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Italy, the Ancient World and the French Musical Inheritance in the Sixteenth Century: Arcadelt and Clereau in the Service of the Guises
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Throughout the sixteenth century France looked towards Italy with an intensity rarely matched before or since. Generations of French kings pursued dreams of conquest on the peninsula; during their Italian campaigns French noblemen and their retinues spent extensive periods south of the Alps, gaining firsthand experience of Italian language and culture. Dynastic marriages linked leading French families with different Italian states: the Retz with the Florentine Gondi, the Nevers with the Mantuan Gonzaga and the Guise with the Este of Ferrara, among many others.
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- Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1996
References
This study expands upon research first presented at the conference ‘Le mechat et I'influence des Guises’, Joinville, June 1994. I would like to thank the organizer, Yvonne Bellenger, and participants in the conference for discussing and sharing their work with me. Donna Cardamone Jackson has been unfailingly kind, reading and commenting on an earlier version of this study and providing information, transcriptions and advice; I am grateful to her for her help with the villanella repertory, to Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens for their help with Arcadelt's Latin songs, and to Jane Bernstein and John O'Brien for their helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. I would like to thank the British Academy and the University of Southampton for their generous support of my research in Paris and in London.Google Scholar
1 See Dickinson, Gladys, Du Bellay in Rome (Leiden, 1960), 11–40, and Margaret McGowan, ‘Impaired Vision: The Experience of Rome in Renaissance France’, Renaissance Studies, 8 (1994), 244–55, for discussion of récits de voyage and itineraries of French travellers.Google Scholar
2 Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘The Exile's Defense: Du Bellay's La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse’, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse 93 (1978), 275–89 (pp. 280–1). I would like to thank Kate van Orden for drawing this article to my attention. A revised version of the article is included in Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven and London, 1983), 18–53.Google Scholar
3 Jestaz, Bernard, ‘L'exportation des marbres de Rome de 1535 à 1571, Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire publiés par l'Ecole Française de Rome, année 1963, no. 2, 415–66 (p. 424). See also Ian Wardropper, ‘Le mécénat des Guise: Art, religion et politique au milieu du XVIe siècle’, Revue de l'art, 94 (1991), 27–54.Google Scholar
4 ‘Sing for me those odes still unknown to the French muse, to a lute well tuned to the sound of the Greek and Roman lyre: and let there be no verse in which some vestige of rare and antique erudition does not appear.’ Joachim Du Bellay, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris, 1946; repr. 1970), 112–13.Google Scholar
5 ‘Sound for me those fair sonnets, no less learned than pleasing Italian invention, synonymous in name with the ode, and different from it only in that the sonnet has rules and limits for certain verses, while the ode may employ freely all manner of verse, even make them up at will, as Horace did … For the sonnet, then, you have Petrarch and some modern Italians.’ Ibid., 120–2.Google Scholar
6 French attitudes to imitation of both classical texts and Italian models are discussed in detail in Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1983), esp. pp. 171–241.Google Scholar
7 On the house of Lorraine and the Guises, see Jean-Marie Constant, Les Guise (Paris, 1984), and Emile Humblot and Roger Luzu, Les seigneurs de Joinville (St Dizier, 1964). Older studies include Jean-Jacques Guillemin, Le cardinal de Lorraine, son influence politique et religieuse au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1847); Henri Forneron, Les ducs de Guise et leur époque, 2 vols. (Paris, 1877); and Joseph de Croze, Les Guises, les Valois et Philippe II, 2 vols. (Paris, 1866). On the literary, artistic and musical patronage of the Guises, see Le mécénat et l'influence des Guises, ed. Yvonne Bellenger (Paris, forthcoming); my article in this collection, ‘Les Guises et l'air de cour: images musicales du prince guerrier’, contains an appendix listing musicians associated with the Guises 1550–1600. On the musical patronage of the house of Lorraine, see Freedman, Richard, ‘Music, Musicians, and the House of Lorraine during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1987). French surnames referring to important dynasties take an ‘s’ in the plural (e.g. ‘les Bourbons‘). Opinion as to whether this rule should apply to the Guise family varies, with a consequent lack of consistency in the appearance of the name in secondary sources.Google Scholar
