Medieval & Renaissance Music Performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

The city was as famous for its festivals and grand spectacles as it was for its artists, merchants, philosophers, politicians, poets and priests. In three major festivals — carnival, calendimàggio (May 1), and San Giovanni (June 24) – all vied for power and pride of place, weaving processions that mirrored the complexities and dangers of Florentine life. The carro, or triumphal wagon (trionfo), played an integral part in the festivities. Elaborately decorated with banners, drawn through the streets accompanied by torch bearers, singers and actors, these moving tableux vivants, not unlike the floats of modern-day parades, survive in vivid accounts, and in the sounds of music from a distant time.

Entrata degli Sancte
Members of merchant guilds joined together in companies to sing laude, songs of devotion, and to consolidate their political power behind the scenes. These laudesi companies processed through town singing religious contrafacta to well known melodies. The lovely Alta trinita beata, which appears in the Florence Laudario, survives in later minor melodies like La barabana, and La mantovana, Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi, as the theme from Smetana’s Die Moldau, and, finally, as Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem. ¹

Entrata degli Amanti
On calendimàggio—beginning on the first of May—the youth of Florence would process through the city bearing green branches of spring, as described in the song Ben venga maggio. According to custom, young men would place these sprigs in the keyholes of the doors of young maidens: if the sprig was pulled through, entry was assured. The anonymous Vilana, che sa tu far implicitly recalls the same metaphor. This song lampoons mercenaries by adopting, in climactic fashion, the text of a German leyson.

Lorenzo innamorato
No single person better portrays the spirit of quattrocento Florence than Lorenzo de' Medici. He supported such artists as Botticelli and Michelangelo, such poets and philosophers as Angelo Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and even his historical nemesis, the great prophet Girolamo Savonarola. As an accomplished poet, musician and member of a laudesi company, Lorenzo wrote both religious and carnival verse. The settings of his Canto dei profumieri and Trionfo di Bacco dress double entendre in a deceptively simple syllabic style that reflects humanist concerns for language and oratory. In contrast Lorenzo avidly collected manuscripts of florid polyphony composed by Northern oltremontane like Alexander Agricola, Antoine Busnois, and Heinrich Isaac. Italian indifference to the original French verses resulted in a large untexted repertory, used both for instrumental performance and for the addition of sacred and secular text. Whether motet or instrumental fantasy, Agricola’s Cecus non judicat de coloribus exemplifies his fascination with musical tricks and the repetition of brief motives. Although his popular chanson Jay bien et aver survives as a three-voice composition, we have added a si placet voice in contemporary style.

Trionfo della Guerra
Hired by the Medici, Heinrich Isaac arrived in Florence around 1485, and remained a loyal composer and friend to the Medici until his death in 1517. As Allan Atlas noted, the tenor of Palle, palle pictorially and aurally represents the balls of the Medici motto and heraldry. Based on a similar motive, A la battaglia depicts one of several attempts to establish control over Sarzana, an important strategic coastal fortress. Gentile Aretino's text was possibly intended for an investiture ceremony for the captain of Florentine forces. The programmatic words also catalogue notable allies, doubtlessly flattered to hear their names mentioned in song. A letter recently discovered by F. W. Kent reveals Isaac working on A la battaglia in 1487 for the upcoming carnival. At the same time, these Medici-inspired works, along with Regnum meum and Par ung chies do cure might have originated in a Mass written by Isaac for Lorenzo.

Morte del Principe
Isaac’s lament on the death of Lorenzo de Medici Quis dabit capiti sets a poem by Angelo Poliziano based on verses from Jeremiah. The Et requiescamus in pace chant that pervades much of the work was adopted wholesale from Isaac’s own Missa Salva nos, reflecting both skillful allusion and the demands of short notice. In the one newly composed section, Isaac labels the silent Tenor voice “Laurus tacet” and symbolizes Lorenzo’s death through a sequential descent of the chant in the Bass voice. The Tenor returns on a single despairing note, mourning a man who, in the words of Machiavelli, "was no sooner in his grave, than those fatal fires were kindled, which so soon after began to spread those desolations over the peninsula, which no man then living could arrest, and which proved the ruin of Italy.”

Trionfo della Fede
The messianic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola prophesied Lorenzo's death as a sign of divine punishment. Under the spell of his sermons, Florentines succumbed to religious fervor and threw their belongings into the famous bonfires of the vanities. Who knows how many manuscripts of music were burned alongside the paintings of Sandro Botticelli? Although Savanarola composed laudi, he protested that even many religious songs were too corrupt for the worship of the Lord, saying, “these songs of yours today have been invented by ambition and avarice.” The Dominican songs Allegro canto and Torna torna may well have sounded above the flames.

Martiri e Esili
The death of Savonarola inspired a reverence even in those who opposed him during his lifetime. When in 1498 he was excommunicated, tortured and burned at the stake along with two fellow friars, parallels to the Crucifixion did not go unnoticed. His death inspired numerous compositions, some supplying blank spaces for the illegal inclusion of his name among the saints. The procession of the Carro della Morte, described by Giorgio Vasari in detail, displays the paradoxical interrelations between religion, art and politics so typical of Renaissance Florence. On a wagon sat skeletons riding on ghost horses, and "figures of the dead raised themselves half out of their tombs and seated their skeleton forms thereon while they sang the words: "Dolor, pianto, e penitenza." Vasari claims that people believed "the spectacle was meant to signify the return of the exiled Medici, who were, so to speak, dead, but might be expected to rise again." Ironically, the text is Savonarolan in character. Another possibly related work is Pazienzia ognun me dice, whose religious text conceals an implicit hope for the return of the Medici.

Trinofo d'Amore
After the return of the Medici in 1512, a belief in the supremacy of the Tuscan dialect and renewed interest in the poetry of Petrarch found expression in imitations by poets like Pietro Bembo. Madrigal settings like Jacob Arcadelt’s Che poss’io piu se’l cielo delighted in the Petrarchian paradoxes ridiculed by Giovann Battista Giraldi, who complained: "It is a remarkable thing that these young men lament so much about love. . . some are alive with death, others die with life: this one burns in ice, that one is frozen in fire; this one cries out while keeping silence, that one is silent while crying out, and all those things that are impossible in nature appear to be possible for them."

Nova belleza and Perche quel che mi trasse represent the few surviving setttings of amorous texts by Elzear Genet (called Carpentras after his native village), who served as maestro da cappella to Pope Leo X. Carpentras’ undeserved obscurity today arises partly from his early retirement to Avignon, brought on by an incurable disease that "so suddenly attacked my head that it does not cease to torment it with continuous hissing and agitates the brain like winds fighting among themselves." It is in part a testament to his ability as a composer, that in 1587 papal singers protested the replacement of his music by the compositions of Palestrina.

Musica Divina
During his final illness in 1492, Lorenzo rejoiced that he was able to obtain a cardinal's hat for his son Giovanni who, as Pope Leo X, would become famous for his lavish patronage of the arts, and for presiding over the corrupt church against which Luther rebelled. Leo’s cousin Giulio, as Pope Clement VII, “the most disastrous of all pope’s” would witness the sack of Rome and the schism with Henry VIII of England.