Articles by Lars Berglund
Svensk tidskrift för musikforsking/Swedish Journal of Music Research, 2024
During the winter and spring of 1653-1654, the English ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1675... more During the winter and spring of 1653-1654, the English ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-1675) resided in Uppsala and attended the court of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689). On 27 March 1654, he reported in his diary that some members of his entourage had heard the Queen's Italian musicians sing in her chapel, and that later that day they had dined with Whitelocke, performed for him and were rewarded for their effort: Easter Monday there was great solemnity & excellent musicke in the Q[ueens] chappell, some of her Italians musitians, dined at Wh[itelockes] house, & played & sang to him in the after noon, & lost not their expected reward. (Spadling, ed., 1990, p. 345) The chapel Whitelocke referred to was situated in the southern wing of Uppsala Castle and was a square church hall of three naves, connected to the large banquet hall, Rikssalen. The Italians of the Queen's music comprised a group of about twenty singers and musicians who arrived in Sweden in November 1652, led by the young organist and composer Vincenzo Albrici (1631-1687). This report is quite remarkable because it shows that the Italian musicians that Christina had recruited to her court did perform sacred music at her court servicessomething that has been disputed, or at least not accepted, in previous scholarship. In this study we show that this likely happened regularly and that the repertoire can largely be reconstructed. Some of the sacred repertoire was even performed with texts that were otherwise considered improper in Lutheran liturgy. We argue that both the sacred and secular repertoire of the Italian singers and the circumstances around their recruitment should be understood against the background of her astonishing decision to abdicate, leave Sweden, and convert to the Catholic faith. Christina has gone down in history as a dedicated promoter of science and the arts, both during her reign as sovereign of the Swedish kingdom (1644-1654) and during her years in Rome (1655-1689). Among her better-known acts of patronage was the recruitment to Stockholm of René Descartes (1596-1650), but he was only one of many prominent European intellectuals who visited her court, and one of many with whom she corresponded (Brummer, 1997; Garstein, 1992, pp. 569-587). Apart from her interests in philosophy, moral issues, and matters of faith, Christina also took a deep interest in the performing arts, and not least music (Lucca, 2011; Losleben, 2012). Roughly, two competing images of Queen Christina's patronage of the arts and letters Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning / Swedish Journal of Music Research (STM-SJM), volume 106.
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Translatio Musicae: Circulation and Use of Music in Early Modern Europe (edited by Lars Berglund and Maria Schildt), 2024
This is an article in proofs, about to be published.
The study focuses on the local and global as... more This is an article in proofs, about to be published.
The study focuses on the local and global aspects of the circulation of Carissimi’s sacred works in the seventeenth century. I use a catalogue of music manuscripts from Chiesa del Gesù, preserved in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and compare this list with works preserved in manuscripts and contemporary printed editions from Rome and abroad. These comparisons suggest that the highly restricted accessibility of Carissimi’s music during the composer’s lifetime and in the decades after his death was a reality also within Rome and not only abroad, but that manuscripts seem to have circulated within the Jesuit circles of Rome. I also use some case studies to demonstrate how the catalogue from Chiesa del Gesù can be used to resolve questions of attribution.
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Turismo musicale: Storia, geografica, didattica / Musical Tourism: History, Geography and Didactics, Rosa Cafiero, Guido Lucarno, Raffaela Gabriella Rizzo, Gigliola Onorato (eds.), Bologna: Pàtron editore, 2020
Many Swedish noblemen made educational journeys in Europe in the early modern period. These journ... more Many Swedish noblemen made educational journeys in Europe in the early modern period. These journeys were motivated by notions of nation building, while at thc same time they served the social ambitions of the families. I focus on two such journeys: Carl Lilliecrona, travelling
aound 1640 and Jean Lefebure and Bengt Ferrner around 1760. The examples suggest a shift: whereas Lilliccrona’s journey could be described as an anthropological experience in a musical
terra incognita, more than a century later, Lefebure and Ferrner followed a more predetermined course, aiming to conform with now standardized cosmopolitan patterns of taste.