8 Charles de Lorraine's education at the Collège de Navarre is described in Nicholas Boucher, La conjonction des lettres et des armes des deux tresillustres princes Lorrains Charles Cardinal de Lorraine … et François de Lorraine Duc de Guyse, freres (Reims, 1579), ff. 9–10', a translation by Jacques Tigeou of Boucher's Latin funeral oration for Charles de Lorraine, first published as Caroli Lotharingi Card. et Francisci Ducis Guysii literae et arma (Paris, 1577). According to Ronsard, the cardinal enjoyed playing the lute; see Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, revised and completed by Isidore Silver and Raymond Lebègue, ix (Paris, 1937; repr. with appendices 1982), 53.Google Scholar
9 According to Constant (Les Guise, 34), Charles de Lorraine controlled at various times 30 archbishoprics, nine bishoprics and five abbeys. A partial list of his benefices appears in Forneron, Les ducs de Guise, i, 99. On the Guise control of benefices, see Bergin, Joseph A., ‘The Decline and Fall of the House of Guise as an Ecclesiastical Dynasty’, The Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 781–803.Google Scholar
10 Constant, Les Guise, 22–3.Google Scholar
11 Charles, duc de Lorraine, was raised at the French court under the influence of his uncles after François de Guise and his brothers seized control of the regency of the duchy of Lorraine from the duke's mother, Christine of Denmark, in 1552; see Guillemin, Le cardinal de Lorraine, 46–7.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 11–18; Croze, Les Guises, 12–15.Google Scholar
13 Guillemin, Le cardinal de Lorraine, 22–3; under one such plan, Naples would fall under the control of the Guises themselves, with François de Guise installed as the French governor.Google Scholar
14 Humblot, and Luzu, , Les seigneurs de Joinville, 163–4. The terms of the marriage were drawn up in the presence of Henri II in Turin in August 1548, with Charles de Lorraine acting as the Guise representative, and the marriage was celebrated at St Germain in December.Google Scholar
15 Letters from Giovanni Della Casa, on behalf of Cardinal Carlo Caraffa, to Charles de Lorraine place the latter in Venice in December 1555-January 1556, and in Ferrara in late January; see Opere di Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa (Venice, 1752), ii, 48–56.Google Scholar
16 Jestaz, ‘L'exportation des marbres de Rome’, 442; see also Wardropper, ‘Le mécénat des Guise’, 29. The musician Pierre Sandrin was involved as an agent in obtaining a painting (and perhaps other artworks) for Charles de Lorraine, according to a letter to Sandrin from Lancelot de Carle, bishop of Riez, who was acquiring sculptures and paintings for the cardinal in 1553. See Lesure, François, ‘Un musicien d'Hippolyte d'Este: Pierre Sandrin’, Musique et musiciens français du XVI' siècle (Geneva, 1976), 251–6 (pp. 253–4). I would like to thank Richard Freedman for drawing my attention to this letter.Google Scholar
17 Pietro Aretino, for example, enjoyed the patronage first of Jean de Lorraine and then of his nephew; see Lettere scritte a Pietro Aretino, ed. Teodorico Landoni (Bologna, 1875), ii/2, 210–11, and Aretino, Il quinto libro delle lettere di M. Pietro Aretino (Paris, 1609), 10, 13, 56, 230 and 257–8.Google Scholar
18 The document is preserved in Nancy, principal home of the dukes of Lorraine, where members of the Guise branch were frequent visitors. See Jacquot, Albert, Essai de répertoire des artistes lorrains: Les musiciens, chanteurs, compositeurs (Paris, 1904), 45; Jacquot does not supply a shelfmark for his source. Arcadelt's biography is treated in detail in Thomas Whitney Bridges, ‘The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1982), i, 10–66.Google Scholar
19 On the title-pages of two prints from 1557 and 1559 (discussed below), Arcadelt was identified as a ‘chantre du roi’; he appears as a royal singer in court documents from 1554, 1555 and 1562 (see Bridges, ‘The Publishing of Arcadelt's First Book of Madrigals’, i, 52); and he is listed in a record of payments to the king's chamber singers in F-Pan KK129 (‘officiers domestiques du roi’), July-December 1559), cited in Marie-Thérèse de Martel, Catalogue des actes de François II (Paris, 1991), no. 2686. He was still on the royal payroll at his death in 1568 (see Lesure, ‘Arcadelt est mort en 1568’, Musique et musiciens, 225–6).Google Scholar
20 The publishing history of the chansons is discussed in Arcadelt, Opera omnia, ed. Albert Seay, viii: Chansons I (Rome, 1968), xi–xxii. See also François Lesure and Geneviève Thibault, Bibliographie des éditions d'Adrian Le Roy et Robert Ballard (1551–1598) (Paris, 1955).Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 68–9 and 80–1.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., 14, although the Charles de Lorraine in question is misidentified as the duc de Lorraine rather than the cardinal. The preface and the three Masses from the collection are edited by Albert Seay in Arcadelt, Opera omnia, i (1965).Google Scholar
