In morte di Madonna Laura / Huelgas Ensemble
Madrigal cycle after texts of Petrarca

medieval.org
Sony Vivarte 45942
1991










1.
1 - [6:03]
1a. Canzoniere No.267
Spirito l'Hoste da REGGIO (c.1510-c.1575). Oimè il bel viso
1b. Canzoniere No. 283
Spirito l'Hoste da REGGIO. Discolorato hai, Morte, il più bel volto


2. Canzoniere No. 268
2a. [stanza 1 + 2]
2. Padre F. Mauro de'SERVI (c.1545-c.1621). Che debb'io far - Amor tu'l senti   [5:49]
2b. [stanza 1 + commiato]
3. Bernardo PISANO (1490-1548). Che debb'io far - Fuggi'l sereno   [4:39]
2c. [commiato]
4. Tomaso CIMELLO (c.1500-c.1580). Fuggi'l sereno   [2:55]


3. Canzoniere No.353
5. Stefano ROSSETTI (c.1520-c.1585). Vago augelletto che cantando vai   [5:15]

4. Canzoniere No. 282
6. Baldassare DONATO (c.1530-1603). Alma felice che sovente torni   [5:41]


5. "Mia benigna fortuna" (Canzoniere No. 332)
5a. [stanza 2]
7 . Padre F. Mauro de'SERVI. Crudele, acerba, inexorabil Morte   [4:19]
5a. [stanza 10]
8. Cesare TUDINO (c.1530-c.1590). Amor, i'ho molti e molt'anni pianto   [5:07]
5a. [stanza 7]
9. Spirito l'Hoste da REGGIO. Nessun visse già mai più di me lieto   [7:00]


6. Canzoniere No. 365
6a
10. Padre F. Mauro de'SERVI. Io vo piangendo i miei passati tempi   [4:58]
6b
11. Andrea ROTA (1553-1597). Io vo piangendo i miei passati tempi   [4:16]


7. Canzoniere No. 246
12. Nicola VICENTINO (1511-c.1576). L'aura che'l verde lauro   [6:12]






Huelgas Ensemble
Paul van Nevel

Katelijne van Laethem, Cantus
Ibo van Ingen, Tenorino
John Dudley, Tenor
Josep Cabré, Baritone
Lieven de Roo, Bass

Johannes Boer, Tenor Viola da gamba - R. Passaro, Belgium (Italian Renaissance)
Gail Ann Schroeder, Bass Viola da gamba - M. Ternovec, Italy (after Gasparo da Salò)   
Piet Stryckers, Bass Viola da gamba - R. Passaro, Belgium (Italian Renaissance)
Willem Bremer, Cornetto - J. van der Veen
    Bass Curtal  - Eric A. Moulder
    Recorder, Bass Recorder - E. G. Morgan/Hopf
Bart Coen, Alto and Basso Recorders - Koblicheck, Bergström
René van Laken - Tenor Curtal - Eric Moulder, London 1984
Harry Ries - Alto Saqueboute - H. Glasl, 1989
Wim Becu - Bass Saqueboute - Meinl & Lauber, 1978


Producer / Recording Supervision: Wolf Erichson
Recording Engineer / Editing: Stephan Schellmann (Tritonus)

Recording place: Chapel of the Paridaens Intituut, Leuven (Belgium)
February 23-25, 1990

Cover Design: CC. Garbers / B. Kruck
Cover Front: Book Miniature from Petrarca's 264th Chant (Bologna),
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

℗ Sony Classical GmbH
© Sony Classical GmbH

PETRARCA AND HIS CANZONIERE

     Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), one of the greatest poets and Humanists that Italy has ever produced, was, to say the least, a most controversial figure. He was a Humanist, poet, diplomatic emissary, great traveller, author of pamphlets, translator, lively letter-writer and a person with a critical eye for the ins and outs of society.

     Petrarca's activities in life centered around three geographical areas. The first of these was Avignon, a city he frequently visited. He was especially drawn to Fontaine de Vaucluse, a village nearby, where he spent long periods meditating, writing and working on new projects. The second pole to which Petrarca felt attracted was the city of Rome, which he visited for the first time in 1337. Petrarca was to regard the eternal city as the center of Western society for the rest of his life. The third area where Petrarca spent a great deal of time was northern Italy, where he travelled through or stayed in cities such as Verona, Bologna, Venice, Padua, Parma and in particular, Milan, where he was associated with the court of Galeazzo Visconti.

     But of course Petrarca also travelled outside of these areas as well; in 1333 he travelled to Paris, Gent, Cologne and Liège, where he is said to have re-discovered the speeches of Cicero. In 1343 we find Francesco in Naples, on a diplomatic mission; in 1355 he visited Paris and in 1356, Prague.

     The vast majority of his œuvre is written in Latin. Petrarca thought in Latin; it was his "working language". Petrarca's most important contribution to Italian poetry is his collection of poems known as the Canzoniere. This collection made him more famous than all his Latin works combined. The Canzoniere originated due to an event which affected him emotionally for the rest of his life. It was his fleeting acquaintance with a beautiful woman, Laura de Noves, whom he met on the 6th of April, 1327 in the Church of St. Claire in Avignon. This meeting was to play a crucial role in Petrarca's life, both as a poet and as an artist. His - under the circumstances - platonic love for Laura finds its expression in the poetry of the Canzoniere. His lovesick state is incurable and his feelings received a new impulse in 1349, when he heard of Laura's death. He then began to give the poems he had already written a more definite structure, augmenting these with new poems and giving the Canzoniere its present organization. In 1367, he gave the collection the definitive title of Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. The Italian madrigalists of the sixteenth century regarded these verses to be the most exemplary form of Italian poetry ever created.