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Contrafacta. Modes of Music Re-textualization in the Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century / [ed] Marina Toffetti, Gabriele Taschetti, Krakow: Musica Iagellonica, 2020
A Düben collection manuscript with the shelf number Vmhs 11:2 contains a com-position ascribed to... more A Düben collection manuscript with the shelf number Vmhs 11:2 contains a com-position ascribed to Giacomo Carissimi, with the text incipit Isti sunt triumphatores. The attribution to Carissimi has been regarded as uncertain, but it is still included in several work catalogues. This article shows that the attribution is certainly false. The piece is a re-texted version of a madrigal composed by Stefano Landi, included in his first collection of madrigals, printed in Venice 1619. The title of the original madrigal is “Arde Filli d’un viso”. The text is a poem by Matteo Piacentini published first in Vicenza in 1600, and then again in Venice in 1611, but in Landi’s madrigal the text is modified, or likely misread; the title of the original poem is “Arde Fillide in viso”.The Vmhs 11:2 manuscript in Uppsala contains a complete set of partbooks of two madrigals for five voices, the one by Stefano Landi, and Galeazzo Sabbatini’s “Io amo che tanto basta”. They were prepared by the young Gustav Düben in the early 1650s, perhaps originally intended for instrumental performance. At a later moment, prob-ably after 1663, Düben started to prepare a contrafactum of Landi’s madrigal, using a Latin liturgical text, Isti sunt triumphatores. The text appears to have been borrowed from a printed collection of motets by Gasparo Casati, in that case most likely from the Antwerp reprint published by Marie and Madeleine Phalèse. Liturgically, the text is associated with the Feasts of Apostles, and the contrafactum could possibly have been intended for such a service in the German Church in Stockholm, where Gustav Düben was the organist. It was most likely at this point that Düben misattributed the piece to Carissimi, perhaps associating the manuscript with the time when an en-semble of Italian singers visited the Swedish court between 1652 and 1654, bringing with them a large number of works by Carissimi.The contrafactum is not completed. Only the first thirty-seven bars of the canto primo part have text underlay, and eleven bars of the alto. Since the Latin text was very dif-ferent than the Italian madrigal text, both regarding meter and content, the re-texting involved a number of challenges. In the preserved part, a number of modifications have been made to the music, which is typical of re-texting practices. The melismatic passage opening the madrigal has been set syllabically in the contrafactum, thus annihi-lating the word painting in the original. Notes have been split in two to accommodate the text, or on the contrary joined in melismas. The attempt at a re-texting does not seem very successful, and it is possible that Düben abandoned the task for this reason, even though such an assumption must remain tentative.
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Contrafacta. Modes of Music Re-textualization in the Late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century / [ed] Marina Toffetti, Gabriele Taschetti, Krakow: Musica Iagellonica, 2020
Ulrika Eleonora the Elder, Queen of Sweden from 1680, died in July 1693. She was buried in the Ro... more Ulrika Eleonora the Elder, Queen of Sweden from 1680, died in July 1693. She was buried in the Royal funeral church, Riddarholmskyrkan, on November 28 of the same year. The Queen’s funeral was designed to be one of the most magnificent ceremonies of state in Sweden during the Baroque era. The decorations for the ceremony were created by the Royal court architect, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger (1654–1728). For the Queen’s coffin he built a castrum doloris with a huge black pyramid, covered with emblems and inscriptions painted in a golden colour, which were illuminated by lamps inside the construction. Little or nothing has been known about the music played dur-ing this ceremony. According to the official printed account two musical works were performed. In this article I am able to show that the works referred to consisted of one composition by the French court violinist Pierre Verdier, Kristus är mitt liv, and one by the Flemish composer Daniel Danielis, Aspice e caelis, with a new text in Swedish. This can be shown by means of source and watermark studies and by analysing the texts. The biblical verse on which Verdier’s piece is based (Phil. 1:21: “[for to me,] to live is Christ and to die is gain”), was the Queen’s motto and the text for the funeral sermon. Moreover, Danielis’ Aspice e caelis was originally composed for the funeral of princess Eleonora of Güstrow-Mecklenburg, who was a cousin to Ulrika Eleonora’s husband, the King. That piece has been re-texted with an undoubtedly tailor-made Swedish text, which closely follows the varied rhythm and stress patterns of Danielis’ recitative setting, at the same time mirroring the import and affect of the original text, but not the exact wording. Both works are marked by a sad, plaintive affect appropriate for such an occasion. Both are scored for gamba consort, which at this time was associated with tears and sorrow. In both works we find instances of symbolic, rhetorical personi-fication: in Verdier’s composition the duet between bass and soprano can be associated with the Queen’s tender relation to Christ. In Danielis’ motet the solo soprano voice represents the female gender of the person being buried. Apart from these two works, also a choral arrangement by Christian Ritter, Einen guten Kampf, can be associated with the funeral.The recycling of music for the funeral is not a coincidence, but should be understood as a representation of dynastic continuity. In a similar way, the visual decorations of the funeral were re-used at later royal funerals. There are also indications that Verdier’s Kristus är mitt liv was used again at the funeral of Ulrika Eleonora’s husband King Charles XI in 1697.
