Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros26Musiques nomades : objets, résea...“Is There No One Here Who Speaks ...

Musiques nomades : objets, réseaux, itinéraires

“Is There No One Here Who Speaks to Me?” Performing Ethnic Encounter in Bohemia and Moravia at the Turn of the 17th Century

« N’y a-t-il personne ici pour me parler ? » Le brassage « ethnique » et sa mise en scène en Bohême et en Moravie, au tournant du xviie siècle
Scott L. Edwards
p. 17-34

Résumés

Cet article enquête sur les transformations musicales en Bohême et en Moravie, sous l’influence du brassage « ethnique » suscité par le transfert de la cour impériale de Rudolphe II de Vienne à Prague, en 1583. Dans les décennies qui suivent, la population de la nouvelle capitale fait plus que tripler. Petit à petit, la culture musicale porte la marque de son internationalisation et cette évolution devient perceptible dans toute la Bohême et en Moravie. Les formes musicales locales, comme le quodlibet plurilingue et la messanza, doivent faire face à la prééminence nouvelle de la musique italienne, renforcée par le développement rapide d’une diaspora italienne. Ils servent également de révélateur aux défis singuliers posés par l’environnement multilingue de la région.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

  • 1Anno 1584… 18. Septembris na Staroměstkým rynku, jenž slove U Kometků, začali sou Vlaši šarvátku v (...)

1In the year 1584… on the 18th of September at the Old Town Square [in Prague], in the house which is called U Kometků, Italians started a brawl at 5:00 pm, which lasted until the third hour of the night. At this location, Czechs struck back at them and wanted to break the door down, but the Italians fled at the number of Czechs and Germans, according to whom not a few were injured on both sides, by Czechs and Germans. In response, the Italians escaped that night to his imperial majesty, Rudolf II.1

  • 2 Useful overviews of Prague during this time period include R. J. W. Evans’s foundational study, Rud (...)
  • 3 Population estimates vary widely. Jaroslav Miller estimates a smaller increase from 25,000–30,000 i (...)

2This incident occurred not long after a significant geopolitical realignment at the end of the 16th century: the transfer of the Holy Roman imperial capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583. Prague, isolated by its own religious reformation in the 15th century, became almost overnight one of Europe’s most consequential centers of power, and waves of migration brought an influx of foreigners into sudden and jarring contact.2 By the end of the century, the city would triple in size, from an estimated 25,000–30,000 inhabitants after 1500 to some 70,000–110,000 in 1600.3 In addition to newly urbanized Bohemians, recent transplants included migrants from surrounding German- and Slavic-speaking regions and other imperial territories from the Low Lands and Italian peninsula, alongside ecclesiastics, fortune hunters, and ambassadorial delegations from across Europe and beyond. With German and Czech as the most widely spoken languages; Yiddish and Hebrew in what was fast becoming the largest Jewish ghetto in Europe; Latin as the language of learning and, in some cases, religious life; and Italian, and, to a lesser extent Spanish, as the linguae francae at the court, Prague’s unique linguistic mixture was a crucible with broad ramifications. With so many ethnicities and languages jostling together, the city offers an unparalleled opportunity to study how cultural forms developed essentially from scratch in response to the city’s newfound international stature. Italian-speaking arrivals quickly came to fulfill important roles in architecture, construction, music, and the luxury goods trade, in short, taking over many commodities coveted by the city’s newfound elite. As the incident above illustrates, imperial protection made ethnic relations uneasy, while different ways of thinking, mores, and modes of behavior occasionally clashed in an ethnically diverse population.

  • 4 Studies on the emergence of Italian communities in Bohemia and Moravia include Jaromíra Čoupková, “ (...)
  • 5 Italian musicians in Prague have also been the focus of several studies by Michaela Žáčková Rossi, (...)
  • 6 I have assembled many of these inventories in chapter one of my dissertation, “Repertory Migration (...)

3At the same time, Italian communities spread across Bohemia and Moravia—not only in Prague but also, for example, in Plzeň, Brno, and in several towns along the Moravian-Hungarian border.4 These Italian transplants formed an integral part of the socio-economic fabric of the greater region, with broad public visibility, audibility, and interconnected through networks of traders, construction workers, and culture producers. Among these migrants were whole families of musicians —Galeno, Mosto, Orologio, Sagabria, Turini, and Zigotta— who traveled from cities such as Brescia, Udine, or Cremona to work at the imperial court, whose musical establishment was under the helm of the sixteenth century’s most prolific composer of Italian madrigals, Philippe de Monte.5 Alongside Czech-, German- and Dutch-speaking musicians, they were core members of the Emperor’s Kammermusik and Stallpartey, entertained aristocratic social gatherings or burgher weddings, and instructed other musicians in instrumental performance. To enhance their stature on the international market, Italian musicians published sets of partbooks that might offer a window on the types of music they likely performed for Central European audiences. By primarily choosing Venice, however, as the city of publication, their books ended up in the hands of an international and, above all, Italian public more often than they appeared in Bohemian homes. A glance at period inventories of Bohemian and Moravian libraries confirms the poor circulation of these Venetian prints.6 Rather, their music must have circulated in Central Europe through performance, as an elite commodity reserved to those who could afford access to them. Nevertheless, the wide spectrum of Bohemian and Moravian society that had daily contact with the Italian language formed a readymade market for Italian music, and it is essential to take this market into account when we consider the numerous anthologies of Italian music issued by such Nuremberg printers as Katherina Gerlach and Paul Kauffmann. German-issued anthologies of Italian music circulated in Bohemia and Moravia in much greater numbers than their Venetian counterparts and, like the linguistically diverse Central European marketplaces in which they were sold, often became part of libraries that included music in German, Czech, and Latin.

  • 7 Michael Praetorius’s discussion of the quodlibet and messanza appears in his Syntagma Musicum Tomus (...)

4For these reasons, it is perhaps not surprising that linguistic encounters were staged through musical performance. One outlet for this kind of exploration was the quodlibet, a musical genre that stitches together quotations of various tunes into a patchwork, according to Michael Praetorius, often for humorous effect.7 In composing their quodlibets, musicians relied on a restricted repertory of tunes broadly familiar to the public. By manipulating this melodic storehouse, they could exploit varying levels of musical recognition in their audiences, juxtaposing the familiar against the new or nonsensical to field novel musical and linguistic relations. Although the quodlibet was often limited to German and Latin quotations when it first appeared as a printed genre in the 1540s, by the turn of the seventeenth century it became common practice to quote Italian tunes or, occasionally, to juxtapose multiple languages in a single piece. The rapid exchange of quotations was an ideal vehicle for grafting one language onto another, mixing and shifting across them to produce burlesque effects and neological games. In this multilingual musical form, the palate is tickled by surprise and thematic diversity, rather than semantic integrity, and discourse concentrates on moments of communication breakdown more than logic-driven narrative content. Meanwhile, the chaotic potential of mixing so many disparate elements together is kept in check by harmonic uniformity, that ties together the thematic diversity.