23 In the revised edition of this collection in 1572, Arcadelt's name was replaced by that of the current Le Roy & Ballard best seller, Orlando di Lasso, and the name of Charles de Lorraine no longer appears; see Le Roy & Ballard's 1572 Mellange de Chansons, ed. Charles Jacobs (University Park, PA, 1982). Ronsard's preface is edited in English translation in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York, 1950), 286–9.Google Scholar
24 Pierre Certon is identified as the maistre des enfans of the royal Sainte Chapelle in titles in 1552 and 1555; in 1554, the title of Alberto da Ripa's posthumous Quart livre de tabulature de luth identifies the composer as a ‘varlet de chambre du Roy nostre sire’; Claude de Sermisy is the ‘Regii Sacelli Magistro’ in a motet print of 1555 and a Mass volume in 1558. See Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie, for details of these prints. In the 1560s, it is extremely rare for a composer's position to figure in the title of Le Roy & Ballard prints; on the few occasions when such information is included, the composers are almost invariably members of the royal chapel.Google Scholar
25 ‘Le mécénat des Guise’, 27.Google Scholar
26 See, for example, Du Bellay, La deffence, ed. Chamard, 112–14.Google Scholar
27 See Dobbins, Frank, ‘Joachim Du Bellay et la musique de son temps’, Du Bellay: Actes du colloque international d'Angers du 26 au 29 Mai 1989 (Angers, 1990), 587–605 (p. 590).Google Scholar
28 ‘The three Italian Ferraboscos, who are the musicians of Monseigneur the most reverend Cardinal of Lorraine, dressed as so many Amphions, will enter the hall first after the Poet to play their instruments, singing at the beginning, at the end and between the passages some couplets and sections of interpolated verses, after each of the maidens.’ F-Pn f. fr. 4600, ff. 302–3.Google Scholar
29 Bellay, Joachim Du, Oeuvres poétiques, v: Recueils lyriques (Paris, 1923), 201–29. The staging description from F-Pn f. fr. 4600 is edited on pp. 230–1.Google Scholar
30 ‘Two of the three of those children of Italy brought / Not from Rome, but from heaven, to sweeten the trouble / That affairs bring to the Prelate of Lorraine. / In another troupe of singers one can see / Their older brother filling another role.’ Etienne Jodelle, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Enea Balmas (Paris, 1965), i, 180.Google Scholar
31 This has been discussed by Wardropper, ‘Le mécénat des Guise’, 27, in the context of Guise commissions for painting, architecture and sculpture; he underlines the leading role played by Charles de Lorraine in directing the nature of all such commissions in the 1550s.Google Scholar
32 Constant, Les Guise, 23; in Constant's view, ‘cette cohésion sera l'un des éléments de la force et de la réussite du lignage’ (‘this cohesion would prove to be one of the elements of the strength and success of the dynasty‘). The account of the morning assembly of the six Guise brothers at court is derived from Nicholas Boucher, La conjonction des lettres et des armes, f. 52v.Google Scholar
33 Missa quatuor, cum quatuor vocibus and Missa pro mortuis, both published in Paris in 1554. see Lesure, and Thibault, , ‘Bibliographie des éditions musicales publiées par Nicolas Du Chemin (1549–1576)’, Annales musicologiques, 1 (1953), 269–373 (pp. 310–11).Google Scholar
34 Dixiesme livre de chansons tant françoises, qu'italiennes (Paris, 1559). See Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie, 86–7. The title of another Clereau Mass print which appeared in Paris in 1557 seems to indicate that the composer had recently left Toul (Missa cum quatuor vocibus, ad imitationem Missae Virginis Mariae … autore D. Petro Clereau, quondam pueris symphoniacis Ecclesiae Tulensis, praefecto).Google Scholar
35 The citations occur in bars 20–3 and 58–61; Comment au departir is edited with Clereau's three- and four-voice chansons in Jane Bernstein, The Sixteenth Century Chanson, vii: Pierre Clereau (New York, 1988), 144–8. Voi mi ponesti in foco, on a text by Bembo, is edited in Arcadelt, Opera omnia, vii (1969), 183–4. The citation was first remarked upon by Paul Henry Lang, in a review of Anthologie de la chanson parisienne au XVIe siècle, ed. François Lesure (Monaco, 1953), in Musical Quarterly, 39 (1953), 457–70. In editions of Ronsard's works from 1578 onwards, Comment au departir is entitled ‘Madrigal’, perhaps a reference to Clereau's setting (see Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Laumonier, vii (2nd edn, 1959), 271).Google Scholar