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Det åskådliga och det bottenlösa. Tankar om konst och humaniora (=Eidos; 22), fskr. Margaretha Rossholm-Lagerlöf, red. Peter Gillgren et al., 2010
"Understanding Music, Experiencing History. Reflections Over a Madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi"
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Löftet om lycka. Estetik, musik, bildning (fskr. Sten Dahlstedt, red. Anders Burman et al., Göteborg: Daidalos), 2013
"Music Sold by the Metre: an Essay about Music, Meaning and the Eventual Limits of Music Analysis... more "Music Sold by the Metre: an Essay about Music, Meaning and the Eventual Limits of Music Analysis"
The essay presents an analysis of the Ikea textile "Margareta", to test the limits of meaning construction, reception and analysis of music.
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Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World: Provincial Cosmopolitan, ed. Göran Rydèn, 2013
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Swedish Monuments of Music as Instrument of National Profiling
In an article from 1942, Stig Wal... more Swedish Monuments of Music as Instrument of National Profiling
In an article from 1942, Stig Walin proposed a strategy for Swedish historical musicology. His starting point was the notion that Sweden did not have a very strong muscial tradition and no national composers that could be compared with the greatest European names. Instead, Walin proposed, the driving force for Swedish musicologists would have to be patriotism, and a general interest in the social and cultural history of music.
Such ideas has been defining for musicology in Sweden, and can be traced in memorial or documentary projects such as the edition series Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (with the Berwald edition as an exception), the phonogram series Musica Sveciae, the historical handbook Musiken i Sverige and the recent project Levande musikarv.
At the same time, that approach gave rise to a strong focus on socio-cultural contexts and historical-antropological approches, thanks to which Swedish musicology turned out to be well prepared for he re-negotiaton of musicological methodology during the last decades.
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Musica Iagellonica, 2017
Music by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli did not have a prominent place in Sweden during the early m... more Music by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli did not have a prominent place in Sweden during the early modern period and a substantial part of the music by them preserved in Swedish libraries arrived as booties of war during the Thirty Years’ War and was never in practical use. There is performance material in manuscripts connected with the German Church in Stockholm, Uppsala University and some of the cathedral city gymnasia, with parts mostly copied from German or Flemish anthologies of Italian music. The situation in Sweden differs radically from Denmark, where there was a much more active reception, with Danish composers traveling to study for Giovanni Gabrieli. Still, it is argued that the kind of peripheral and mediated dissemination revealed in Swedish Gabrieli sources should not be mistaken for passive reception, but was rather marked by a different degrees of agency.
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Schütz-Jahrbuch, 2002
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Genre and Ritual: The Cultural Heritage of Medieval Rituals (Eyolf Östrem et al, eds), 2005
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["The historicity of musical expression: early modern music and listening"], in: Yearbook of the ... more ["The historicity of musical expression: early modern music and listening"], in: Yearbook of the Royal Academy of Letters 2017
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Commonplace Culture in Western Europe in the Early Modern Period II: Consolidation of God-given Power (Kathryn Banks & Philiep G. Bossier eds.) Leuven: Peeters, 2011
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Musicologica Istropolitana, 2018
The Düben Collection in Uppsala contains a relatively large share of Italian music. A third of th... more The Düben Collection in Uppsala contains a relatively large share of Italian music. A third of the composers represented were Italian, and about a sixth of the works in manuscript. About half of them were copied from prints, both within and outside Sweden, but there are also a small number of unique manuscripts that are the result of manusrcipt dissemination directly from Italy. The most interesting came with an Italian ensemble recruited by Queen Christina in 1652. Moreover, the cases of Simone Vesi and Giovanni Carisio illustrates the complexity of the collection and its dissemination routes, and the necessity to scrutinize and contextualize every single item.
