INTRODUCTION
On 11 April 1578, Joanna of Austria (1547–78), Grand Duchess of Tuscany, died in childbirth in Florence, at thirty-one years of age. The wake took place the following day, and in the evening she was laid to rest in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the burial church of the Medici family. Solemn exequies featuring musical performances were organized in the same church on April 18, the seventh day after Joanna's death.Footnote 1 Among the commoners attending the event was Giuliano de’ Ricci, grandson of Niccolò Machiavelli and an aspiring scholar who wrote an account of the ceremony in his chronicle of Florence.Footnote 2 In it, he described the funeral procession, the church decorations, and the catafalque, also devoting a few words to the liturgy itself. He recalled the dignitaries who celebrated the rites and commented on the musical accompaniment, stating that the mass “was sung with sad music and very sad sounds of organs.”Footnote 3 This brief passage suggests that it was the emotional content of the music that drew de’ Ricci's attention, yet the clumsy repetition of the adjective sad betrays his difficulty in elaborating on what he heard. After all, de’ Ricci is not known to have had any musical education, and his words are characterized by the brevity and vagueness that are the norm in statements about music by nonmusicians in early modern Italy.Footnote 4
Against this background, it would seem that an appropriate understanding of early modern music for the deadFootnote 5—which, in the present context, refers to polyphonic and/or instrumental art music, as opposed to the ecclesiastical singing known as plainchantFootnote 6—could be attained only through the examination of musical sources and the settings that survive therein. Research in this direction has already achieved solid results: scholars have identified a tendency toward stylistic restraint and conservatism in the repertory for the liturgy for the dead.Footnote 7 This interpretative framework is motivated by the admittedly striking penchant for chant paraphrase, a supposedly archaic compositional technique in which one or more parts elaborate (paraphrase) a plainchant melody. By focusing on works, however, this historiographical narrative has located agency only in the act of composition, neglecting both performance and listening. Few scholars have attempted an interpretation of early modern Catholic music for the dead as heard, and their findings diverge curiously. In his groundbreaking study on the Requiem mass from its beginnings to 1600, for example, Harold Luce regarded music as a “means to intensify the somberness and bleakness of funerals.”Footnote 8 In contrast, Grayson Wagstaff proposed that music for the dead was a “way to control weeping and other inappropriate displays of emotions that betrayed people's feelings—the sadness, loss, and anger over death that were inappropriate in light of the orthodox view of death as the door to the rewards of heaven.”Footnote 9 Both readings were based on intense work on Catholic repertories, but they did not incorporate any actual historical accounts on listening to music for the dead. Thus, these interpretations run the risk of projecting the scholars’ understanding of sacred music and its style onto the past. The purpose of this contribution is to put past listeners at the center of inquiry, with a particular focus on listeners who were educated but not specialized in music.Footnote 10 Such listeners—whether they were clerics or laypeople—were certainly numerous at public and well-attended events such as exequies and other commemorations of the dead, yet their voices do not feature in musicological studies of exequial music. What were their impressions of the music performed? Which meanings did they attach to it? Does our modern historiographical narrative resonate with their views?
I seek to answer these questions with regard to post-Tridentine Italy, an extremely important period in the history of early modern music for the dead. From the 1560s onward, the patchwork of Italian states witnessed a veritable explosion in the production and circulation of music for the liturgy for the dead. This suggests that the repertory had acquired an important function and was performed often, a circumstance that mirrors the renewed centrality that post-Tridentine religiosity assigned to the suffrages for the dead—in an intentionally marked contrast to Protestantism. The popularity of music for the dead, however, is anything but obvious: before the 1560s only a few settings were available in Italy, and the advent of printed music in the early sixteenth century did little to change this, as is evident from the fact that only three collections with music for the dead were published in the first sixty years of music printing on the Italian Peninsula.Footnote 11 This scarcity has been interpreted as a hesitation to allow music into liturgies for the dead, a hesitation rooted in music's long-standing association with festive occasions. The papal master of ceremonies Paride de’ Grassi (ca. 1450–1528), for instance, articulated this very clearly in his Tractatus de Funeribus et Exequiis (Treatise on funeral rites and exequies, probably written in 1511),Footnote 12 stating that counterpoint (i.e., polyphonic music) is not used during the liturgy for the dead because it is a sign of joy.Footnote 13 The same reasoning applied to the organ, which was expected to remain silent during ceremonies for the dead.Footnote 14 Grassi evidently regarded plainchant as the sole appropriate means to celebrate masses and offices for the dead, a view that also was voiced in the seventeenth century, when the repertory pro mortuis had already become widely available.Footnote 15 This apparent contradiction must be taken into account when working on music for the liturgy for the dead, which remained an exceptional repertory, with distinctive features, even when it was performed on a regular basis.Footnote 16 Thus, it is of fundamental importance to understand not only how this music was composed but also how it was heard and understood by cultured society at large.