36 Arcadelt's Missa De beata virgine is a paraphrase work using Mass IX and Credo I with Marian tropes; see Albert Seay's preface to Arcadelt, Opera omnia, i, p. v. Clereau's Missa cum quatuor vocibus, Ad imitationem Missae Virginis Mariae (Paris, 1557) is based on the same plain-chant material; as in Arcadelt's Mass, most movements begin with a literal quotation of the chant as a point of imitation or as a melody in the superius. As there are few printed Marian Masses from France in this period, the appearance in the same year of a Mass by Maillard using the same material (Missa ad imitationem missae Virginis Mariae, Paris, 1557) suggests that all three pieces are related in the circumstances of their performance and publication.Google Scholar
37 On Clereau's life, see Dobbins, Frank, ‘Clcreau, Pierre’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), iv, 493–4, and François Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau et ses sources poétiques’, Musique et musiciens, 257–61. Three songs attributed to Clereau appeared in a Moderne print of 1539; no other works appeared in print until 1554 and the publication of his Masses. For the year 1557–8, about the same time Clereau apparently left Toul, the register of the cathedral chapter notes a payment of a year's wages to an organist identified as ‘Pierre Florentin’, perhaps a reference to Clereau (Archives de Meurthe-et-Moselle, G. 1350, cited in Jacquot, Essai de répertoire, 57).Google Scholar
38 Revised editions appeared in later years and formed the basis for a retrospective edition of all of Arcadelt's three-voice songs in 1573; for details of the prints, see Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie, and Seay's prefaces to Arcadelt, Opera omnia, viii–ix.Google Scholar
39 Jane Ozenberger Whang, ‘From Voix de ville to Air de cour. The Strophic Chanson, c. 1545–1575’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1981), 145–6. The most extensive study of the three-voice chanson remains Courtney Adams, ‘The Three-Part Chanson during the Sixteenth Century: Changes in its Style and Importance’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1974). Arcadelt's three-voice songs are included in Opera omnia, ed. Seay, viii–ix, nos. 25–8, 35–6, 39, 43–4, 47–8, 57, 80–1 and 126; no. 125, Vieille plus vieille que le monde, is also set for three voices, but is a note nere setting of a single stanza of the poem rather than a homophonic strophic piece like the others.Google Scholar
40 Heartz, Daniel, ‘Voix de ville: Between Humanist Ideals and Musical Reality’, Words and Music, the Scholar's View … in Honor of A. Tillman Merritt, ed. Laurence Berman (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 115–35 (pp. 117–21). Frottola rhythms and melodies occur especially frequently in Arcadelt's settings of texts by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, who was renowned for singing his own verses; Heartz shows that in some cases the tunes associated with Saint-Gelais's texts were pre-existing melodies from the frottola repertory, and hypothesizes that these tunes were used by Saint-Gelais himself and subsequently arranged by Arcadelt.Google Scholar
41 For a list of concordances between Arcadelt's chansons, voix de ville tunes included in Certon's Premier livre de chansons (Paris, 1552) and the melodies in Jean Chardavoine's Recueil des plus belles et excellentes chansons en forme de voix de ville (Paris, 1576), see Whang, ‘From Voix de Ville to Air de cour‘, 149–54.Google Scholar
42 Arcadelt's chanson style is discussed in greater detail in Adams, ‘The Three-Part Chanson’, 208 and 211–16, and Whang, ‘From Voix de ville to Air de cour‘, 156–63.Google Scholar
43 ‘Who is an author as sweet as he is divine’. Sebiilet, Art poétique français, ed. Félix Gaiffe, rev. Francis Goyet (Paris, 1988), 148.Google Scholar
44 See Heartz, , ‘Voix de ville‘, for a discussion of their prominence in the voix de ville repertory.Google Scholar
45 Horace, Carmina, I, 32 and 22, and III, 22, respectively. All five Latin pieces appear in Arcadelt, Opera omnia, ed. Seay, viii–ix.Google Scholar
46 See Weber, Edith, Musique et théâtre dans les pays rhénans, i–ii: La musique mesurée en Allemagne (n.p., 1974), i, 348–9.Google Scholar
47 Levy, Kenneth, ‘Vaudeville, vers mesurés et airs de cour’, Musique et poésie au XVIe siècle, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris, 1954; 2nd edn 1974), 185–201 (p. 195). Levy points out that these volumes form part of a concentration on odes in France in the 1550s which embraces Arcadelt, Clereau's settings of Ronsard and Richard de Renvoisy's volume of Anacreontic odes (1559); he notes the connections between these settings, the air de cour and Baïf's later experiments in vers et musique mesurés.Google Scholar
48 ‘Rise up, my lyre, / I wish to utter a song / To your golden strings. / The divine grace / Of the fair verses of Horace / Still pleases me, / But all at once I will change my style / To recount the virtues of Henry, / Then cultivating such a fertile land / Up to heaven the fruit will mount.‘Google Scholar