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The article describes the practices of acquisition of music behind the Düben Collection. Music wa... more The article describes the practices of acquisition of music behind the Düben Collection. Music was copied into manuscripts from prints, but was also obtained in the form of groups of manuscripts from different regions of Europe. Close personal contacts and networks seem to have been more important than traditional trade routes.
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Books by Lars Berglund
Fontes Musicae in Polonia C/C/XXIII; Kaspar Förster Jun. (1616–1673). Sacrae cantiones 3, 4, & 5 vocuum, ed. Lars Berglund, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2021
A critical edition of 12 concertato motets for 1 to 3 voices by Kaspar Förster jnr (1616-1673). T... more A critical edition of 12 concertato motets for 1 to 3 voices by Kaspar Förster jnr (1616-1673). The edition is free to download as a pdf. It is also available in print (40 PLN + shipping, i.e. c. € 9).
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
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Fontes Musicae in Polonia C/XXIX; Kaspar Förster Jun. (1616–1673). Sacrae cantiones 3, 4, & 5 vocuum, ed. Lars Berglund, Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Sub Lupa, 2021
A critical edition of 10 concertato motets for 3 to 5 voices by Kaspar Förster jnr (1616-1673). T... more A critical edition of 10 concertato motets for 3 to 5 voices by Kaspar Förster jnr (1616-1673). The edition is free to download as a pdf. It is also available in print (35 PLN + shipping, i.e. c. € 8).
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
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The present volume offers a reflection on the phenomenon of the re-textualization of vocal music ... more The present volume offers a reflection on the phenomenon of the re-textualization of vocal music in the 16th and 17th century. Its main object of investigation is the contrafactum, an intertextual artifact par excellence that is studied here from multiple points of view.
The first part of the book examines some procedures of textual substitution carried out in various parts of Europe by poets, literati, men of culture, or culturally updated members of the clergy, who produced highly refined contrafacta.
The second part deals with the adaptation of texts dictated by necessities of various kinds (celebratory, political, confessional), often made in a hasty manner and re-using pre-existing vocal compositions, but still able to reveal significant aspects of the history of religious culture in Europe at the time of the Reformations.
Furthermore, it represents a useful work tool for anyone wishing to carry on the research into the European assimilation of the secular vocal forms in the Italian language, by making available to the reader a description of the contents of most printed collections including contrafacta published in Europe between 1576 and 1649.
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Articles by Lars Berglund
The study focuses on the local and global aspects of the circulation of Carissimi’s sacred works in the seventeenth century. I use a catalogue of music manuscripts from Chiesa del Gesù, preserved in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and compare this list with works preserved in manuscripts and contemporary printed editions from Rome and abroad. These comparisons suggest that the highly restricted accessibility of Carissimi’s music during the composer’s lifetime and in the decades after his death was a reality also within Rome and not only abroad, but that manuscripts seem to have circulated within the Jesuit circles of Rome. I also use some case studies to demonstrate how the catalogue from Chiesa del Gesù can be used to resolve questions of attribution.
aound 1640 and Jean Lefebure and Bengt Ferrner around 1760. The examples suggest a shift: whereas Lilliccrona’s journey could be described as an anthropological experience in a musical
terra incognita, more than a century later, Lefebure and Ferrner followed a more predetermined course, aiming to conform with now standardized cosmopolitan patterns of taste.
The essay presents an analysis of the Ikea textile "Margareta", to test the limits of meaning construction, reception and analysis of music.
In an article from 1942, Stig Walin proposed a strategy for Swedish historical musicology. His starting point was the notion that Sweden did not have a very strong muscial tradition and no national composers that could be compared with the greatest European names. Instead, Walin proposed, the driving force for Swedish musicologists would have to be patriotism, and a general interest in the social and cultural history of music.
Such ideas has been defining for musicology in Sweden, and can be traced in memorial or documentary projects such as the edition series Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (with the Berwald edition as an exception), the phonogram series Musica Sveciae, the historical handbook Musiken i Sverige and the recent project Levande musikarv.
At the same time, that approach gave rise to a strong focus on socio-cultural contexts and historical-antropological approches, thanks to which Swedish musicology turned out to be well prepared for he re-negotiaton of musicological methodology during the last decades.