  • 8 Nürnberg, Kauffmann, 1609.
  • 9 Composers represented in this volume include Nicolaus Zangius, Carl Luython, Jacob Regnart, and Han (...)
  • 10 The full title is Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber, das ist allerley seltsame lecherliche Vapores und H (...)
  • 11 Like the quodlibets analyzed here, Luython’s Missae quodlibeticae share a rapid, primarily syllabic (...)

5With few cities in Central Europe rivaling Prague in the proximity of its multilingual inhabitants, it is not surprising that multilingual quodlibets became a specialty of local musicians. The genre provided a compact stage for exploring regional linguistic peculiarities and, above all, the varied proficiencies inhabitants developed in secondary languages. Among the Bohemian or Moravian examples that survive, we find Czech, German, Latin, French, Hebrew, and Italian crowded together, sometimes at once with quotations of popular tunes, liturgical extracts, and melodies taken from books of the most up-to-date printed music. Three examples are transmitted in the anthology Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber8, a collection of German, Latin, and Italian music composed largely by musicians employed at the Habsburg courts.9 The enigmatic German title of the anthology is colored by unconventional Latin borrowings promising supernatural transport from melancholy: The Musical Pastimer, that is all sorts of whimsical, absurd Vapors and Humors, honest Collations and Sleep-Drunk-Games, Quodlibet, Jewish School, and other amusing little songs, the likes of which have never before been poured together into one model, from several excellent musici, composed for four, five, six, seven and eight voices, and brought together by one of the music lovers.10 The unnamed lover of music is never identified, with neither dedication nor forward surviving in any of the extant partbooks. Represented collectively by eleven compositions in the anthology, Nicolaus Zangius and Carl Luython, two musicians employed in Prague at the time, must have played an instrumental role in seeing the anthology through to print. That same year, the pair also issued a pair of expensive folio prints in choirbook layout at the same printshop of Nicolaus Straus in Prague: Zangius a volume of Magnificat settings and Luython dedicating to Emperor Rudolf II a collection of nine Mass Ordinary settings, among which four are titled Missa quodlibetica.11 As a means of self-promotion when the emperor’s reign was waning, these three volumes offered complimentary showcases for the composers’ abilities in both sacred and secular composition.

  • 12 See Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table From 1300 to 1789, Phi (...)
  • 13 This game, also popular in Siena, is described in Girolamo Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle (...)
  • 14 The best account of Ferdinand’s drinking ritual is found in a travelogue written by Stephanus Pighi (...)
  • 15 The best evidence for Czech contrafacta is in lutebooks that survive from this period, where Czech (...)

6Liquid metaphors in the title of the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber allude to its contents, which include a variety of drinking songs, satires, and music for festivities in German, Latin, Italian, and multilingual Nudelverse. The “honest collations” in the title evoke one of the archetypical meals of sixteenth-century secular life: the serving of cold food, sweets, and wine following a ball.12 German is the most well represented language, but there are six Latin as well as three Italian titles, among which the anonymous editors identify the composer of only one, Cicirlanda che commanda, a vinata by Orazio Vecchi based on the game Cicirlanda, in which a leader crowned with a garland commands the others to perform various actions, most of which center on drinking.13 Along with the rest of the volume’s contents, we can imagine this music accompanying drinking ceremonies of Archduke Ferdinand in Innsbruck or the south Bohemian Rožmberk family, whose guests signed Trinkbücher after the consumption of spirits.14 Conspicuously absent from the linguistic makeup of the volume is the Czech language. It does not appear as underlay to any of the musical settings, nor would it in fact enjoy sustained life in printed musical polyphony until the mid-seventeenth century, when Adam Michna published sacred works in the vernacular from his home in the south Bohemian town of Jindřichův Hradec. The delayed acceptance of Czech as a vehicle for printed polyphony has yet to be fully studied. We might attribute it to the limited market for Czech-language music or the fact that many Czech contrafacta of German-language and Latin-language songs traveled readily through channels outside print.15

  • 16 Praetorius, Syntagma musicum tomus tertius, 18: “3. Etliche haben in allen Stimmen einerley Text/we (...)
  • 17 Petr Daněk offered the first study linking the partbooks in Brno to this musical print based on the (...)
  • 18 According to Vladimír Maňas, the note reads, “Urozenemu Panu Panu Janowi Getrzichowi Mladßimu Zzier (...)
  • 19 Nürnberg, Gerlach, 1594.
  • 20 The Piu è diversi madrigali è canzonette is a substantial collection of Vecchi’s works for larger f (...)

7The two other Italian titles in the anthology are both examples of a type of quodlibet known as the messanza, a subgenre loosely defined by Praetorious as a quodlibet drawing liberally on Italian tune fragments. Praetorius used both examples from the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber to illustrate his third category of quodlibet, in which fragments of songs are combined together, yet the same text is sung simultaneously in all voices.16 By presenting melodic fragments successively rather than simultaneously, the composer can retain much of the quotations’ original polyphonic settings, modifying endings so that one quotation grafts easily onto the next. One of these messanze was also copied by a scribe into a set of upright quarto partbooks of Moravian origin, among which three partbooks are presently known to survive: a tenor and bassus, kept in the Department of the History of Music at the Moravian Land Museum in Brno; and a quintus partbook, now at Harvard University’s Houghton Memorial Library.17 A note on the inside back cover of the tenor partbook indicates that its owner was once Jan Jetřich the Younger of Žerotín (d. 1628), scion of one of the most prominent governing families in Moravia and administrator of the family estate in Strážnice, a Moravian town near the upper Hungarian border approximately 125 km northeast of Vienna.18 These three partbooks contain an anthology of music by Orazio Vecchi, a Modenese composer whose music enjoyed numerous northern reprints. Titled Piu è diversi madrigali è canzonette à 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. & 10. voci19, this print is followed by manuscript additions comprising music for recreation and worship.20 One scribe penned the first layer, a group of five secular works likely conceived as a group, whose varied forms recall the diverse contents of the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber: Vola vola pensier, a madrigal by Giovanni de Macque; two moralia by Jacob Handl, a composer who worked in both Moravia and Prague; the above-mentioned messanza; and an anonymous five-language quodlibet. Collectively, these pieces give us insight into the varied musical entertainment at an early seventeenth-century Moravian social gathering, the extent to which this party was a multilingual phenomenon, and how printed books of music and memorized repertoires were brought together in concise forms to produce an overwhelming sense of musical abundance.

8A glance at the tunes utilized by the anonymous composer of this messanza indicates a clear preference for the most popular “hits” of the sixteenth-century Italian repertory over works composed by musicians active in Central Europe, with the exception of one quotation from Philippe de Monte’s Cantai un tempo. The title of the messanza, as given in the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber, is derived from its first melodic quotation, Io son ferito ahi lasso, a five-voice madrigal by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina that enjoyed unusually widespread international success. The order of quotations, transcribed wherever possible according to the orthography of the Moravian partbooks’ scribe, is as follows:

  • 21 Since the partbooks form an incomplete set, I have used the version printed in the Musicalischer Ze (...)