49 RISM 155620, pp. 1–2. Only the bass line is extant, but at the words ‘La divine grace / Des beaulx vers d'Horace’ the bass cites the rhythm which characterized the second hemistich of each verse in the sapphic metre in the odes (compare with Example 3 below); it thus seems likely that at this point the superius cited one of the tunes associated with the Horatian odes.Google Scholar
50 I suspect that the lost Goudimel and Jambe-de-Fer volumes would have proved helpful here. It seems to me significant that all three composers who published settings of Horatian odes – Goudimel, Jambe-de-Fer and Arcadelt – were also active in publishing settings of psalms, with their associated tunes, in the 1550s; and I suspect the odes, like the psalms, are examples of arrangements of pre-existing tunes.Google Scholar
51 ‘He reforms the song of the church. And because the prolongation of liturgical song is for the most part on the short syllables of the words, so that frequently short syllables are made long, and long are made short, he specifically commanded that the song correspond to the quantity of the syllable, and not the syllable to that length and variation of the song. For this is what he claimed: if in a civil oration, which would concern the affairs and business of a republic, the orator strays even slightly from the measure; if he commits an error in prolonging the long syllables, or abbreviating the short ones, he is mocked, he is despised; in the church, which demands a more moderated action from those who sing to the Lord God, the church which is the mistress of morals, as she is the mother and nurse of the good arts and sciences, if you err, do you not esteem the error worse than that which is committed in a legal speech or in some rustic song?’ Boucher, La conjonction des lettres et des armes, ff. 20–21.Google Scholar
53 ‘The queen Catherine de Médicis remained sterile for many years, at which King Henry, who was still dauphin, was very displeased. Those fine men [the Guises], after having gained control of their sénéchale [Diane de Poitiers], tried to get Henri to send his wife back to Italy … The queen then played the Christian, keeping the bible frequently on her table, reading it and having it read to her. At the same time, by the command of the great king François, 30 of the psalms of David had been translated by Marot, and set to music by various musicians: for King François and the emperor Charles V had rewarded these translations by their words and by gifts. But if anyone loved these psalms and embraced them tightly to sing them and have them sung, it was the young prince Henri while he was still dauphin; so that all good people praised God, and his favourites and even the sénéchale pretended to love the psalms, and said to him, Sire, may I not have that one for my own? Will you let me have this one, please? So that he had difficulty giving them psalms as he wished and as they requested. Nevertheless he kept for himself Psalm 128, “Blessed is he who willingly serves the Lord”, and he himself made a song for this psalm, which was a very good and pleasing song and well suited to the words. He sang it and had it sung so often that he showed a great desire to be blessed in his lineage, as this psalm describes. A little time after, the dauphine Catherine began to have children. But Henri, instead of acknowledging such a blessing, let himself go in filth with that evil sénéchale even worse than before, so that this great blessing, I might say, became a horrible curse. For which the cardinal of Lorraine was a fitting instrument. For seeing that Henri took pleasure in the holy psalms, which fortify chastity and are the principal enemies of all filth, he realized that because of this in time Henri would better love his wife and send off his whore, and in consequence the power of the Guises, based on that dirty foundation, would diminish. The cardinal began first to denigrate the psalm translations and finally the psalms themselves, substituting for them the lascivious verses of Horace and the silly songs and execrable loves of the French poets he brought into favour. Then Ronsard, Jodelle, Baïf and other wicked poets began to come into favour; and God, not wanting his name to continue to be so profaned, took away his praises to put them in the mouths of humble people. Marot and his psalms were banished. All kind of wicked songs and lascivious music were brought forward, principally by the scheming of the cardinal of Lorraine, the Maecenas of those evil troublemakers.’ La Planche, La legende de Charles, Cardinal de Lorraine, ff. 32–32v.Google Scholar
