Le Jeune, , Le printemps, i, pp. 92–115Google Scholar. A modern edition of Janequin's, En escoutant le chant mélodieulx (Le chant du rossignol) appears in Janequin, Chansons polyphoniques, ii, pp. 197–202Google Scholar. First issued in 1544, this chanson was reprinted as late as 1559, when it appeared in a book issued by the firm of Le Roy and Ballard. A setting of the same text by Pierre Certon also appeared in 1559; for a modern edition see Certon, P., Complete Chansons Published by Le Roy and Ballard, ed. Bernstein, J. A., The Sixteenth-Century Chanson 6 (New York, 1990), pp. 51–5Google Scholar. For a modern edition of Le Jeune's version of this chanson, see Le Jeune, , Le printemps, i, pp. 50–68Google Scholar.

10 A modern edition of Le Jeune's Ma mignonne je me plain appears in Le Jeune, , Le printemps, ii, pp. 1–63Google Scholar. Le Jeune had previously borrowed the tune for his four-voice setting issued in 1575. For a modern edition of this arrangement, see Le Jeune, C., Complete Unpublished Chansons, ed. Bernstein, J. A., The Sixteenth-Century Chanson 16 (New York, 1989), pp. 24–7Google Scholar. For a modern edition of Nicolas's setting of Ma mignonne je me plain (from Le Roy and Ballard's Second livre de chansons of 1564) see Nicolas, , Complete Chansons Published by Le Roy and Ballard, ed. Choi, Hyunjung, The Sixteenth-Century Chanson 20 (New York, 1991), pp. 126–8Google Scholar. Pierre Certon evidently also used the tenor of chanson, Nicolas's in his own setting of this text issued in Les meslanges de Maistre Pierre Certon (Paris: Du Chemin, 1570)Google Scholar.

11 Levy (‘The Chansons of Claude Le Jeune’, pp. 223–6) connects Du trist' hyver with other Italianate pieces by Le Jeune, and in turn with the broad – but in his view exclusively musical – vogue for Italian fashion that appears among the works of Caietain, Maletty and Boni. Further on the musical aspects of that movement, see Dobbins, F., ‘Les madrigalistes français et la Pléiade’, La chanson à la Renaissance, ed. Vaccaro, , pp. 157–71Google Scholar. A modern edition of Du trist' hyver appears in Le Jeune, , Le printemps, iii, pp. 47–86Google Scholar.

12 Several of Walker's, D. P. important studies of Le Jeune's settings of vers mesurés have recently been reprinted in a single volume, Music, Spirit and Language in the Renaissance, ed. Gouk, P. (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

13 Levy's accommodation to this national model of musical history led him to classify Le Jeune's ‘Italianate’ chansons as a separate type of work from the remainder of his output, positing an undocumented Italian journey during the composer's early career. See Levy, ‘The Chansons of Claude Le Jeune’, pp. 191–241.

14 According to Mary Lewis (personal correspondence of 19 November 1993) a copy of the Musica nova now in the collection of the Paris Conservatoire (Rés. 1202) seems to bear the marks of early French ownership. The title page of the cantus book, she reports, bears a signature in a northern hand, ‘Barbara [?] de Bonhomme.’ The binding papers and the binding itself appear to be of French provenance. My thanks to Dr Lewis for kindly sharing with me the results of her extensive research with the Gardane sources.

15 See His, I., ‘Les modèles italiens de Claude Le Jeune’, Revue de Musicologie, 77 (1991), pp. 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 On Le Jeune's, Dodecacorde contenant douze pseaumes de David, mis en musique selon les douze modes … (La Rochelle, 1598)Google Scholar and its use of Zarlino's disposition of the modal types, see Le Jeune, C., Dodécacorde, comprising Twelve Psalms of David Set to Music according to the Twelve Modes, 3 vols., ed. Heider, A. H., Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance 74–6 (Madison, WI, 1988), i, pp. xiii–xviGoogle Scholar. Bonniffet, (Un ballet démasqué, p. 403)Google Scholar cites a French translation, ‘probablement de la main même de C. Le Jeune’, that joins Le Jeune's ideas on musical theory with those of Zarlino (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, n.a.fr. 4679). Scholars have evidently overlooked this and other sources of Zarlino's theories in French.

17 On the moral and philosophical platforms of the Baïf circle, see Yates, F. A., The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947), pp. 69–76Google Scholar. The famous letters patent of the Académie, issued to Baïf by King Charles IX in 1570, appear on pp. 319–22 of this volume. Concerning the later history of academic discussion of the moral virtues of art, especially as voiced in Desportes's thought, see Sealy, R. J., The Palace Academy of Henry III (Geneva, 1981)Google Scholar. A mid sixteenth-century Latin music treatise in the hand of a royal mathematician, Christophorus Mondoreus, was apparently once in Desportes's possession. The book, with the poet's name on the title page, is preserved as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 224.

18 A modern edition of Baïf's, nineteen-line chansonette mesurée appears in his Chansonnettes, ed. Bird, G. C. (Vancouver, BC, 1964), pp. 100–03Google Scholar.

19 For a survey of Desportes's poetic currency among chanson composers of the late sixteenth century, see Verchaly, P., ‘Desportes et la musique’, Annales Musicologiques, 2 (1954), pp. 271–345Google Scholar. Further on the Italian models for Desportes's writings, see the sources listed in note 3 above.

20 Estienne attacks so many aspects of courtly behaviour and language that it is difficult to know where to begin listing them. See Estienne, H., Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé et autrement disguizé, principalement entre les courtisans de ce temps (Paris, 1578)Google Scholar; the dialogue was issued in a modern edition in 1883. Further on the reception of Italian manners and language in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, see Balsamo, J., ‘Les traducteurs français d'ouvrages italiens et leurs mécènes (1574–1589)’, Le livre dans l'Europe de la Renaissance, ed. Aquilon, P. and Martin, H.-J. (Paris, 1988), pp. 122–32Google Scholar, and Idem, Les rencontres des muses: italianisme et anti-italianisme dans les lettres françaises de la fin du XVIe siècle, Bibliothèque Franco Simone 19 (Geneva, 1992).

21 On the long French debate about the status and meaning of Horace's advice on translation, which embroiled not only Henri Estienne but also Estienne Dolet and even Heinrich Glarean, see Norton, G. P., ‘Fidus interpres: a Philological Contribution to the Philosophy of Translation in Renaissance France’, Neo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, ed. Castor, G. and Cave, T. (Oxford, 1984), pp. 227–51Google Scholar, and Idem, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva, 1984), esp. pp. 57–112. The sixteenth-century French discussion of theories of translation and imitation should be viewed against the intellectual background of the years around 1500 as presented by Brown, Howard Mayer in ‘Emulation, Competition and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 35 (1982), pp. 1–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.