In order to do so, this article does not concern itself with musical sources; rather, it focuses on written accounts that address the performance of music during ceremonies for the dead but do not assume that their readers possess a fully fledged musical education. The core of my source material is made up of funeral books, which are festival books devoted to the commemoration of exequies.Footnote 17 From the second half of the sixteenth century onward, funeral books became relatively common in Italy, yet so far they have not been the object of thorough musicological inquiry.Footnote 18 These sources cannot be treated as factual accounts of historical reality, since their purpose was often overtly propagandistic, but they do bear witness to their authors’ worldviews and ideologies.Footnote 19 Even if potentially fictional, a funeral book can reveal how music was understood and verbalized, showing, furthermore, what was regarded as desirable and appropriate by its author and by those who commissioned it (often the very same individuals who organized the exequies). My arguments have developed through the comparison of several funeral books, authored by writers who were active in a time span of over a century in different regions of what is now called Italy. Despite being approximately contemporary, these authors did not write and transmit their experiences in exactly the same way. I argue, however, that a certain level of abstraction enables the identification of meaningful rhetorical patterns concerning the verbalization of musical experiences within a specific ritual context. These conventions can be taken as the object of historical inquiry without presupposing absolute consistency among the authors who shared their use.
In order to contextualize the picture emerging from the funeral books, I also consider other textual sources, such as treatises on liturgy and funeral orations.Footnote 20 The notion of music expounded in these texts is intertwined with a specific understanding of the liturgy for the dead and its objectives. Over the course of my argument, it will become clear that emotions were regarded as a central aspect of the liturgy for the dead, in which contrasting forms of emotional display were cultivated and encouraged, and the function of music was understood along these same lines. Thus, this article seeks to contribute to the investigation of emotional responses to deathFootnote 21 and death rituals in post-Tridentine Italy—a defining yet still under-researched period in the history of Western attitudes toward deathFootnote 22—tracing the correlation between Catholic exequial music and the emotional climate of its performance context.Footnote 23
By tackling these topics, my research situates itself at the crossroads of the history of musical listening and the history of emotions. The latter, in particular, has attracted considerable skepticism in recent years, so further clarification of my methodology is necessary. Critics have argued that emotions of the past are beyond the reach of text-based historical inquiry, since such inquiry relies on representations rather than on the emotions themselves.Footnote 24 A history of musical listening has similar limitations, since one cannot retrieve the very act of listening but only its transmedial depiction in texts or images.Footnote 25 In this article, however, I am not interested in the acts of listening and feeling themselves; rather, I am concerned with the representations of a musical experience in literary works such as funeral books and orations. Nonetheless, my research does not comment solely on a literary tradition and its tropes. Quite the contrary: the texts studied here both mirrored and informed the linguistic and conceptual resources listeners could use to construe their experience of music, thus truly revealing facets of past emotional cultures and listening practices.
SADNESS AND SWEETNESS
In previous publications, I sifted through funeral books in order to find pieces of information regarding music performance.Footnote 26 Although funeral books are mainly concerned with the ephemeral architecture built for the exequies,Footnote 27 they often describe the ceremony itself and its musical accompaniment, suggesting that the latter was regarded as one of the ingredients of successful solemn exequies, and was deemed worthy of being recorded in words—albeit often very briefly. Such a reading of funeral books does not tell us how their authors made sense of the music they heard, however. In order to cast light on this aspect, I mapped the lexicon used in connection with performances of music in a corpus of ninety-seven funeral books published between 1558 and 1666, commemorating exequies celebrated on the Italian Peninsula and Sicily.Footnote 28 All these sources are written in the Italian vernacular—with only one exception drafted in Latin—and common features in language, content, and structure suggest that they can be regarded as a literary genre defined by shared conventions.Footnote 29 Thus, they appear as a fairly homogeneous corpus and can be discussed collectively. Nonetheless, there is a certain variety both in the size and scope of the publications and in the social and political standing of the personages commemorated, who range from emperors and kings to military commanders and artists.Footnote 30 Accordingly, the economic resources available for the exequies could vary greatly and certainly also affected the musical performances in question. However, these practical differences are of secondary importance for my research, which focuses on discourses about music rather than on reconstructing actual events. Accordingly, my lexicographic analysis is concerned primarily with the terms employed to connote the experience of music and does not take into account words used in their literal meaning to name performers, music genres, musical instruments, or performance practices. Furthermore, for the sake of sample coherence, the analysis excludes the performances in the plainchant tradition as well as those by instrumental military bands (trumpets and drums), both of which require separate discussion.Footnote 31
Table 1 lists words that appear at least ten times in the text corpus. As mentioned above, all these texts but one are written in Italian, and for this reason table 1 uses Italian nouns to represent occurrences in all of the sources (with the nouns standing in for all forms—nouns, adjectives, and adverbs). The few words listed here make up over a third of all the terms employed, revealing the consistency of the lexicon used to characterize music in funeral books. Note, moreover, that many of the words occurring fewer than ten times—and, thus, not recorded in table 1—are close in meaning to these more common ones.Footnote 32
Table 1 – Terms that connote the experience of music in funeral books (1558–1666)
As is clear from the frequent use of concepts such as eccellenza and solennità, funeral books often extol the excellence and solemnity of the performance. This is either stated directly or implied by describing the performers as rare or handpicked. According to the funeral book describing the Venetian exequies for Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici (1549–1609), for instance, the organizers summoned “the rarest singers and instrumentalists of the city [Venice] and its surroundings.”Footnote 33 Similarly, the singers at the Bolognese exequies for Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623) are described as “the best and most refined voices of the city, including not a few from abroad.”Footnote 34 Needless to say, these word choices match the commemorative function of funeral books, implicitly praising the organizers of the exequies and their magnificence.