Quotations in the messanza, Io son ferito ahi lasso: 21

Io son ferito ahi laßo* (Q)

Palestrina: Io son ferito ahi lasso
5-voice madrigal

Nasce la pena mia* (T)

Alessandro Striggio: Nasce la pena mia
6-voice madrigal

Anchor che col partire*

Cipriano da Rore: Ancor che col partire
4-voice madrigal

In meyn (T, Q, B)

Orlando di Lasso: Im Mayen
5-voice Lied

Liquide per l’Amor (Q) da gl’occhi sparse*

Luca Marenzio: Liquide perle Amor
5-voice madrigal

sone dilecto cara (T) / Sono dilecto Caro (B)

Andrea Gabrieli: Sonno diletto e caro
6-voice madrigal

me cosini in terra (Q)

Anonymous: Tre cose son’ in terra
3-voice villotta alla napolitana

Der wein der schmeckt mir also wol

Orlando di Lasso: Der wein, der schmeckt mir also wol, 5-voice Lied

Il chor che mi rubasti* (T)

Orazio Vecchi: Il cor che mi rubasti,
4-voice canzonetta

Chi passa per questa strada e non sospiro beato soi (T) / Chi passa per questa strada e non suspiro Beato sio (Q) / Chi passa per questa strata e non suspiro Beato sio (B)

Filippo Azzaiolo: Chi passa per sta strada (e non sospira, beato s’e), 4-voice villotta

stese lemano (T) e gl’occhia terra volse*

Lelio Bertani: Stese la mano e gli occhi a terra volse, 6-voice madrigal

Cantai un tempo

Philippe de Monte: Cantai un tempo
6-voice madrigal

Tu moristi inquel sono (T) / Tu moristi in quel sono (Q) / To moristi in quisono (B)*

Lelio Bertani: Tu moristi in quel seno
6-voice madrigal

Venus, du und dein Kind / seit alle beyde blind

Jacob Regnart: Venus du und dein Kind
3-voice German villanella

Mentrio campaj contento Correnoluorni tutte le vento (T) / Mentrio campai contento (Q, B)*

Orazio Vecchi: Mentre io campai contento / Correvano li giormi piu che ‘lvento
4-voice canzonetta

Contenta a te bibe mio (Q) / Amatemi ben mio (B)*

Lelio Bertani: Amatemi ben mio
6-voice madrigal

Ich her ein der hie spracht zu mier (T)

Orlando di Lasso: Ist keiner hie, der spricht zu mir, 5-voice Lied

Vestiva cole conpai torno (T) / Vestiva colle compagnia tono (Q) / Vestivi colle compagnia introno (B)*

Palestrina: Vestiva i colli e le campagne intorno
5-voice madrigal

leta godea gadea sedendo (T) / Læto gadea lu sedendo (Q) / Lieto gadea, gadea sedendo (B)*

Giovanni Gabrieli: Lieto godea sedendo
8-voice madrigal

Baruchem Zachai (T) / Barachim Zachai (Q, B)

Anonymous: Judenschul
6-voice mascherata

Io son restato qui consolato (T, Q, B)***

Orazio Vecchi: Io son restato qui sconsolato
6-voice canzonetta

Des mag ich wol mit lust ein liedlein singen

Jacob Regnart: Nun bin ich einmal frey
3-voice German villanella

Mille mille volta bella (T, Q, B)**

Girolamo Conversi: Io vo gridando
5-voice canzone

  • 22 Nürnberg, Gerlach, 1588.
  • 23 Those marked with one asterisk in the list are in the first volume. Conversi’s Io vo gridando appea (...)

9Macque’s Vola vola pensier, the madrigal which opens the five-piece set in the Moravian partbooks, was reprinted in an anthology of Italian music issued by the Nuremberg music editor Friedrich Lindner titled Gemma musicales22, and when we compare the quotations in the messanza to the contents of this volume, we find a striking eleven of them included among the anthology’s sixty-four works.23 Thus, we might see this messanza as one indication of how printed songs were absorbed and reconstituted by their consumers. In prints of Italian-texted music for the German market, it was common to transmit only the first stanza of strophic works, as in the case of the Nuremberg reprint of Vecchi’s madrigals and canzonettas included in the partbooks. This can be attributed in part to reduced proficiencies in Italian or the desire to acquire proficiency in this important courtly language, but it is also an acknowledgement of prevailing musical practices that favored instrumental performance over performance by voices alone. The overlapping or piled-up arrangement of tunes in the messanza suggests that more than semantic content, it was the distinctive melodies, polyphonic arrangements, and novel sounds of the Italian language that appealed to Central European ears. At the same time, the scribe is not without some Italian aptitude. Italian text is latinized, and Italian words are occasionally replaced with others that reconfigure the texts’ meanings (“Sonno diletto e caro” becomes Sono dilecto cara;” “Correvano li giormi piu che ‘l vento [The days ran faster than the wind]” becomes “Correnoluorni tutte le vento”). “Amatemi ben mio [Ah, pity me, beloved]” is transformed in the quintus partbook into a somewhat untranslatable, but grammatically viable Latin-Italian macaronic text, “Contenta a te bibe mio,” which embeds a conspicuous imperative to drink in place of the beloved.

10These alterations also point toward a fundamental problem with the expressivity cultivated in Italian madrigals as they circulated abroad. If Italian songs were often used by foreigners to acquire secondary language skills, their textual forms might organize emotions into templates difficult to convert into effective speech. In the musical world of Central Europe, the madrigal’s rarefied sentiments were set in sharp relief against the earthier topics cultivated in Lieder. The steady alternation between Italian and German tunes in this messanza invites us to read it as more than a randomized assemblage, but as a dramatic dialogue that plays with the compromised nature of discourse in a multilinguistic milieu. We can imagine the German quotations as trading in everyday dialogue, offering familiar tunes and language that ground some of the less familiar Italian songs. Putting everything together in English translation, we get the following (with German lines in bold):

I am wounded, alas
My torment begins
Though when taking leave
in May
From his eyes Cupid shed liquid pearls
Sleep beloved and dear
Three things are underground
This wine tastes pretty good to me
The heart that you stole from me
He who passes down this street without sighing is blessed
He stretched out his hand and turned his eyes to the ground
Once I sang
You died in that bosom
Venus, you and your child are both blind
While I lived contented, the days ran faster than the wind
Ah, pity me, beloved
Is there no one here who speaks to me?
Clothed the hills and countryside around
I sat happily enjoying
Baruchem and Zachai
I am left here disconsolate
Of that I may well sing with pleasure a little song
A thousand, a thousand times beautiful.

  • 24 Lasso’s setting of this lyric was first published in his Neue teütsche Liedlein of 1567. Jacob Hand (...)