     The Canzoniere collection consists of 366 poems Petrarca wrote from 1327 onwards and is divided into two parts: the first part, In Vita di Madonna Laura, contains 263 poems and was written before Laura's death; the second part, In Morte di Madonna Laura, contains 103 poems, all dedicated to Francesco's mourning and to the memory of Laura. It is typical of Petrarca that he writes as much about himself as he does about his lost love. In many of his poems, Petrarca opens up his soul to the reader, making masterly analyses of his inner life and of his doubts. In Morte di Madonna Laura depicts countless shades of the emotions of one man, from sublime memories to inconsolable despair. A kind of musical fluidity arises from Petrarca's careful and flexible use of elisions, and through the almost inexhaustible richness of his metrical constructions. His style is characterized by an abundant use of rhetorical figures; the antithesis in particular can be considered the hallmark of Petrarca's language.

     Its richness of sound and rhythmic virtuosity, coupled with its luxuriant imagery must have made Petrarca's work appealing to the Italian madrigalists of the sixteenth century. Petrarca, who himself sang and played a plucked instrument, clearly had no high opinion of Italian minstrels. In a letter to his friend Boccaccio, he wrote that Italian musicians possessed "no great voices, but long memories, great diligence and even greater shamelessness".

     In the sixteenth century, a great interest in Petrarca's poetry arose; no composer failed to set his texts to music: All the poems contained in the Canzoniere were set to music at least once, more often by various composers in several versions. Two reasons can be given for this sixteenth century "fashion": first, Humanism was attaining growing importance and this led to a demand for good texts, especially in the composition of madrigals - composers found in Petrarca's poetry just the emotional tone and rhythmical variety they were seeking for these works. Second, the rise of Petrarchism in the sixteenth century also contributed to an increasing interest in his works in musical circles. The foremost supporter of Petrarca was Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) who termed Petrarca's Canzoniere an exemplary work for all Italians in his "Prose della volgar lingua", declaring Tuscan to be the superior Italian language. Bembo published the Canzoniere in 1501; in the course of the sixteenth century, more than 130 editions of this work appeared in Italy.

     It is against this background that we would like to place the "musical Petrarchism" evidenced in the works of the best Italian composers of Petrarca's texts. In the case of the sometimes little-known Italian composers we have chosen for this recording, their rendering of the expressive and emotional content of Petrarca's texts makes them the (unrecognized) leaders in expressing Petrarch's art.

Paul van Nevel

Spirito l'Hoste da Reggio (c. 1510-c. 1575; period of artistic activity: 1545-1560), born in Flanders, went to Italy, as did many of his countrymen, due to the greater possibilities Italy offered in terms of artistic fulfillment as a composer. The first madrigal on this recording, with its repeated motive of lament in the upper voice, was drawn from his first volume of madrigals, published in 1547.

Padre F. Mauro de'Servi (c. 15451621), like his contemporary Andrea Rota (1553-1597), was active in Bologna. The compositions he wrote there not only demonstrate the conventional compositional rendering of the text typical of his day (that is, madrigalisms) but also reveal Servi's attempts to convey even subtle nuances in the poetic language.

Stefano Rossetti (c. 1520-c. 1585; period of artistic activity: 1560-1580), active at the Cathedral of Florence about mid-century, is considered the originator of the "madrigale arioso": the texts of his compositions are not interpreted musically so much by harmonic means as by a very vivid rendering using elaborate embellishments in the vocal line.

Bernardo Pisano (1490-1548), the oldest composer in this cycle, writes in a contrapuntally stricter style than the others. The sometimes surprising cadential formulas of this composer, who was also a singer at the papal chapel in Rome, foreshadow the bold harmonic practices of the later, "true" madrigalists.

Tomaso Cimello (c. 1500-post 1579) treats text and music in his madrigals as elements of nearly equal importance: not only does he carefully note the author of each text, but he also takes individual lines of the poems of several authors as the basis for some of his compositions. In this recording, however, one gains the impression that the text is more important than the music.

Baldassare Donato (between 1525 and 1530-1603) was the court music director at the Cathedral of St. Mark in Venice from 1562 to 1565. The counterpoint and pleasing sonoric quality of his compositions reveal quite clearly the influence of his contemporaries and friends Adrian Willaert and Cipriano de Rore.

Cesare Tudino (c. 1530-c. 1590) is represented on this recording by a madrigal taken from his first volume of madrigals, published in 1554. The bold chromaticism and the daring treatment of dissonances in this work reveal him as a very progressive composer of this period.

Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576) caused a great sensation among his contemporaries through his attempts to explore extensively the harmonic possibilities of the tonal system of his day, creating amazing sonoric effects in his music. His innovations in the compositional sphere, however, in no way affect the form and construction of the texts he set to music, in this case a poem by Petrarca.

Translation: Deborah Hochgesang