The most striking aspect of the lexicon employed in funeral books, however, is the ample use of words denoting emotions. Mestizia (sadness) is the most common term, occurring twenty-one times (both as an adjective and as a noun) across the entire time span taken into account. Another very common term connected to the same semantic domain is flebilità, used almost exclusively in its adjectival form, flebile. Although in modern Italian flebile is often employed in the sense of “feeble,” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its meaning was closer to the Latin root flere (to weep), and I translate it as “tearful.”Footnote 35 Furthermore, funeral books employ several other terms—not listed in table 1—that are related to the same semantic domain as mestizia and flebilità, such as tristezza (sadness)Footnote 36 and lacrime (tears).Footnote 37
Two concrete examples will suffice to convey how such emotion words are used in the sources. The first is one of the earliest texts in my sample, Le essequie del sig. donno Hercole II duca quarto di Ferrara (The exequies of Lord Hercules II, fourth Duke of Ferrara), a funeral book recounting the exequies for Duke Ercole II d'Este (1508–59) held in Ferrara on 27 November 1559, the day after the investiture of his heir, Duke Alfonso II d'Este (1533–97).Footnote 38 The main public event of the ceremony was a funeral procession at dawn through the streets of the city, which were decked in mourning. The anonymous author of the printed account recorded that “at one end of the Giudecca [corso della Giovecca in modern-day Ferrara] there was an arch, and another one at the other end. The body was carried under these arches, which were black, decorated with epitaphs, and full of candles. On top they had a very high dome entirely covered with small lights, and inside the domes there was sad and funereal music.”Footnote 39 The chronicler's attention was clearly caught by the position of the musicians—situated in elevated domes lit by candles, instead of walking with the cortege—but it is nonetheless telling that the music was described as “sad and funereal,” underlining its emotional content rather than any other feature.
Other sources discuss music and emotion in more elaborate terms, also addressing its effects on the listeners. Let us consider as our second example the Feralis pompa serenissimae Margaritae Austriacae (Funeral pomp of the most serene Margaret of Austria), the only Latin funeral book in my sample. It was written by the monk Giacomo Tramontana to commemorate the exequies held in Piacenza for Duchess Margaret of Parma (1522–86). With regard to the music, the author wrote that
fifty-seven monk priests came, not ignorant of the musical art, among whom excelled the Sicilian Mauro Panormita, a very talented master of the musical art, who had written in a grave and sad way the psalms, the versicles, the litanies, the responsories, and the other items to be sung that are usually performed in church during the suffrages for the dead. Together with these, the monks of San Sisto reached the number of a hundred and twelve. On the day of burial, the monks of San Sisto, holding candles, proceeded in pairs, as is usual, stretching in a long procession concluded by a double musical choir, which performed psalms and responsories written in a grave and sad way, so that the ears of those listening were affected by incredible devotion and sadness.Footnote 40
This account is exceptionally detailed: it mentions the author of the music, the number of performers involved—a unique occurrence in the entire corpus—the genres set to music, and the position of the choir in the procession. It is worth noting that, according to Tramontana, the character of the music was defined by the way it was composed (Tramontana used the verb notare, which I translate as “to write”), and it is described with the terms gravitas (gravity) and moestitia (sadness). In turn, the emotions conjured by the music instilled in the listeners comparable states of mind—namely, devotion and sadness (devotio and tristitia). From this account, it is clear that Tramontana regarded music's ability to negotiate emotions as its most important contribution to the ceremony.
In order to put such descriptions into context, one needs to take a step back and consider the role of emotions in the liturgy for the dead as such. Irrespective of Christian views of death as the gate to the afterlife, liturgical treatises agree in identifying sadness as the key emotion of funeral ceremonies. The idea that the liturgical formulary pro mortuis expresses sadness (tristitia) already appears—albeit in passing—in the Libellus de Exordiis et Incrementis Quarundam in Observationibus Ecclesiasticis Rerum (Book about the origins and developments of some aspects of the liturgy) by Walahfrid Strabo,Footnote 41 written ca. 840 and commonly regarded as the first history of liturgy in the Christian West.Footnote 42 This emotional understanding of the liturgy for the dead is expounded in greater detail in Guillaume Durand's Rationale divinorum officiorum (Rationale for the divine offices), a highly influential treatise written in the thirteenth century but still widely read in post-Tridentine Italy. Durand noted that “death is the vengeance of sin, from which grief and affliction of mind derive, and the exequies for the dead are celebrated with grief.”Footnote 43
In Durand's words, the emotion defining the liturgy for the dead does not derive from loss—the death of the individual—but, rather, from the contemplation of mankind's sinful nature, which represents the foundation of death itself. Mutio Capuccini's Dichiaratione dell'offitio de’ morti, e delle cerimonie nell'essequie per le anime delli defonti (Explanation of the office for the dead, and of the ceremonies [that take place] in the exequies for the souls of the departed)—a treatise entirely devoted to the liturgy for the dead, published in Rome in 1626—runs along the same lines: building on several church authorities (including the abovementioned Strabo and Durand), Capuccini identifies sadness (mestizia) as the emotional cornerstone of the liturgy for the dead, which also informed the selection of its chants: “When we celebrate the exequies for the dead, we cry and weep rather than solemnize, and for this reason we omit the songs of joy.”Footnote 44 In a chapter devoted to weeping over the dead, moreover, Capuccini adds that one should mourn the departed not because they are dead—death being, indeed, the liberation from our earthly prison—but because of their and our sins.Footnote 45 This point, which echoes Durand's words above, is of utmost importance, as it invites us to distinguish between different sorts of funeral grief without projecting our modern understanding of that emotion onto an early modern liturgical culture.Footnote 46