54 Freedman, Richard, ‘Divins accords: The Lassus Chansons and their Protestant Readers of the Late Sixteenth Century’, Orlandus Lassus: Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium of the international Musicological Society, Antwerp, August 26–28, 1994 (forthcoming). I am grateful to the author for allowing me to consult his work prior to publication. The chronological accuracy of La Planche's report is questionable, for it is difficult to believe that Charles de Lorraine's influence was as extensive as La Planche claims, at the time when Henri II was still dauphin (that is, before 1547, when Charles de Lorraine was himself still only a teenager). The story also seems to contradict the association of both Jean and Charles de Lorraine with psalm translation and singing in the late 1540s and 1550s; see Giacone, Franco, ‘Les Guises et le Psautier de David’, Le mécénat et l'influence des Guises, ed. Bellenger. To my knowledge this is the only source in which the composition of the tune to Bienheureux est quiconques sert à Dieu is attributed to Henri II; but if this was indeed his preferred psalm it is surely significant that a setting of it by Arcadelt appeared in 1559 in a collection prominently displaying Charles de Lorraine's name in the title. Many settings of this psalm were printed in Paris in the 1550s; in addition to the Arcadelt setting and several by Goudimel, there are settings by Certon (1555) and Janequin (1559), as well as a lute intabulation by Le Roy (1552); see Lesure and Thibault, Bibliographie, for details of the prints.Google Scholar
55 The Baïf attribution is made in Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau’, 260, and the Magny attribution by Seay in Arcadelt, Opera omnia, ix, p. xii. See Dobbins, ‘Joachim Du Bellay’, 591–5, for a complete list of Arcadelt's Du Bellay settings.Google Scholar
56 See Ronsard: La trompette et la lyre, catalogue of the exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 12 June–15 September 1985 (Paris, 1985), 51–2, for descriptions and photographs of Henri II's manuscript. Biographical information about both Ronsard and Saint-Gelais is furnished in the chronological summary prepared by Michel Simonin and Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer, pp. 10–19.Google Scholar
57 Clereau's first book, the Premier livre de chansons tant françaises qu'italiennes (Paris, 1559), appeared in a revised edition in 1566 under the title Premier livre d'odes de Ronsard with a companion volume, which survives only in fragments. Music from both was combined for Les odes de Pierre de Ronsard mis en musique à troys parties (Paris, 1575) and the entire corpus of Clereau's three-voice music was published by Ballard in 1619. On the printing history, see Cauchie, Maurice, ‘Les chansons à trois voix de Pierre Clereau’, Revue de musicologie, 22 (1927), 79–91. Poetic attributions for Clereau's music are derived from Cauchie and from Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau’; they are reproduced in Jane Bernstein's preface to the edition of Clereau's songs in The Sixteenth-Century Chanson. A single poem in the first book does not conform to the character of the rest of the collection. Jay bien mal choisi, a satiric song in a female narrative voice complaining about the sexual inadequacy of a lover, is in the tradition of grivois lyrics. Clereau's setting uses a tune which appears in other settings and features a refrain and patter effects missing from his settings of Pléiade poetry.Google Scholar
58 ‘And I will make return (if I can) the practice of the lyre today revived in Italy, which lyre alone should and can animate verse, and give it the just weight of its gravity.’ See Ronsard, Oeuvres complétes, ed. Laumonier, i–ii and vii; the preface is printed in vol. i.Google Scholar
59 Bernstein, The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, xv, incorrectly claims that this song was printed second in the collection in the first edition of 1559; compare with the only extant partbook, the concordant, in GB-Lbl M. k.8.i.4 (14), where Comme un qui prend une couppe appears as the first chanson.Google Scholar
60 ‘Your praises / Vaunted to the lute / And to foreign peoples / Sang your merits / Doing naught but make / The air ring with your name.‘Google Scholar
61 ‘On some of his verses, set to music and presented to Monseigneur the Duke of Nevers’. Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau’, 259.Google Scholar
62 Also in 1557, Des Masures published in Lyons a collection of psalm translations, Vingt pseaumes de David: Traduictz selon la verité Hebraique, dedicated to Toussaint d'Hocédy; see Pidoux, Pierre, Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle (Basle, 1962), ii, 107.Google Scholar
63 ‘And this is why now at present / I have undertaken to make a gift / Of my songs, notes and numbers / To this valiant Duke of Nevers / To whom may my verses bring pleasure / After the accidents of war.‘Google Scholar