11The beginning of the messanza piles the opening points of imitation from Io son ferito ahi lasso, Nasce la pena mia, and Ancor che col partire on top of one another, but their steady march is short-circuited by an interruption from Orlando di Lasso’s setting of the German folksong, Im Mayen. Among the most widely transmitted Lieder of the period, its innocuous title masks a bluntly indecorous lyric that undercuts the lofty Italian expressions of suffering that precede it.24

  • 25 The complete text set by Lasso is “Ist keiner hie, der spricht zu mir, / Guter gesell, den bring ic (...)

12As a commentary on the Italian songs, it achieves a distancing effect through its directness of speech, one that is amplified by the second German quotation from Lasso’s Der wein der schmeckt mir also wol [This wine tastes pretty good to me]. In this moment we are removed once more from the rarefied world the Italian lyrics would transport us to, and into the banal conversation of the table. The demonstrative modifier [“this wine”] refers to the enunciatory context: the place of speaking, the time, the speaker and audience, lending the works a sense of both context-embeddedness and spontaneity. At the same time that “wine” refers to drink, it also connotes the boozy consumption of so many songs blending into an inebriated haze. Lasso’s Trinklied launches a string of Italian quotations, whose passive, dejected subjectivities inspire German commiseration in the form of Regnart’s villanella, Venus, du und dein Kind. In a festive social environment, however, too much despondency can only be out of place. “Ah, pity me, beloved,” garbled by drink in the quintus as mentioned earlier, provokes the outburst, “Is there no one here who speaks to me?” The deictic words of Lasso’s Lied put a halt to the circuitous language of frustration, and those acquainted with the rest of lyrics would know that the lyric’s solution to finding a forthright interlocutor is to introduce more wine.25 Sandwiched incongruously between Giovanni Gabrieli’s springtime ode to Cupid’s arrow and Vecchi’s canzonetta of dejection is the Hebrew “Baruchem and Zachai,” extracted from an anonymous mascherata entitled Judenschul—whose lyrics are a garbled mixture of Hebrew and Italian—transmitted in full immediately prior to this work as printed in the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber. The quotation conjures a Judaic religious scene in order to establish a far-out point. The linguistic shift is announced by the chromatic inflection from F to F(#) in the Altus, and this extract serves as a bridge between the full-choir polyphonic flurry of “I sat happily enjoying” and the switch to homorhythmic perfect time for Vecchi’s “I am left here disconsolate,” sung by a trio of low voices. The answer by high voices with the refrain from Regnart’s Nun bin ich einmal frey von Liebesbanden [Now I am at last free of love’s chains] shifts the discourse from disconsolation to the possibilities freedom from love affords, at the same time that it moves from abstraction to the situational. It fuses with the concluding formula “a thousand times beautiful” to offer a commentary on the messanza itself, one that could be read simultaneously to dismiss the contents of everything that has been sung before as gibberish, or to suggest that the copiousness expressed by this stream of Italian polyphony could be extended indefinitely.

  • 26 Several studies have investigated this phenomenon. Useful starting places are Rolf Caspari, Liedtra (...)

13Encounters between different styles of singing —Italian, German, and Hebrew— in Io son ferito ahi lasso dramatize the contrasting lexicons, formulas, and world-views expressed through different languages, parodying one by means of the others. The integration of Italian music in this hybrid musical form can, of course, be plotted within the familiar narrative of the Italianate transformation of the Lied, but this account overlooks a range of overlapping social factors26. We know that Central European composers began increasingly at the end of the sixteenth century to travel south of the Alps for musical study. At the same time, a steady stream of Italian music reprints issued in the north brought Italian music into Central European homes. We might expand this to consider the impact of international networks of trade and correspondence, spiritual affinities that linked geographically distant regions, and the cultural expansion promoted by study abroad, which, in Bohemia and Moravia, was all but mandated by the existence of only one university within their borders for most of the 16th century. Often disregarded is how the wider Central European market fell under the centrifugal sway of Prague’s imperial court and the new international community that filled it. If direct evidence of the musical life of Italian immigrants presently remains beyond reach, the quodlibet suggests how melodies circulated to form part of a collective repertoire Italian migrants likely shared with neighbors.

  • 27 In the 1570s, eleven Italian retailers are recorded in Brno. In the 1570s–1580s, forty-five Italian (...)
  • 28 Bernardo Brevin, of unknown profession, was the first to obtain a seat on the municipal council in (...)
  • 29 See Jordánková and Sulitková, op. cit., p. 726.
  • 30 During a brief stay in Brno, Adam of Valdštejn the Younger attended a comedy in Brno at the home of (...)
  • 31 Among the three, the largest settlement was in the royal town of Uherské Hradiště, most of whom wer (...)

14The Žerotín partbooks provide evidence of how Italianate culture permeated life at higher social levels, but they also invite us to consider how a rapidly developing Italian diaspora might have contributed to late sixteenth-century cultural transformations beyond the imperial capital. If Italian migration to Bohemia intensified in the 1570s and 1580s, a similar pattern can be charted in the Moravian city of Brno, where 102 Italian professionals are documented among newly established residents between the middle of the 16th century and 162027. An Italian congregation was established in 1592 in response to this sudden expansion in numbers, which included construction workers, masons, sculptors and painters, traders and shopkeepers, some of whom rose to prominent social and municipal positions28. Builders came to satisfy enthusiasm for Italian architectural design, while traders catered to the luxury market, providing silk, velvet, and voile; Venetian glass; foods such as cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, cane sugar, almonds, carob, figs, oranges and lemons; and wines, including malvoisie, muscat, and rivoli—in short, everything that could make for an impressive dinner.29 Situated midway between Prague and Vienna, the Moravian city was an important meeting place for managing regional affairs, and it is here that Jan Jetřich’s cousin, Karel of Žerotín, hosted visitors in his capacity as Moravian governor from 1608 to 1615.30 Taste for the fruits of Italian workshops, farms, and vineyards encouraged Italian settlements further east in the area surrounding Jan Jetřich’s Strážnice estate, where satellite communities took root in the neighboring towns of Uherské Hradišťě, Uherský Brod and Uherský Ostroh, a town whose first Italian homeowner is documented in 1589.31

  • 32 As listed in his diary, Adam of Valdštejna the Younger attended these events regularly at the homes (...)
  • 33 A summary of his architectural, musical and theatrical patronage is provided in Herbert Haupt, Fürs (...)
  • 34 Other records of musical practice around Strážnice at this time have yet to come to light, with the (...)
  • 35 Musicians are recorded in Ladislav Velen’s employ in the northern Moravian town of Moravská Trebova (...)
  • 36 During a brief stay in Brno, Adam of Valdštejn the Younger attended a comedy in Brno at the home of (...)