It goes without saying that the statements of liturgists do not tell us what the faithful felt during ceremonies for the dead—something that surely could vary greatly from one occasion to another—but, rather, reveal what was regarded as the appropriate emotional climate of this particular liturgy. This liturgical appropriateness granted sadness a public and collective status, a key aspect in understanding descriptions of exequial music that resort to the emotion words discussed above. The performance of music was intrinsic to splendid exequies for members of the elite, yet it had to conform to the character of the liturgy and contribute to expressing its emotional mood.Footnote 47 Rich liturgical paraphernalia such as vestments and paraments visually represented the same emotional attitude through the color black, a color “commensurate with sadness and appropriate for the dead, who have already reached the darkness of death,” in the words of the abovementioned Capuccini.Footnote 48
I argue that by underscoring the sadness of music, authors of funeral books implicitly legitimized its performance, which could have been regarded as inappropriate to penitential occasions, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. This ostensible contradiction shines through the statements of those authors who contrasted the perfection and solemnity of music with its emotional connotation—consider, for instance, expressions such as “excellent yet tearful and sad concert”Footnote 49 or “great and noble music, but sad, as it was appropriate for such a ceremony.”Footnote 50 The latter example suggests that it was precisely its emotional content that enabled music to be performed during exequies. This idea is not confined to funeral books, however: in a lengthy treatise on tribulation, the bishop of Tortona, Paolo Aresi (1574–1644), made a passing comment on the scriptural verse “a tale out of time is like music in mourning” (Ecclesiastes 22:6), noting that “not every sort of music or song is inappropriate and inopportune to grief, but solely joyful music; there are other sorts of songs that excite feelings of sadness and compassion, and are most suitable for funerals.”Footnote 51
Provided that the music matched the emotional climate of its performance context, which functions were ascribed to the emotions it engendered? Was music supposed to foster solely the penitential attitude expounded by the liturgists mentioned above? Some funeral books offer insights into this matter, revealing two related yet different paradigms: one in which musical emotions direct listeners toward God and another centered instead on the departed and the grief of those left behind.
As I have shown, the monk Giacomo Tramontana stated that exequial music caused “devotion and sadness.” In this context, devotion is to be interpreted in religious terms, as a “pious emotion and prompt zeal toward God and sacred things.”Footnote 52 Several other funeral books underline a similar function of exequial music. Simone Berti, a member of the Accademia Fiorentina,Footnote 53 for instance, described the music of the Florentine exequies for Maria de’ Medici (1575–1642) as follows: “In the meantime, the tearful concent of grave and sonorous voices (which were heard alternatively from the choir and the organ loft, accompanied by the sound of musical instruments), increasingly reawakened piety and devotion in the hearts of those present, while at the altar the true body and blood of Christ was offered to God.”Footnote 54 Albeit recording practical aspects such as performing forces (voices and instruments) and their position in the church, this passage exudes emotional devotion: not only does the “tearful” music excite “piety and devotion” in the “hearts,” but the ritual is subsumed into its sacrificial essence, the Eucharist, the object of devotion par excellence in post-Tridentine religiosity.Footnote 55
Funeral books also reveal a second function of the emotions stirred by exequial music, one that catalyzes compassion and grief. The music performed at the 1634 exequies for Francesco de’ Medici (1614–34), for instance, was said to “let compassion and grief penetrate more deeply in the souls of those who were present.”Footnote 56 While devotion is invariably directed at God, compassion is a more ambiguous term. In line with its Latin etymology (compatior, “to suffer with”), it points at a “pain for the suffering of others,”Footnote 57 and it played a central role in Christian culture—first and foremost in relation to the pain of the crucified Christ and the grief of his mother.Footnote 58 In the context of funeral books compassion is similarly death-related, but its precise object is not always clear, since it can imply pity both for the dead and for those who grieve them. In this regard, let us consider the funeral book Il pianto et la mestitia (The crying and the sadness) by the writer, painter, and musician Giovanni Briccio,Footnote 59 commemorating the exequies held in Rome for Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto (1571–1623). During the funeral procession, the bier was escorted by people carrying crosses and candles, accompanied by a “large musical choir” that performed with a “sad singing causing compassion.”Footnote 60 The compassion instilled by music might well have been for the mourners themselves: indeed, right after describing the procession's musical accompaniment, Briccio underlines the “sadness, crying, and sorrow of heart” of those looking at the bier, so intense that it was “unspeakable and indescribable.”Footnote 61
By putting the spotlight on the emotional responses to the death of Cardinal Montalto, this example introduces a further aspect that makes it possible to contextualize emotionally charged descriptions of exequial music, highlighting the social and political function of grief in solemn exequies for the elite and, consequently, in the commemorative accounts scrutinized here. Regardless of whether they were spontaneous or ritualized, public displays of grief could serve multiple objectives—paying homage to the deceased and their family, marking communities, and showcasing networks of power.Footnote 62 Accordingly, funeral books usually devote significant space to bereavement, fulfilling different purposes depending on the system of power manifested by the publication. Some funeral books reveal the part played by music in this economy of sorrow, establishing a relation between the emotional content of music and grief caused by loss. This shows, furthermore, that the sadness of music could not always be superimposed onto the penitential sadness for mankind's sinful nature advocated by liturgists. The Requiem mass for the bishop of Cremona, Pietro Campori (ca. 1553–1643), for instance, was “accompanied by such tearful music of voices and instruments that caused the attendees to weep for the memory of their dead pastor.”Footnote 63 Similarly, the exequies for King Philip IV of Spain (1605–65) in Palermo featured a “grave singing, with which a king was bewept and sung: soft, plain, and apt to awaken grief.”Footnote 64 In both cases, grief is obviously caused by the death of the commemorated individual, and music contributes to enhancing that emotion. Thus, exequial music could be perceived as a catalyst for grief and as its sonic expression, ultimately serving both religious and political objectives by contributing to the construction and the representation of an emotional community.
