This Da Vinci Classics album constitutes the second volume of a publication dedicated to what is now known as the Cancionero de Upsala (sic), but which is also designated through several other names – each of which tells a part of its history.
Firstly, Upsala now looks as a misprint, but it was the correct name of the city of Uppsala at the beginning of the twentieth century, before a great spelling reform of the Swedish language. It was in Upsala, or Uppsala, that a Spanish musicologist, Rafael Mitjana, found a collection about which nobody seemingly had written anything in scholarly literature. Mitjana studied it and discussed it in depth, thus binding his name to that of the collection; gradually, with the increasing expansion of musicological studies, it became evident that the Uppsala volume is probably the only surviving copy of this Scotto book.
Scotto was one of the major publishers and printers of music in the sixteenth century. Music printing was still a very recent activity, even though some music printers, such as Ottaviano Petrucci, had achieved results of excellent quality and impressive beauty very soon.
Scotto was based in Venice, one of the liveliest cities in the world at that time; a city where culture, marketing, art, and international relations were blooming. From Venice, items of all kinds could travel worldwide, and it was not impossible at all that music printed there could eventually land in Sweden. From the book’s provenance comes therefore another of its names, i.e. Cancionero de Venecia. It may come as a surprise, however, that – given the high number of songbooks printed in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century – the name Cancionero de Venecia could have been attributed unambiguously to a particular publication. The point is that, yes, it is true that a great many music books were published in Venice, but not many of them were songs with lyrics in Spanish. In fact, as concerns the Scotto press, this book seems to have been the only one with Spanish texts. Thus, if Canzoniere di Venezia would be too generic an indication (since there were many songbooks in Italian), Cancionero de Venecia is a unique name.
A further geographic specification is contained in still another of the book’s many names, i.e. Cancionero del Duque de Calabria, the Songbook of the Calabria Duke. Who was this Duke of a region of Southern Italy – the region closest to Sicily? It was a Spaniard, actually; i.e., Duke Ferdinand of Aragon (1488-1550), the viceroy and lieutenant general of the Kingdom of Valencia. And this brings us to yet another place, the Spanish city of Valencia, which is the one actually most relevant to the book under observation. Valencia, at that time, had been for nearly a century one of the most brilliant and vibrant cities in Southern Europe, at the expenses of other Iberian regions such as Castille and Catalunya. he city became a meeting point, a crossroad, and a melting pot of influences and people coming from the most diverse zones of Europe; under the rule of the “Duke of Calabria,” it also acquired an international standing from a musical viewpoint. Ferdinand, the heir to the Kingdom of Naples (hence the title “Duke of Calabria”), received an education befitting an Italian Renaissance prince, absorbing a culture that he was finally able to translate into concrete actions in Valencia.
Ferdinand’s life had been very adventurous and picturesque, including exile, imprisonment, freedom granted by Emperor Charles I, and two marriages – after being widowed, he remarried the Marchioness of Cenete, a cultivated woman and follower of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Upon assuming the Viceroyalty of Valencia, he arranged for his mother’s entire library to be brought from Ferrara, where she had resided.
Within such an environment, Ferdinand was keen to establish his court as a haven for literates, artists, thinkers, and the like. He was a true Renaissance man, with unquenchable curiosity and manifold cultural interests. As a contemporary observer stated, there was no musical chapel in Spain at the time comparable to Ferdinand’s, in terms of the quality of the voices, the instrumentalists, and their artistic value. Inspired by Italian chapels, Ferdinand began building his own musical chapel, which quickly became the foremost in the Iberian Peninsula.
Through its various names, we have therefore already sketched a profile of the Cancionero. It is a collection of fifty-four villancicos, i.e. the vocal form typical for the Spanish Renaissance. The lyrics are mostly secular, but there is a non-negligible presence of Christmas carols (twelve). Although the concepts of sacred and secular were different in the sixteenth century in comparison with today’s, Christmas carols were considered as somewhat in between. They could be sung in church during the Christmas holidays, where many of the usual limitations to vernacular singing were lifted; but they were also performed within secular contexts, alongside love songs. The songs are unattributed in the print, but their authorship has been ascribed to musicians who were in close relationship with the Aragonese court – for instance Pere Joan Aldomar, Bartolomeu Cárceres, Mateo Flecha el Viejo (who may have been a chapel master), and Cristobal de Morales.