15Attention-grabbing Renaissance architecture and luxury imports brought by these immigrants lent prestige to Italian culture beyond the imperial court, and these phenomena help clarify how Italian-language music could come to permeate musical culture in Moravia so thoroughly by the turn of the century. The popularity of Italian performance at court was sustained in the private homes of aristocrats, for whom comedies, masquerades, balls, and a daily round-robin of banquets formed staples of social life.32 While Italian masons were constructing his chateaux in Valtice and Lednice, the Moravian Prince Karl I von Liechtenstein, Karel of Žerotín’s predecessor as governor of Moravia, employed a private chapel with Nicolaus Zangius as chapelmaster, was entertained by foreign buffone, and listened to musicians perform from his remarkably up-to-date collection of Italian music books, which accounted for a quarter of his substantial collection.33 Although it is unknown whether Jan Jetřich employed musicians in Strážnice or kept a collection of musical instruments at hand, he likely pooled resources together with aristocratic peers, like-minded neighbors, and other members of his family.34 Ladislav Velen of Žerotín retained three musicians at his court, and it was undoubtedly personal knowledge of the family’s musical tastes that led Zangius to dedicate a book of three-voice Lieder—whose German texts are saturated with foreign-word borrowings—to Jan Diviš of Žerotín.35 The Žerotíns converged regularly in Brno, where they acquired Italian imports, entertained international guests en route between Vienna and Prague, staged comedies, and likely carried on this broad Central European tradition of drinking rituals, where differences among their linguistically diverse guests could rapidly dissolve through festive entertainment.36

16It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the Italian diaspora in Bohemia and Moravia contributed to the diffusion of the Italian tunes quoted in these quodlibets, but we might at least gain some perspective on how cultural collision or convergence was performed, both musically and socially. Interest in the quodlibet stemmed from its ability to encapsulate a variety of musical genres and ways of speaking, and it seems not by coincidence that its popularity should occur in a region opening up to new patterns of migration as well as an increasingly uneasy confessional plurality. These tensions manifest in the quodlibet that follows the messanza in the Žerotín partbooks, whose liturgical quotations in Czech, German, and Latin collide against Italian tune fragments and nonsense sounds to satirize a polyconfessional milieu. In such a dynamic, tense environment, the quodlibet offered a means of reconciling competing cultural forces by delivering a broadly intelligible social mirror—humorous at the same time that it harbors the capacity to marginalize by not giving voice (for example, the absence of Czech-language music in sources of printed polyphony), or to oppress through caricature, as in the case of Judenschul. At the same time, the quodlibet does the work of bringing multiplied modes of behavior into musically harmonious alignment. By staging encounters between differing linguistic identities, it reveals something about how disparate musical traditions could simultaneously conflict and complement each other. Italian music may be the butt of a musical joke when set against German Lieder, but these differences are precisely what made Italian modes of communication and culture so necessary. If German was a richly communicative and direct everyday language, Italian provided complimentary templates that encouraged speakers to express abstract emotions suited to courtly modes of discourse. This knowledge helped one gain access to the elite network centered around Prague’s imperial court.

  • 37 In the 17th century, this metaphor is used by Johann Rist (1642), Karl Christoph von Marschalk-Meer (...)

17The rhapsodic nature of these late Renaissance works would soon be swept clean by the broom of the Thirty Years War. The ransacking of Strážnice in 1605 by Hungarian rebels under the command of Stephen Bocskay was only a foretaste of calamities to come: numerous members of the Žerotín family, including Jan Jetřich, were forced into exile in the 1620s alongside waves of non-Catholics, while properties and city councils would change hands on a massive scale under a new regime of Habsburg absolutism. At a time when people were forced to take sides, this intrinsically polyphonic form no longer reflected social reality. The beggar’s patchwork coat, which Johann Groh once positively used to characterize the open forum of the quodlibet, would soon become a pejorative emblem of the state of the German language itself, sullied by too many foreign words and encouraging its speakers toward moral decadence.37 In the later seventeenth-century regime of linguistic purity, a new course had to be charted, one that set aside the cognitive clash of far-flung ideas in favor of monodic, totalizing forms of discourse. We might see in the early seventeenth-century multilingual quodlibet a poetics of the fragment interrupted, or perhaps one that had reached its saturation point. Musical and linguistic profusion had once been fascinating subject matter, not only because they spoke different languages and compiled unsystematizable messages, but also because they encouraged alternative ways of thinking.

Im Mayen hört man die hanen krayen,

In May, one can hear the roosters crow.

Frey dich, du schöns brauns megetlein,

Rejoice, you pretty brunette maid,

Hilff mir den habern seyen!

Help me sow my seed!

Bist mir vil lieber dann der knecht,

You please me far more than the farmhand;

Ich thu Dir deine alte recht,

I’ll give you what you need,

Bum, medle, bum.

Boom, beauty, boom.

Ich frey mich dein gantz um und um,

I take pleasure in all of you from every side,

Wo ich freundlich zu dir kum,

Wherever I come to you affectionately

Hinderm ofen und um und um,

Behind the oven and from every side,

Frey dich, du schöns brauns megetlein,

Rejoice, you pretty brunette maid,

Ich kum, ich kum, ich kum!

I come, I come, I come!

Haut de page

Annexe

Anon.: Io son ferito ahi lasso

Anon.: Io son ferito ahi lasso

© Scott L. Edwards

© Scott L. Edwards

© Scott L. Edwards

© Scott L. Edwards

Haut de page

Notes

1Anno 1584… 18. Septembris na Staroměstkým rynku, jenž slove U Kometků, začali sou Vlaši šarvátku v hodině 23, a trvala až do třetí hodiny na noc. Tu sou na ně udeřili Čechové a dveře vyraziti chtěli, ale Vlaši sou zutíkali pro počet Čechův a Němcův, podle čehož nemálo zraněno od spolustrany, jakožto Čechův a Němcův; k žalobě utekše se Vlaši té noci k Jeho Milosti Císařský Rudolfovi Druhému.” Transcribed in Jaroslav Pánek, “Italové, Nizozemci a Němci v rudolfinské Praze ņěkteré formy a problémy soužití,” Documenta Pragensia 19 (2001), p. 67. Pánek notes that the third hour of the night have meant 9:00 pm.

2 Useful overviews of Prague during this time period include R. J. W. Evans’s foundational study, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973; the two-volume Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II., edited by Jürgen Schultze, Hermann Fillitz, and Eliška Fučíková, Freren, Luca Verlag, 1988; and Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City, edited by Eliška Fučíková, London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1997. For background on the religious climate of Bohemia, a useful starting point is David Zdeněk, Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther, Washington, D. C., Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003; and on migration and the ethnic fabric of Prague during this time period, see the special issue of Documenta Pragensi 19 (2001) edited by Olga Fejtová, Václav Ledvinka, and Jiří Pešek subtitled “Národnostní Skupiny, Menšiny a Cizinci ve Městech: Praha – Město Zpráv a Zpravodajství.”

3 Population estimates vary widely. Jaroslav Miller estimates a smaller increase from 25,000–30,000 in 1500 to 53,600–70,000 in 1600, whereas Richard Lachmann’s figure of 110,000 in 1600 is more widely cited. See Jaroslav Miller, Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500–1700, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, p. 26; and Richard Lachmann, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe, New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 52.