The funeral book commemorating the Venetian exequies for the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo II de’ Medici (1590–1621) is particularly telling in this regard. The exequies were organized by the Nazione Fiorentina—an association representing Florentines residing in Venice—in the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo on 25 May 1621, and coordinated by Giulio Strozzi (1583–1652),Footnote 65 who also authored the funeral oration and the printed account of the exequies.Footnote 66 The Nazione Fiorentina had an obvious interest in publicly staging its members’ grief over the demise of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the funeral book was dedicated to none other than Ferdinando II de’ Medici (1610–70), Cosimo II's heir.Footnote 67 According to Strozzi's account, “the doleful celebration started with a very sad sinfonia, capable of drawing tears and exciting sorrow,”Footnote 68 which was followed by a solo vocal composition, O vos omnes. This was sung by Francesco Monteverdi, son of San Marco's celebrated chapel master Claudio Monteverdi, who supervised the music of the entire event. Unfortunately, O vos omnes is lost—just like the rest of the music for the event—but Strozzi printed its text in the funeral book.Footnote 69 This suggests that he assigned great value to the message it conveyed, and it cannot be ruled out that he had in fact prepared the text himself.
O vos omnes appears to be a cento of aptly modified fragments from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, beginning with the invocation “O vos omnes attendite et videte dolorem nostrum [O, ye all, attend and see our sorrow],” which recurs twice as a refrain. This is a modified version of Lamentations 1:12 (“O vos omnes qui transitis per viam attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus [O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow]”), and it was performed before the introit, Requiem aeternam, that usually begins the celebration of the mass for the dead. Thus, the words of O vos omnes were the first to resound in the basilica, marking the beginning of the exequies. I argue that the choice of these very words as incipit of the entire ceremony and the modifications introduced in their scriptural source reveal the emotional function assigned to music. First of all, the fact that the grief expressed in O vos omnes was related to loss rather than only penitence is evident in the rest of the text, which, for instance, laments being “orphans without a father.”Footnote 70 Second, the text implicitly creates a link between the exequies for the Grand Duke and Holy Week: lamentations were read or sung during Matins of Tenebrae, and the verse Lamentations 1:12 featured prominently as the respond of the fifth responsory for Holy Saturday.Footnote 71 Funeral motets based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah were not uncommon and possibly suggested to liturgically minded listeners a parallel between the deceased and Christ.Footnote 72 Third, the changes made to the scriptural source reveal the desire to represent a community united by grief: the sorrow is not personal, as in Lamentations 1:12 (“dolor meus”), but is inflected to become the sorrow of the entire Florentine community in Venice (“dolorem nostrum”). Finally, the imperative “attendite et videte” encapsulates the function of this musical representation of grief, which is staged to be “attended and seen” by everyone.
Similar strategies can be identified in another seventeenth-century account, a funeral book commemorating the exequies for the admiral of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Marquess Jacopo Inghirami (1565–1624), celebrated in Volterra Cathedral in 1624. According to the anonymous author, at the beginning of the exequies “the excellent musician and chapel master of the cathedral, messere Antonio Bracci, with the finest spirit had the following words sung, with the accompaniment of viols, theorbos, and arpicordi, instruments suited to reveal feelings of piety: ‘Scindite vestimenta vestra et accingimini saccis et plangite ante exequias inclyti vestri [Rend your garments, and gird yourselves with sackcloth, and mourn before the exequies of your illustrious man].’”Footnote 73 The plural imperatives of the introductory composition Scindite vestimenta vestra invite those attending the exequies to grieve the demise of Jacopo Inghirami, revealing once again the role assigned to music in the negotiation of the ceremony's emotional climate. Moreover, just as in the case of O vos omnes, Scindite vestimenta vestra must have held a symbolic value for those who were aware of its words’ original context: they were taken from 2 Samuel 3:31, in which David orders the celebration of exequies for Abner, a key military figure in the holy scriptures. This established a parallel with Inghirami's career and matched the militaristic plan of the funeral decor, which featured weapons and even Ottoman banners captured in battle.Footnote 74
Finally, it is worth commenting on the reference to the emotional power of viols, theorbos, and arpicordi, which are said to be “suited to reveal feelings of piety.” The choice of these specific instruments suggests yet another link with Holy Week: as a matter of fact, viols, theorbos, and arpicordi were traditionally used to accompany the Lamentations—that is, the excerpts drawn from the Lamentations of Jeremiah that were sung at Matins during Triduum, the last three days of Holy Week.Footnote 75 Thus, it is likely that the timbre of these instruments was associated with death, sorrow, and penitence.