The uniqueness of this collection derives first of all from its rarity. As said, this collection as such survives in this single copy; but in general there are very few such collections dating from sixteenth-century Spain. Among them are the Cancionero de Medinaceli and Juan Vázquez’s Recopilación de sonetos y villancicos (1560).
Originally, in spite of the many names by which it is currently indicated, the book bore the following inscription: “Villancicos de diversos Autores, a dos, y a tres, y a quatro, y a cinco bozes, agora nuevamente corregidos. Ay mas ocho tonos de Canto llano, y ocho tonos de Canto de Organo para que puedan aprovechar los que A cantar començaren. Venetiis, Apud Hieronymum Scotum, MDLVI”. This translates as “Villancicos by several composers, in two, three, four, and five parts, corrected again. There are furthermore eight tones of plainchant and eight organa from which those who begin to sing will profit. In Venice, at Jerome Scotto’s, 1556”.
As the title reads, one very special feature of the collection is the presence of the eight one-part and eight two-part pieces – the former shaped in a fashion similar to plainsong, in the eight Church modes, and the latter as bicinia, i.e. simple two-part counterpoints allowing for a progressive approach to polyphonic singing. As one critic defines them, these latter are “effectively two-voiced imitative fantasies built on a variety of themes and contrapuntal devices that can be used profitably for singing or instrumental performance”, in the typical “adaptive” approach characterizing the transition from singing to playing in the late Renaissance.
This second CD of the project dedicated to the Cancionero includes in fact a total of sixteen vocal pieces and five instrumental works, some of which are presented here in world premiere. In spite of the fact that the Cancionero has been known and studied for approximately 120 years now, some of its components have been virtually neglected by both scholars and performers until recently. A major impulse toward a greater knowledge of the “fringe” elements of the Cancionero came with the publication, in 2003, of a new scholarly facsimile edition of the book; however, this has not sufficed to shed complete light on the publication in its entirety and to appreciate its full potential in artistic, academic, and musical terms.
Furthermore, the Cancionero did not appear in a void; therefore, very perceptively and usefully, this recording frames it within its context, adding to the recording three more pieces for instruments alone, which can be traced back to the musical experience lived at the Court of Valencia.
The leitmotiv and the red thread adopted by the performers in the selection and ordering of the pieces is the juxtaposition of the two faces of love. Particularly in the Renaissance (and especially thanks to the movement known as Petrarchism), the mixture of delight and pain, pleasure and desire, passion and melancholy in the experience of love was deeply felt, and lyricists and poets played abundantly on this topos. Ultimately, this polarity can be interpreted as the eternal duel between eros and Thanatos, love and death. In spite of these august literary roots, the tone of the lyrics sung in the Cancionero is not excessively elevated. The presence of these themes and subjects in a kind of poetry which is at times folklike and colloquial bears witness to the pervasiveness of this approach, and to how it migrated from “high” literature to daily life. The musical features are those typical for the villancicos on subjects inherent to love.
Two of the pieces in the collection, i.e. No soy yo quien veis bivir and Dime robadora are offered both in two- and in three-part settings; this latter version is obtained by adding a lower part to the pre-existing upper two voices. Thanks to this solution, two new pieces take life, almost as if playing a musical game derived from court entertainment, in a new kind of compositional virtuosity. The performers of this CD chose to unify the two versions of each piece, performing the two-part realization as the first section of a composite piece whose second half is made by the three-part version.
As concerns the instrumental pieces of the Cancionero, four out of the eight bicinia or organa (pedagogically-conceived duos), and one of the eight plainchants are performed here. The didactic intention is evident in both cases, although it regards respectively performance and composition.
The realization and development of a Counterpoint on the Canto llano has been curated by Giorgio Pacchioni, who is one of the world’s leading experts in historical counterpoint. It consists of four sections, among which the original 156 breves of the original work have been divided. Two upper parts, making a canon, are added to that melodic line: each section has its own tempo, its (canonic) “delay”, and its intervallic distance among the two voices.
The application of such compositional devices and strategies is not only what allows for the actual performance and recording of this music, but also it is a powerful witness of its liveliness and fecundity. At a distance of nearly five centuries, the musical material gathered in the Cancionero continues to offer challenges and new perspectives to composers and performers alike, for the delight of the listeners of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow. Chiara Bertoglio © 2024
Pasión y Melancolía: Cancionero de Upsala, Villancicos de diversos autores, Second Part