4 Studies on the emergence of Italian communities in Bohemia and Moravia include Jaromíra Čoupková, “Italští Obchodníci a Řemeslníci ve Městech Uherskohradišťského Okresu,” Svatobor 2 (2003), p. 45-55; Marina Dmitrieva-Einhorn, “Rhetorik der Fassaden: Fassadendekorationen in Böhmen,” in Metropolen und Kulturtransfer im 15./16. Jahrhundert: Prag, Krakau, Danzig, Wien, edited by Andrea Langer and Georg Michels, Stuttgart, Steiner, 2001, p. 151-170; Hana Jordánková and Ludmila Sulitková, “Italové a Španělé v Předbělohorském Brně,” in Ad Vitam et Honorem Profesoru Jaroslavu Mezníkovi Přátelé a Žáci k Pětasedmdesátým Narozeninám, Tomáš Borovský et al. (eds.), Brno, Matice Moravská, 2003, p. 715-742; Cyril Kříž, “Po Stopách Italů v Plzni,” Zpravodaj Společnosti Přátel Itálie, N° 4 (2005), p. 911; idem, Zpravodaj Společnosti Přátel Itálie, N° 1 (2006), p. 79; and Ludmila Sultiková, “Italově v Brně v Předbělohorském Období,” Svatobor 1 (1999), p. 55-65.

5 Italian musicians in Prague have also been the focus of several studies by Michaela Žáčková Rossi, including “Gregorio Turini, Život a Dílo Rudolfínského Hudebníka s Několika Rožmberskými Střípky v Závěru,” Folia Historica Bohemia 19, 1998, p. 59-81; “Gregorio Turini e il suo Primo libro de canzonette a quattro voci (1597),” in Villanella, Napolitana, Canzonette: Relazioni tra Gasparo Fiorino, Compositori Calabresi e Scuole Italiane del Cinquecento, Maria Paola Borsezza, Annunziato Pugliese and Vibo Valentia (eds), Istituto di Bibliografia Musicale Calabrese, 1999, p. 163-181; “I musici dell’area padana alla corte di Rodolfo II (1576–1612),” in Barocco Padano 4 [=Atti del XII Convegno Internazionale sulla musica italiana nei secoli xviixviii, Brescia 14-16 Luglio 2003], Como, Antique Musicae Italicae Studiosi, 2006, p. 205-222; and “Da Udine a Praga: La Crescente Fortuna dei Musicisti Friulani alla Corte Imperiale di Rodolfo II,” in Alessandro Orologio (1551–1633): Musico Friulano e il suo Tempo, Udine, Pizzicato, 2008, p. 265-276. For the full list of prints, reprints, publishers, and dedicatees of Monte’s madrigal books, see Thorsten Hindrichs, Philippe de Monte (1521–1603): Komponist, Kapellmeister, Korrespondent, Göttingen, Hainholz, 2002, p. 173-177.

6 I have assembled many of these inventories in chapter one of my dissertation, “Repertory Migration in the Czech Crown Lands, 1570-1630”, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.

7 Michael Praetorius’s discussion of the quodlibet and messanza appears in his Syntagma Musicum Tomus Tertius, Wolfenbüttel, Holwein, 1619, p. 17-18.

8 Nürnberg, Kauffmann, 1609.

9 Composers represented in this volume include Nicolaus Zangius, Carl Luython, Jacob Regnart, and Hans Leo Hassler, all of whom worked for Emperor Rudolf II at some point in their careers, as well as composers employed at the court of Archduke Ferdinand in Innsbruck (Jacob Regnart, Georg Flori) and the Dresden court of Elector August of Saxony (Antonio Scandello).

10 The full title is Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber, das ist allerley seltsame lecherliche Vapores und Humores, ehrliche Collation und Schlafftruncksbossen, Quodlibet, Judenschul und andere kurtzweilige Liedlein, dergleichen zuvor nie also in einen Model zusammen gegossen worden: von mehrerley fürttrefflichen Musicis mit 4. 5. 6. 7. und 8. stimmen componirt, und durch einen der Music Liebhabern an tag gegeben.

11 Like the quodlibets analyzed here, Luython’s Missae quodlibeticae share a rapid, primarily syllabic declamation and a high degree of thematic concentration, but without the accompanying texts, their original sources have yet to be determined. The two prints mentioned above are Carl Luython, Liber I. missarum, Prague, Nicolaus Straus, 1609; and Nicolaus Zangius, Magnificat secundi toni, Prague, Nicolaus Straus, 1609. Their joint conception is indicated not only by their in-folio formats, similar layouts, and publication at the same print shop in the same year, but also by the fact that so many surviving exemplars bind the two volumes together. The formats and layouts of the publications are clearly modeled on the choirbooks printed by Christopher Plantin and count among the most impressive volumes to have been printed in Prague in the 16th and 17th centuries. What is especially stunning about this achievement is that Nicolaus Straus did not issue any other books of polyphonic music.

12 See Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table From 1300 to 1789, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, p. 51-52.

13 This game, also popular in Siena, is described in Girolamo Bargagli, Dialogo de’ giuochi che nelle vegghie sanesi si usano di fare, Venice, Gardano, 1581, p. 32-33. Bargagli mentions its ancient, popular origins and points out that the name is derived from ghirlandia (garland).

14 The best account of Ferdinand’s drinking ritual is found in a travelogue written by Stephanus Pighius, the tutor of Karl Friedrich of Jülich-Kleve-Berg, whom he accompanied on a European grand tour. Visitors to Archduke Ferdinand’s chateau in Innsbruck were invited to descend into a cave constructed in the garden, where they found a table covered with sweets and tankards of wine. After a reading from a ceremonial book, guests were expected to drink wine from a large vessel in one swallow then sign a guestbook. One indication that music was part of the experience is the signature of Ferdinand’s chapelmaster, Guillem Bruneau, among the guests. Ferdinand’s Trinkbücher survive, as does one from the estate of Petr Vok of Rožmberk, who seems to have practiced a similar ritual at his chateau in the Bohemian town of Bechyně. Pighius published his account in his Hercules Prodicius, seu Principis Iuventutis Vita et Peregrinatio Historia Principis adolescentis institutrix, Antwerp, Plantin, 1587, p. 238-240. A facsimile and useful transcription of the first volume of Ferdinand’s Trinkbücher is available in Ludwig Igálffy von Igály, Die Ambraser Trinkbücher Erzherzog Ferdinands II. von Tirol. Erster Band (1567-1577), Transkription und Dokumentaion. Schriften des Kunsthistorischen Museums 12, Wien, Phoibos Verlag, 2010. On the Trinkbuch of Petr Vok, see Václav Bůžek, “Pijácké Zábavy na Dvorech Renesančních Velmožů,” Opera Historica 8 (2000), p. 137-161.

15 The best evidence for Czech contrafacta is in lutebooks that survive from this period, where Czech titles are occasionally provided for music that circulated in print as German-language Lieder. See Jiří Tichota, “Bohemika a Český Repertoár v Tabulaturách pro Renesanční Loutnu,” Miscellanea musicologica 31 (1984), p. 143-225.