Taken all together, the sources just discussed reveal facets of a past culture of listening, enabling the reconstruction of a wider audience's horizons of expectation. It appears that exequial music was not regarded as ascetically removed from human sadness and grief. Quite the contrary: one of its raisons d’être was its very ability to express or even enhance those emotions, which were regarded as appropriate in the context of solemn exequies. Against this background, the example quoted in this article's opening paragraph, Giuliano de’ Ricci's description of the exequial music for Joanna of Austria as “sad” and “very sad,” should not be dismissed as a simplification; rather, it should be read as expressing a widely accepted understanding of exequial music.
Let us now go back to table 1. Besides the emotion words connected with sadness, two other terms are very often employed in funeral books to describe music: soavità and dolcezza, both of which reference the concept of sweetness.Footnote 76 The synesthetic use of sweetness to make positive statements about musical phenomena had already enjoyed a long history, both in Latin and ItalianFootnote 77—to name just a few authoritative examples, it is employed with this meaning in the Latin Vulgate Bible,Footnote 78 by Isidore of Seville,Footnote 79 by Dante Alighieri,Footnote 80 and by Petrarch,Footnote 81 in addition to many others.Footnote 82 The understanding of sweetness in auditory terms is also sanctioned in the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), according to which “sweetness” (dolcezza) can be defined as a “sweetness (soavità) of harmony and melody.”Footnote 83 Since sweetness was regarded as one of music's fundamental positive qualities, it is no surprise that authors of funeral books referred to it to describe exequial music, in line with the celebratory purpose of their accounts.
The sweetness of exequial music, however, often acquires a more specific connotation when combined with the emotion words discussed in earlier parts of this article. Its semantic domain is thus joined to that of sadness. Vincenzo Pitti (1562–1631),Footnote 84 a member of the Accademia degli Alterati who authored a printed account of the Florentine exequies for King Philip II of Spain (1527–98), described the music in these terms: “From every part of the temple, a sweet but grave and sad melody of musical instruments was continuously heard. When the sacrifice [i.e., the mass] began, however, that melody, resounding with sweetness, responded to the choir only at appropriate moments, in order not to hinder the devotion of those present.”Footnote 85 Several funeral books resort to similar expressions, suggesting that the sweet sadness of exequial music was a common trope, as the following excerpts show: “the singers answering with sweet and sad concent”Footnote 86 (1599), “sweet and sad concents of the papal chapel”Footnote 87 (1603), “very sad but very sweet concent of instruments and voices”Footnote 88 (1609), “sad and sweet harmony of voices and instruments”Footnote 89 (1612), “grave and very sweet harmonic concert of the best musicians of the city”Footnote 90 (1624), “tearful but sweet melodies, inducing devotion and sorrow in the listeners”Footnote 91 (1644), “admittedly sad but very sweet music”Footnote 92 (1664), “from different parts of the temple resounded voices and musical instruments with a sweet but tearful tone, appropriate to such an occasion”Footnote 93 (1665), and “in the entire temple, voices and sonorous concents were heard, resounding with simultaneously sweet and sad harmony”Footnote 94 (1666).
Before discussing what such expressions reveal about the ways in which exequial music was perceived, it is necessary to consider them from a rhetorical point of view. Strictly speaking, sadness and sweetness are not contrary terms, and their combination to describe music was not uncommon.Footnote 95 A famous example appears in Petrarch's sonnet “Quel rosigniuol che sì soave piagne,” which begins with a nightingale that “so tenderly lamenting / perhaps his children or his cherished mate / in sweetness fills the sky and countryside / with many notes of grief skillfully played.”Footnote 96 Their intuitive meaning notwithstanding, the expressions used in funeral books do have an antithetical nature, as might be implied by the frequent use of contrasting constructions (e.g., “sweet but grave and sad”). Even clearer in this regard is the description of the music for the exequies of Duke Vincenzo II Gonzaga (1594–1627) in Mantua as a “mixture of sweet sadness and tearful sweetness.”Footnote 97 The chiastic structure of this sentence underlines its oxymoronic character, in line with the preference for antithesis that characterizes the literary language of the period.Footnote 98
Although such antithetical tropes were not employed exclusively for exequial music,Footnote 99 their appearance in funeral books reveals important aspects of the way in which solemn exequies and music were understood. I argue that the coupling of sadness and sweetness matched an aesthetic principle that informed the perception of funeral decor as well, which was regarded both as an expression of grief and as a source of aesthetic pleasure. For instance, the decorations in Santa Maria Novella (Florence) for the exequies, in 1598, of King Philip II of Spain were characterized by a “graceful sadness and grief.”Footnote 100 According to the consul of the Accademia Fiorentina Alessandro Stufa,Footnote 101 the funeral paraments set up for the Florentine exequies of Emperor Matthias (1557–1619) “caused terror due to their blackness and meaning, but pleased by virtue of their well-planned variety and proportion.”Footnote 102 The double-edged nature of funeral decor is thematized over and over in funeral books,Footnote 103 and it is against this background that the sweet sadness of exequial music should be read. Della Stufa's dichotomous judgment on the funeral paraments for Emperor Matthias's exequies, for instance, matches his description of the music performed on the same occasion: “The most holy mass was begun by the archbishop with the assistance of the canons of the cathedral. The chapel of His Majesty followed with repeated and compassionate voices, accompanied by the tearful sound of various musical instruments, asking God for mercy. In the course of those devout ceremonies the chapel was heard from different places with a sorrowful and sweet harmony.”Footnote 104 Reading Stufa's comments on funeral decor and music side by side, one cannot fail to notice the parallels between the terror and pleasure inspired by the paraments and the “sorrowful and sweet harmony” of music. This correspondence is not due simply to the omnipresent taste for antithetical juxtapositions mentioned above. It reveals a common mode of conceptualizing the function of the different arts that contributed to the celebration of solemn exequies, elaborate events suspended between the lugubrious and the pleasurable.