Books by Lars Berglund
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
The first part of the book examines some procedures of textual substitution carried out in various parts of Europe by poets, literati, men of culture, or culturally updated members of the clergy, who produced highly refined contrafacta.
The second part deals with the adaptation of texts dictated by necessities of various kinds (celebratory, political, confessional), often made in a hasty manner and re-using pre-existing vocal compositions, but still able to reveal significant aspects of the history of religious culture in Europe at the time of the Reformations.
Furthermore, it represents a useful work tool for anyone wishing to carry on the research into the European assimilation of the secular vocal forms in the Italian language, by making available to the reader a description of the contents of most printed collections including contrafacta published in Europe between 1576 and 1649.
The study focuses on the local and global aspects of the circulation of Carissimi’s sacred works in the seventeenth century. I use a catalogue of music manuscripts from Chiesa del Gesù, preserved in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, and compare this list with works preserved in manuscripts and contemporary printed editions from Rome and abroad. These comparisons suggest that the highly restricted accessibility of Carissimi’s music during the composer’s lifetime and in the decades after his death was a reality also within Rome and not only abroad, but that manuscripts seem to have circulated within the Jesuit circles of Rome. I also use some case studies to demonstrate how the catalogue from Chiesa del Gesù can be used to resolve questions of attribution.
aound 1640 and Jean Lefebure and Bengt Ferrner around 1760. The examples suggest a shift: whereas Lilliccrona’s journey could be described as an anthropological experience in a musical
terra incognita, more than a century later, Lefebure and Ferrner followed a more predetermined course, aiming to conform with now standardized cosmopolitan patterns of taste.
The essay presents an analysis of the Ikea textile "Margareta", to test the limits of meaning construction, reception and analysis of music.
In an article from 1942, Stig Walin proposed a strategy for Swedish historical musicology. His starting point was the notion that Sweden did not have a very strong muscial tradition and no national composers that could be compared with the greatest European names. Instead, Walin proposed, the driving force for Swedish musicologists would have to be patriotism, and a general interest in the social and cultural history of music.
Such ideas has been defining for musicology in Sweden, and can be traced in memorial or documentary projects such as the edition series Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (with the Berwald edition as an exception), the phonogram series Musica Sveciae, the historical handbook Musiken i Sverige and the recent project Levande musikarv.
At the same time, that approach gave rise to a strong focus on socio-cultural contexts and historical-antropological approches, thanks to which Swedish musicology turned out to be well prepared for he re-negotiaton of musicological methodology during the last decades.
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
Förster was born in Danzig (Gdansk) and studied in Rome for Giacomo Carissimi in the 1630s. From c. 1637-1652 he was a singer at the Polish court, and from 1652-1667 Hofkapellmeister in Denmark. He died in Oliwa 1673.
Förster's music is Italianate in style, with smooth vocal melodies and a sectionalized motet style with a variation of styles and textures. His music is highly expressive, with a harmonic language where he develops the Roman tradition in new direction. He was an important mediator of the new Italian musical style in Northern Europe.
The first part of the book examines some procedures of textual substitution carried out in various parts of Europe by poets, literati, men of culture, or culturally updated members of the clergy, who produced highly refined contrafacta.
The second part deals with the adaptation of texts dictated by necessities of various kinds (celebratory, political, confessional), often made in a hasty manner and re-using pre-existing vocal compositions, but still able to reveal significant aspects of the history of religious culture in Europe at the time of the Reformations.
Furthermore, it represents a useful work tool for anyone wishing to carry on the research into the European assimilation of the secular vocal forms in the Italian language, by making available to the reader a description of the contents of most printed collections including contrafacta published in Europe between 1576 and 1649.
One of Queen Christina’s first actions after she had settled down in Rome in 1656 was to appoint Giacomo Carissimi as her maestro di cappella del concerto di camera. Her path to this decision originated several years earlier. It seems to have started with curiosity, from having read about the excellence of Carissimi’s music in Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis, but not being able to hear it at her court in Stockholm. It continued with the recruitment of an ensemble of about twenty Italian singers and musicians to Sweden in 1652, predominantly from Rome. Now, Christina was finally able to hear music by Carissimi, performed by musicians that had been in close contact with the composer and had direct access to his music. An episode from Münster on her journey to Rome suggests that her encounter with Carissimi’s music had made a deep impact. The anecdote in question has been dismissed as nonsense and propaganda. The musical connection proves that it is most likely accurate, because at the occasion Christina specifically asked to hear two Carissimi pieces that her Italian musicians had brought to Sweden, and that are still preserved in Uppsala. Her choice of repertoire also gives some room for speculations about which traits in Carissimi’s music that could possibly have captivated her.