16 Praetorius, Syntagma musicum tomus tertius, 18: “3. Etliche haben in allen Stimmen einerley Text/welcher aber auch unvollkommen und abrumpirt, und bald ein ander darauff erwischet wird; Wie in Melchioris Francken Quotlibeten: Und in den beyden Messanzen, Mirani a. 5. und Nascela pena a 6. zu ersehen.” Although the editor of the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber titles the quodlibet Io son ferito ahi lasso, Praetorius must be referring to the same work when he indicates Nasce la pena mia as his other example. Altus and quintus both begin with this melodic incipit, making it likely Praetorius decided on the title by examining one of these two partbooks. No other messanza beginning with Striggio’s madrigal is known.

17 Petr Daněk offered the first study linking the partbooks in Brno to this musical print based on the mutual presence of this messanza. See his article, “Neznámé Renesanční Quodlibety Českého Původu,” Opus musicum 2002/2, p. 4-13. The tenor and bassus partbooks, now at the Department of the History of Music (Oddělení dějin hudby) of the Moravské Zemské Muzeum (sign. A 369), are bound in the parchment pages of an older liturgical book. The quintus partbook at the Houghton Memorial Library at Harvard University (sign. Mus.V4912V.1594) is similarly bound with matching print and manuscript appendix.

18 According to Vladimír Maňas, the note reads, “Urozenemu Panu Panu Janowi Getrzichowi Mladßimu Zzierotina ana Strazniczy Panu kemnie” [To the assigned Lord, Lord Jan Jetřich the Younger of Žerotín, Lord in Strážnice, from me]. Jan Jetřich’s cousin, Karel the Elder of Žerotín, served as hejtman of Moravia from 1608 to 1615 and, as the most powerful protector of the Unity of Brethren, hosted in his domain west of Brno their lucrative printshops, from which they printed the most popular Czech-language hymnbooks of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries until their expulsion. Like other members of the Žerotín family, Jan Jetřich studied sometime between 1598 and 1606 alongside many other Bohemian and Moravian nobleman at the university in Strasbourg, where Calvinist doctrine aligned most closely to the religious beliefs of the Unity of Brethren. See František Hrubý, Étudiants Tchèques aux Écoles Protestantes de l’Europe Occidentale à la Fin du 16e et au Début du 17e siècle (Brno: Universita J. E. Purkyně, 1970), p. 12. Jan Jetřich seems to have fled to the Hungarian town of Skalice after the Battle of White Mountain. His estate was acquired in 1628 by the Italian imperial colonel Francesco Magni, while the partbooks ended up at the Benedictine monastery of Rajhrad, just south of Brno. See Antonín Krátký, Pánové z Žerotína, Přerov, [n.s.], 1899, p. 11-12; and Vladimír Maňas, “Čekání na nový úsvit. Hudba v Rajhradském Klášteře v jeho Šestém Století Existence (1550–1650),” in In conspectu angelorum psallam tibi: K Hudební Kultuře Benediktinského Kláštera Rajhrad od jeho Žaložení do Začátku 18. Století, edited by Pavel Žůrek, Lumír Škvařil and Vladimír Maňas, Brno, Moravská Zemská Knihovna, 2014, p. 152-153.

19 Nürnberg, Gerlach, 1594.

20 The Piu è diversi madrigali è canzonette is a substantial collection of Vecchi’s works for larger forces: 49 five- and six-voice canzonette and 31 madrigals for six, seven, eight, nine, and ten voices drawn primarily from the composer’s Madrigali a sei voci… libro primo (1583), Canzonette a sei voci… libro primo (1587), Madrigali a cinque voci… libro primo (1589), and Selva di varia ricreatione (1590), all printed by Gardano.

21 Since the partbooks form an incomplete set, I have used the version printed in the Musicalischer Zeitvertreiber to complete the list of quotations. The quintus and tenor parts are switched in the transcription. The orthographical variants as written here are taken from the three partbooks (T for tenor, Q for quintus, and B for bassus). Where no partbook abbreviation follows, the quoted text is from the printed version.

22 Nürnberg, Gerlach, 1588.

23 Those marked with one asterisk in the list are in the first volume. Conversi’s Io vo gridando appeared in the second volume of the series, Liber secundus Gemmae musicalis, Nuremberg, Gerlach, 1589; and Vecchi’s Io son restato qui sconsolato was printed in the third volume, Tertius Gemmae musicalis liber, Nürnberg, Gerlach, 1590.

24 Lasso’s setting of this lyric was first published in his Neue teütsche Liedlein of 1567. Jacob Handl’s Missa super In Mayen also capitalized on the continued Moravian popularity of Lasso’s setting. It was printed in his third book of five-voice masses, dedicated to Caspar Schönauer, abbot of the Premonstratensian monastery of Zábrdovice just outside the Brno city walls. The broader reception of this tune awaits detailed study.

25 The complete text set by Lasso is “Ist keiner hie, der spricht zu mir, / Guter gesell, den bring ich dir, / Ein gläslein wein, drey oder vier, / Jo, jo, weinlein, daherein! / Was sol uns der pfennig, / Wann wir nimmer sein?” Perhaps due to censors, Lasso’s text expunges the concluding line of this lyric, “Kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison,” as transmitted in the anonymous setting in Georg Forster’s Der ander theil Kurtzweiliger guter frischer Teutscher Liedlein, Nuremberg, Petreius, 1540.

26 Several studies have investigated this phenomenon. Useful starting places are Rolf Caspari, Liedtradition im Stilwandel um 1600: Das Nachleben des deutschen Tenorliedes in den gedruckten Liedersammlungen, München, Musikverlag Katzbichler, 1971; Susan Lewis Hammond, Editing Music in Early Modern Germany, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007; and Katharina Bruns, Das Deutsche Weltliche Lied von Lasso bis Schein, Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2008.

27 In the 1570s, eleven Italian retailers are recorded in Brno. In the 1570s–1580s, forty-five Italian construction workers were living in Brno. Traders in Brno had significant tariff advantages for trade with northern Italy. At the request of the Bohemian King Jiří z Poděbrad, Emperor Frederick III granted a privilege in 1463 to the citizens of Brno, permitting local merchants to trade goods with Venice without having to use Viennese warehouses. The mercantile books of the Brno trader Mikuláš Wunderle from 1561–1564 and 1568–1570 document transactions with Verona, Milan and especially Venice, where merchants from Brno enjoyed the hospitality of the “German House” (Fondaco dei Tedeschi). See Hana Jordánková and Ludmila Sulitková, “Italové a Španělé v Předbělohorském Brně,” in Ad Vitam et Honorem Profesoru Jaroslavu Mezníkovi Přátelé a Žáci k Pětasedmdesátým Narozeninám, edited by Tomáš Borovský, Libor Jan, and Martin Wihoda, Brno, Matice Moravská, 2003, p. 726.

28 Bernardo Brevin, of unknown profession, was the first to obtain a seat on the municipal council in the 1570s. This precedent was followed by the painter Luca Roland the Elder and the traders Antonio and Ottaviano Trussi. Roland and Antonio Trussi belonged to the municipal council (both beginning in 1603) while Ottaviano Trussi maintained a long-lasting political career beyond 1621. Marco Spampato, a cloth merchant, kept a residence in one of the city’s most prestigious locations, Dolní Náměstí (Unteren Platz; today’s Náměstí Svobody), where he hosted prominent aristocrats. See ibid., p. 727.