SWEETNESS AND CONSOLATION
I argued above that musical sweetness could be understood as auditory delight notwithstanding the penitential character of the liturgy for the dead. This interpretation of the concept, however, does not exhaust its semantic palette. Quite the contrary: sweetness could carry emotional and theological meanings in addition to aesthetic ones. Thus, the pairing of sweetness and sadness enables a fuller picture to be drawn of the ambivalent experience of music within the emotional dramaturgy of exequies, a context in which different and contrasting emotions were expressed; these emotions, in turn, informed how the music was heard.
To illustrate the latter point let us consider funeral orations, a type of source that hitherto has not attracted the attention of musicologists working on post-Tridentine Italy.Footnote 105 Funeral orations were usually recited during exequies, and, although mainly concerned with commemorating the deceased, they occasionally addressed the ritual itself, pointing out aspects that the audience was experiencing in that very moment. In doing so, they steered the congregation's understanding of the ceremony and fulfilled a pedagogical objective—and they considerably enrich our perspective on exequies.
Let us begin with an oration delivered by the archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), at the exequies for Anna of Austria, Queen of Spain (1549–80), celebrated in the Milan Cathedral on 6 September 1581.Footnote 106 According to the funeral book Descrittione de l'edificio, et di tutto l'apparato (Description of the setup and all the equipment),Footnote 107 Borromeo spoke right after the gospel of the Requiem mass. He did not indulge in lengthy praise of the deceased—a topic developed in another oration given by Girolamo Monti after the massFootnote 108—but, instead, offered a reflection on the ritual, its meanings, and its interpretation. Since Borromeo had a keen interest in music, it is no surprise that he repeatedly addressed the sound of the ceremony.Footnote 109 The exequies for Anna of Austria involved the performance of plainchant and polyphony both during the office celebrated before the mass and during the mass itself,Footnote 110 meaning that the congregation would already have heard a lot of music by the time that Borromeo delivered his oration. As I will show, his words constitute a framework for finding a meaning in exequial music that goes beyond auditory delight, confirming some of the hypotheses I formulated above and adding a few important points.
Right at the beginning of his oration, Borromeo addresses the function of the funeral decor and music, asking the audience the following rhetorical questions: “Will it perhaps be enough to satisfy the eyes with this appearance? To see these sad statues and look at these lights and burning candles? To measure with one's vision the height of these pyramids [i.e., the catafalque], to marvel at such a skillful structure? To curiously read these diverse panegyrics? To listen also to this harmony of voices and lugubrious songs? Will everything be over just with this simple sight and exterior ritual, with no other fruit?”Footnote 111 The answer assumed by Borromeo is obviously negative: funeral decor and music are part of the “exterior ritual,” the sensory and, in a way, superficial components of the ceremony, but their function does not end there. They convey a message to the faithful that goes beyond pomp and delight: “This black color speaks, these lights speak, these figures and statues speak, this great machinery speaks, the holy church admirably speaks with this sad singing, with these sacred rites and ceremonies.”Footnote 112 Note that Borromeo frequently lists singing alongside other components of the ceremony that are primarily experienced through sight, presupposing a close relation between the arts and crafts employed in the liturgy for the dead. Incidentally, this highlights the relevance of tracing parallels between the modes of perception of the different funeral arts, as I argued above with regard to the sorrowful sweetness of music, and the pleasurable terror inspired by funeral decor.