In conclusion, this paper will argue that Christina’s early involvement with Italian music, and in particular church music from Rome, should be seen in the context of her astonishing decision to abdicate from the Swedish throne and convert to Catholicism, and was part of a deliberate self-transformation, from a ruling Lutheran regent to a Catholic Queen without a land.
Such an ultimate demonstration of music’s powers in music was also a great challenge for a composer. The central scenes of these operas are those where Orfeus by means of his outstanding singing and playing is persuading first Charon, and then Hades himself, to let in into the underworld and to release his Euridice. In Peri’s version of the drama, this persuation is delivered by means of a stylized and highly rhetorical, elevated speech. In Monteverdi’s version it is instead accomplished by a highly exaggerated, performative display of vocal virtousity. Moreover, in Monteverdi’s setting the underworld in represented by a specific sonority, thanks to the unusual decision to let different instruments accompany the different main protagonists.
Forty years later, the same storyline was turned into an opera again, and performed in Paris with music by the Roman composer Luigi Rossi. The event was an attempt by Cardinal Mazarin to introduce Italian opera in France. In contrast to the stilisized, classicizing operas by Peri and Monteverdi, the Parisian Orfeo was an extravagant display of stage machinery and virtuoso singing and the staging required enormous recources. In this performance, the underworld was represented by a combination of an exceptionally lavish stage set, designed by Giacomo Torelli, and a suprisingly straight-forward, heartfelt expression of grief and longing in the aria sung by Orfeo in front of Hades – possibly influenced by the fact that Rossi’s wife passed away during the process of composition.
Then I will proceed to one, or possibly two analytical case studies in the sacred vocal music of Dietrich Buxtehude and his contemporaries, focusing on 1) large scale tonal, modal and harmonic practices, 2)the interplay between phrase organization, harmony, counterpoint and rhythm, and 3) genre hybridity.
Thanks to recent research on the collection by several collaborating scholars (especially Maria Schildt, Peter Wollny, Lars Berglund), it is today to a large extent possible to trace the routes of transmission behind the c. 3000 manuscript sources in the collection and to understand some of the practices behind its history of acquisition. A unique feature of the collection is that it to a large extent contains both manuscripts copied in Sweden by the Hofkapellmeister and his helpers, and the foreign originals from which these manuscripts were made.
A relatively large part of the manuscript sources were copied from prints mainly from Germany, Nehterlands and Italy, some of which are still in the collection, or can be traced to the vicinities of the Royal court. Morover, there are four main routes of manuscript dissimination: from the city of Gdansk; from the electoral or secondogeniture courts of Saxony (Dresden, Zeitz, Halle, Merseburg); from Vienna; and from the region of Hamburg and Lübeck – the latter likely being the most important route. In most cases the transmission can actually be traced back to either personal or official relations or contacts, at least tentatively. Such contacts seem to have been of much greater importance than for example routes of the regular book trade.
French and Italian music had strong impact on the Lutheran regions of Northern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In a remarkable way, the elites in the Lutheran countries favoured and desired the music of its competitors: the French kingdom and the Roman-Catholic church. This project studies how French secular and Italian sacred music was circulated and used in the North, using the Düben collection as a case in point. We use the concept ‘translatio’ to describe the double movement of dislocation and adaptation for the new context. The project has three parts: (1) tracing and mapping routes of circulation; (2) identifying and examining the most important mediators in this process, and (3) scrutinizing and analysing some examples of local adaptation of French and Italian music for new contexts and purposes. The main source material will be the manuscripts and prints in the Düben collection, but complemented with preserved music in European libraries, and with historical inventories of now lost music, a largely neglected material. We use philological methods to trace connections between preserved musical sources and map the networks of mediators. We will also transcribe selected compositions and analyse the music, to reveal practices of adaptation and imitation. Our aim is to provide new understanding of cultural relations in early modern Europe, focusing on how contending forms of religious and political belonging were meditated through music.
Lars Berglund and Maria Schildt
Uppsala University