29 See Jordánková and Sulitková, op. cit., p. 726.

30 During a brief stay in Brno, Adam of Valdštejn the Younger attended a comedy in Brno at the home of Karel of Žerotín on 28 September 1614. See Adam z Valdštejna, mladší, Deník Rudolfinského Dvořana: 1602-1633, Marie Koldinská and Petr Maťa (eds), Praha, Argo, 1997, p. 218.

31 Among the three, the largest settlement was in the royal town of Uherské Hradiště, most of whom were likely artisans, builders, and traders and several of them from Friuli. The earliest Italian name in the registry of landowners is recorded on 3 March 1589 in Uherský Ostroh. See Jaromíra Čoupková, “Italští Obchodníci a Řemeslníci ve Městech Uherskohradišťského Okresu,” Svatobor 2 (2003), p. 45-55.

32 As listed in his diary, Adam of Valdštejna the Younger attended these events regularly at the homes of local aristocrats and frequently in the company of foreign dignitaries. Comedies were staged in Prague, Brno, Olomouc, and at other country estates scattered across Bohemia and Moravia.

33 A summary of his architectural, musical and theatrical patronage is provided in Herbert Haupt, Fürst Karl I. von Liechtenstein: Obersthofmeister Kaiser Rudolfs II. und Vizekönig von Böhmen: Hofstaat und Sammeltätigkeit, Edition der Quellen aus dem Liechtensteinischen Hausarchiv, Wien, Böhlau, 1983, vol. 1-1, p. 40-41, 60-61, and 67-68, and his musical inventory, taken in Prostějov in 1608, is transcribed on p. 158-163. In sum, secular Italian music counts for roughly twenty-five to twenty-nine volumes among a total of 105 books.

34 Other records of musical practice around Strážnice at this time have yet to come to light, with the exception of a 1632-inventory of the music collection of Jakub Piškule, a magistrate in Uherské Hradišťě. He owned two lutes, two clavichords, seven tablatures, and fourteen sets of partbooks transmitting madrigals, Lieder, and concerti. The names inventoried from his music collection are not always precise: Praetorius, Johannes, Vaclav, Hassler, Erbach, Marco Pomerano, Sartorius, Valentin Haussman, Ferrabosco, Pierre Phalèse (six-voice madrigals), Verdonus (Verdonck?), and Luca Marenzio. See Jiří Sehnal, “Hudební Zájmy Královského Rychtáře v Uherském Hradišti v Roce 1632,” Hudební Věda 24 (1987), p. 63-72.

35 Musicians are recorded in Ladislav Velen’s employ in the northern Moravian town of Moravská Trebova at the end of the sixteenth century. See Theodora Straková, “Vokálně Polyfonní Skladby na Moravě v 16. a na Začátku 17. Století: 3. Hudební Instituce na Moravě a jejich Repertoár,” Časopis Moravského Zemského Muzea 68 (1983), p. 150. A modern edition of Zangius’s Ander Theil deutscher Lieder mit drey Stimmen (Wien, Bonnoberger, 1611) is available in Nicolaus Zangius, Geistliche und Weltliche Gesänge, edited by Hans Sachs, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich 87, Graz, Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1969.

36 During a brief stay in Brno, Adam of Valdštejn the Younger attended a comedy in Brno at the home of Karel of Žerotín on 28 September 1614 in the midst of a daily cycle of meals attended at the homes of the local elite. See Valdštejna, Deník Rudolfinského Dvořana…, op. cit., p. 218. At least two members of the Žerotín family signed Ferdinand’s Trinkbücher: Bedřich, stepfather of Jan Diviš, in 1570 and Kašpar Melichar Baltazar, father of Jan Jetřich, in 1577, as documented in Igálffy von Igály, Die Ambraser Trinkbücher…, op. cit., p. 53 and 101. I have not yet consulted Ferdinand’s later volumes of Trinkbücher nor the volume kept by Petr Vok of Rožmberk, but accounts suggest this type of pastime was notoriously widespread. Among Italians, the German predilection for drinking games was known as brindisi, a term that later came to denote the genre of drinking song but was originally derived from the German toast “Bring’s dir.” Giovanni della Casa decried the foreign habit of making a game of drunkenness, and Ariosto used the custom as an excuse not to accompany Cardinal Ippolito d’Este on a trip to Hungary. See Giovanni della Casa, Galateo, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1990, p. 58-59 and 79, N° 29.3.

37 In the 17th century, this metaphor is used by Johann Rist (1642), Karl Christoph von Marschalk-Meerheim (1668), and Martin Aedler in his German grammar for English speakers, the High-Dutch Minerva (1680). See William Jervis Jones, Images of Language: Six Essays on German Attitudes to European Languages from 1500 to 1800, Amsterdam and Philadelphia. John Benjamins, 1999, p. 67. Groh’s only known quodlibet first appeared in his Dreissig Neueausserlesene Padouane und Galliard, mit fünff Stimmen… sampt einem zu endangehentem Quotlibet, genannt: Bettlermantel. Von marcherley guten Flecklin zusammen gestickt… mit vier Stimmen in Truck verfertiget, Nuremberg, Kauffmann, 1606. A modern edition is available in Robert Eitner in “Das deutsche Lied des xv. und xvi. Jahrhunderts in Wort, Melodie und mehrstimmigem Tonsatz.” Monatshefte für Musikgeschichte 12, 1880, supplement, p. 293-306.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

Titre Anon.: Io son ferito ahi lasso
Crédits © Scott L. Edwards
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/402/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 280k
Crédits © Scott L. Edwards
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/402/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 416k
Crédits © Scott L. Edwards
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/402/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 396k
Crédits © Scott L. Edwards
URL http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/docannexe/image/402/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 401k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Scott L. Edwards, « “Is There No One Here Who Speaks to Me?” Performing Ethnic Encounter in Bohemia and Moravia at the Turn of the 17th Century »Diasporas, 26 | 2015, 17-34.

Référence électronique

Scott L. Edwards, « “Is There No One Here Who Speaks to Me?” Performing Ethnic Encounter in Bohemia and Moravia at the Turn of the 17th Century »Diasporas [En ligne], 26 | 2015, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2016, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/diasporas/402 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/diasporas.402

Haut de page

Auteur

Scott L. Edwards

Scott L. Edwards a soutenu, en 2012, à l’université de Californie (Berkeley), une thèse en histoire et littérature de la musique portant sur « La mobilité du répertoire musical dans les terres de la Couronne tchèque, 1570-1630 ». Après avoir été College Fellow au sein du département de musique de l’université de Harvard, il travaille comme post-doctorant à l’université de Vienne dans le cadre du Projet FWF « Ludwig Senfl : Sämtliche Werke (New Senfl Edition) ».

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search