64 Notated music appears in Vingtsix Cantiques chantés au Seigneur, par Louïs des Masures Tournisien (Lyons, 1564) and in two collections published in Geneva in 1566; the tunes are often taken from the Geneva psalter, and the four-voice arrangements have sometimes been attributed to Goudimel. See Guillo, Laurent, Les éditions musicales de la Renaissance lyonnaise (Paris, 1991), 322 and 453–4.Google Scholar
65 See Rémy Belleau, La bergerie, ed. Doris Delacourcelle (Geneva, 1954), 7. The attribution of Clereau's texts to Belleau and the connection with the wedding discussed below were first made by Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau’.Google Scholar
66 The preface is reprinted in Bernstein, The Sixteenth-Century Chanson, xii; it is assumed that the two Belleau texts featured in the second book of Clereau's ode settings, as they appear in the 1575 collection which unites music from both books. The version of Commela corne argentine set by Clereau differs from the text printed in Belleau's works (Lesure, ‘Le musicien Pierre Clereau’, 259); it thus seems likely that Clereau's text represents an initial stage of the poem as it was sung at the wedding.Google Scholar
67 The most extensive study of this repertory is Donna G. Cardamone, The Canzone villanesca alla napolitana and Related Forms, 1537–1570, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, 1981). See also Orlando di Lasso et al., Canzoni villanesche and villanelle, ed. Donna G. Cardamone (Madison, 1991).Google Scholar
68 Cardamone, The Canzone villanesca, i, 125–9.Google Scholar
69 See ibid., ii, 48. Jean Cosson, whose setting of Sus debout ma lire was discussed above, was also the author of a setting of the first strophe and refrain of La pastorella mia included in 155621, Second livre de chansons (Paris, 1556); only the bassus of the setting survives, but it fits a variant of Arcadelt's tune. Virtually nothing is known of Cosson, but his setting of a poem referring to the fashion for Horatian odes as well as La pastorella mia suggests he was a musician with court connections, perhaps in close contact with Arcadelt.Google Scholar
70 This example is an adaptation of a transcription supplied to me by Donna Cardamone Jackson; I am grateful to her for communicating it to me.Google Scholar
71 According to Cardamone (The Canzone villanesca, i, 153–4), northern Italian composers writing three-voice songs in the Neapolitan style after 1560 generally avoid the parallel fifths which characterize earlier settings by Neapolitan composers; the Neapolitans, in contrast, exaggerate this element of the style in post-1560 settings, as if to emphasize the Neapolitan flavour.Google Scholar
72 Ibid., 37–55.Google Scholar
73 On the meanings of aria, see Pirrotta, Nino, ‘Early Opera and Aria’, Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, trans. Karen Eales (Cambridge, 1982), 237–80 (pp. 247–9); the connection of aria style with the villanella is briefly discussed on p. 250. See also James Haar, ‘Improvvisatori and their Relationship to Sixteenth-Century Music’, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1350–1600 (Berkeley, 1986), 76–99; and idem, ‘Arie per cantar stanze ariostesche’, L'Ariosto, la musica, i musicisti, ed. Maria-Antonella Balsano (Florence, 1981), 31–46.Google Scholar
74 Haar, ‘Improvvisatori‘, 87–9.Google Scholar
75 Howard Mayer Brown, ‘The Geography of Florentine Monody: Caccini at Home and Abroad’, Early Music, 9 (1981), 147–68 (p.149); the contents of the Rodio collection are listed on pp. 165–6. Brown discussed the collection further in two subsequent articles: ‘Petrarch in Naples: Notes on the Formation of Giaches de Wert's Style’, Altro Polo: Essays on Italian Music in the Cinquecento, ed. Richard Charteris (Sydney, 1990), 16–50; and ‘Vincenzo Galilei in Rome: His First Book of Lute Music (1563) and its Cultural Context’, Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Victor Coelho, University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, 51 (Dordrecht, 1992), 153–84.Google Scholar
76 Brown, ‘The Geography of Florentine Monody’, 152.Google Scholar
77 Complete contents are listed in Emil Vogel, Alfred Einstein, François Lesure and Claudio Sartori, Bibliografia della musica italiana vocale prof ana pubblicata dal 1500 al 1700 (Pomezia, 1977), i, 648–9.Google Scholar
78 To this air one can sing all the verses.' Fiorino, La nobiltà di Roma, 4.Google Scholar
79 ‘The new manner of this composition, the sweetness and loftiness of the conceits, perhaps no longer heard among the Greeks or among the Latins, nor even among the poets in our language, and the harmony, no less sweet than extraordinary, will continually bring to it [the volume of songs] infinite pleasure’.Google Scholar
80 Caietain included a setting of one of Fiorino's texts, Romane belle che qui tra noi parete, altered to Voi donne belle to omit the specific reference to Rome, in his Second livre d'airs, chansons, villanelles napolitaines & espagnolles (Paris, 1578).Google Scholar
81 Information on Sanseverino and accounts of his singing Neapolitan songs to his own guitar accompaniment in France are included in Cardamone, The Canzone villanesca, i, 172–4; further information about his activities in exile and his connections with the Dentices, del Palla and other musicians is included in Cardamone, ‘The Prince of Salerno and the Dynamics of Oral Transmission in Songs of Political Exile’, Acta musicologica, 67 (1995), 77–99, and ‘Orlando di Lasso and Pro-French Factions in Rome’, Orlandus Lassus: Proceedings. I am very grateful to the author for allowing me to consult her work prior to publication.Google Scholar
82 ‘Improvvisatori’, 91. The cycle and the aria are discussed in greater detail in Haar, ‘The “Madrigale arioso”: A Mid-Century Development in the Cinquecento Madrigal’, Studi musicali, 12 (1983), 203–19 (pp. 209–11).Google Scholar
83 Pensier, dicea, che'l cor m'aghiacci et ardi, Deh dove, senza me, dolce mia vita, rimasa sei and Ruggier qual sempre fui tal esser voglio. Attributions are provided in Emil Vogel et al., Bibliografia, i, 389.Google Scholar
84 Haar, ‘Arie per cantar’, 42–3.Google Scholar
85 Ibid., 42.Google Scholar
86 ‘One sees mathematicians, / The most learned musicians, / Minstrels and lute-players, / Give themselves to a Carolus.’ La Planche, Histoire de l'estal de France, 57.Google Scholar
87 F-Pn Clairambault 816, ff. 203–203', a 1577 état de maison for Louis, cardinal de Guise, features a payment for five singers, including the celebrated Jacques Salmon, and the joueur de lire François de Frontenay.Google Scholar
88 For an exhaustive (and scathing) treatment of such borrowings, see Estienne, Henri, Deux dialogues du nouveau langage français italianizé et autrement desguizé, principalement entre les courtisans de ce temps ([Geneva], 1578).Google Scholar
89 On the derivation of air from aria and early uses of the word in print, see Whang, ‘From Voix de ville to Air de cour‘, 9–16.Google Scholar
90 ‘You know with which air this Ode is sung, and that the notes used today are these.‘Google Scholar
91 See ibid., 14 and 55 (which includes a transcription of Tyard's tune).Google Scholar
92 Arcadelt's La pastorella mia as well as many of his French three-voice songs appeared in exactly this format in the same year in which they were first printed in vocal versions, in Le Roy & Ballard's Cinquiesme livre de guiterre, contenant plusieurs chansons à trois & quatre parties (Paris, 1554). Unlike most of the intabulations in this series, which are free arrangements of songs in four parts, these intabulations are exactly the same as the vocal versions, with all three parts appearing note for note as they do in the vocal print. Also unlike the other songs, which are identified with specific dances, La pastorella mia and other three-voice pieces are labelled ‘Trio’. Clereau's D'un gosier machelaurier was included in Adrian Le Roy's Livre d'airs de cour miz sur le luth of 1571 in a more loosely related intabulation, which does, however, preserve the parallel thirds of the upper two voices and the three-voice texture. See Chansons au luth et airs de cour français du XVIe siècle, ed. Lionel de La Laurencie, Adrienne Mairy and Geneviève Thibault (repr. Paris, 1976), 172–3.Google Scholar
93 Palisca, Claude, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven, 1985), 369–96.Google Scholar
94 The wedding should have taken place in December, but in fact happened on 22 January 1559 (Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Laumonier, ix, pp. xi–xii). The poem refers to two diplomatic missions in May and November 1558, which led Laumonier to conclude that it was written later that year.Google Scholar
My God, what sweetness, what ease and pleasureGoogle Scholar
The soul receives when it feels itself seizedGoogle Scholar
By the gesture, the sound and the voice togetherGoogle Scholar
That your Ferrabosco assembles on three lyres,Google Scholar
When the three Apollos singing divinely,Google Scholar
Marrying the voice and lyre sweetly together,Google Scholar
All at once with the voice and the agile handGoogle Scholar
Make Dido die again through the verses of Virgil,Google Scholar
Almost dying themselves; or when, with louder chords,Google Scholar
They thunder again the assaults of Guines and Calais,Google Scholar
Your brother's victories: then there is no soulGoogle Scholar
That does not leave the body, and does not swoonGoogle Scholar
From their sweet song, just as in the heavensGoogle Scholar
The gods swoon at the song of Apollo,Google Scholar
When he sounds his lyre and sings of the triumphal monumentGoogle Scholar
That Jupiter erected with the arms of Typhon.Google Scholar
Ibid., 53.Google Scholar
96 Wardropper, ‘Le mécénat des Guise’, 40–2.Google Scholar
97 Ibid., 41.Google Scholar
98 ‘France under Henri flourishes / As under Augustus flourished Rome.‘Google Scholar