A few lines later, Borromeo finally introduces what he considers the core message of the liturgy for the dead—namely, sadness and consolation: “Dear children, in this funeral ritual and action the holy church conjoins two things that in principle are very different: sadness and consolation. Because on the one hand, the black color, the lugubrious clothing, the songs and the sorrowful voices of the church, all these things invite us to sadness. On the other hand, this arrangement of innumerable lights, many voices, and concents of divine praises represents the splendor of the glory, give testimony of living hope, and bring us Christian consolation. Thus, with the help of the Holy Spirit, our reasoning will revolve around these two points, and it will be mixed with both these emotions.”Footnote 113 Sadness and consolation are simultaneously the emotional cornerstones of the ceremony, the emotional poles of the oration, and its very topic. Needless to say, for a Catholic like Borromeo the ultimate purpose of the liturgy for the dead was to intercede for the soul of the departed, but he makes clear that the ritual is both for the dead and for the living,Footnote 114 granting a central role to the negotiation of the emotions of those left behind. Resorting to scriptural examples, Borromeo legitimizes grief as a human reaction to the horror of death, noting that its expression has been embedded in Christian death rituals since the very beginning. In this context he underlines once again the role played by singing.Footnote 115 At the same time, quoting a passage from Saint Paul's letters that the congregation would have just heard in the epistle of the mass (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18), he admonishes them not to grieve like “those who have no hope” but, rather, to join sadness together with the consolation “given by Christian faith and hope.”Footnote 116 To that end, “the holy Church in these holy rites, in which it excites our feelings to grief and sadness, also conjoins many messages and tokens of this faith and living hope.”Footnote 117 Music also features in the expression of these positive emotions: “Oh children, fix your mental gaze on that blessed sight, look at those celestial lights, listen carefully to the songs of those hierarchies, imagine the concent of those angelic voices. These lights, which you behold now in this sacred temple, represent those. The hymns and psalms that you hear here are a semblance of that harmony, and these burning fires bear witness to the triumph of the righteous who pass from this life to their eternal glory.”Footnote 118 Visual and sonic elements are joined together to stimulate the congregation's imagination, prefiguring the experience of the afterlife. Sacred music is a foretaste of heaven, a common trope that appears over and over in a variety of forms. Yet it should not be read as a dead metaphor: research has shown that it was regarded as a very real experience, informing both the creation and the perception of music.Footnote 119 This trope, moreover, must have had a particularly strong significance in the context of the liturgy for the dead, which revolved like no other liturgy around the fate of the soul and the afterlife.
With regard to the consolatory function of exequial music, it is interesting to consider a further source, Pietro Ponzio's Dialogo, a music treatise published in Parma in 1595. Between 1577 and 1582 Ponzio had served as chapel master of Milan Cathedral,Footnote 120 meaning that he must have been responsible for the music of the 1581 exequies for Queen Anna of Austria. In the Dialogo, he notes that ancient Romans used music both on joyful occasions and at funerals, adding that this custom “has survived to our day”: while music during banquets “increases joy and happiness,” at funerals it “alleviates sorrow and trouble.”Footnote 121 This confirms that, in addition to representing and causing sadness, the musical accompaniment of exequies was expected to console the audience, just as suggested in the funeral oration discussed here.
Coming back to Borromeo's text, it now should be noted that the archbishop employs different terms to refer to musical phenomena, such as harmony, voice, song, concent, hymn, and psalm. A funeral oration is no music treatise, and one should avoid interpreting this terminology overly narrowly,Footnote 122 but it cannot pass unnoticed that terms such as concent and harmony imply polyphony. Borromeo uses these words to characterize celestial music and the human counterpart that represents it on earth, and thus it cannot be ruled out that he allocates different forms of singing—such as plainchant and polyphony—to different emotional domains. After all, the idea that plainchant and polyphony had different emotional characters was deeply rooted in early modern ceremonial traditions and lay behind the hesitation to perform polyphony during penitential liturgies, as discussed above.Footnote 123 Furthermore, a harmonic understanding of celestial music suggested that it was best approximated on earth by polyphony,Footnote 124 and Borromeo might have attached specifically to the latter the consolatory function he discusses in the oration. By the same token, it is not unlikely that the abovementioned Ponzio—who, after all, was a composer and author of three polyphonic Requiem masses that are still extant in printFootnote 125—also was thinking precisely of polyphony when he wrote that exequial music “alleviates sorrow and trouble.” Whether the two of them were reasoning exactly in these terms is not clear, but that does not diminish the heuristic potential of Borromeo's funeral oration, which reveals an oxymoronic understanding of the liturgy for the dead, its teachings, and its soundscape. Furthermore, the tension between opposites appears to have inspired the iconographic plan of the exequies. For instance, the lower levels of the Milanese catafalque for Queen Anna of Austria were populated by allegorical statues representing sadness and transience, while the upper levels featured representations of religion and virtue—an ascensional progression that matched the emotional roadmap discussed by Borromeo.Footnote 126
Similar ideas appear in other funeral orations that are built on a progression from sadness to consolation and project these emotions onto the ritual and its artistic components. Some authors, such as Francesco Caccia and Emanuele Tesauro, mention music solely as an expression of sorrow; both wrote funeral orations for Savoyard exequies in Turin.Footnote 127 By contrast, a funeral oration for the exequies held in Vigevano for Queen Margaret of Austria (1584–1611) detects both sadness and consolation in liturgical singing, in a way reminiscent of Borromeo's oration.Footnote 128 The author, Giorgio Odescalchi, was then bishop of Vigevano—a suffragan diocese of the archdiocese of Milan—and it is not unlikely that he took Borromeo's oration as his model.
According to a printed account of the ceremony, the music for the Requiem mass was performed by musicians divided into four choirs, and Odescalchi delivered his oration after the gospel.Footnote 129 At the beginning, he elucidates the mixture of emotions experienced following the death of the queen, resorting to a series of evocative similes: “The subject that presents itself to us following the death of our Most Serene Queen is so varied and different in itself that if one considers it from one side, it appears entirely filled with sorrow and sadness, while considered from the other side it is brimming with true and Christian consolation that fills us. Thus, the same earth produces weeds that give bitter and sweet juice. From the same root are born thorns that sting and roses that please. The very same rose tastes bitter but is pleasurable and sweet to those who smell it. And I myself, who came up here to discuss my thoughts with you, I feel assailed by different emotions.”Footnote 130 Odescalchi juxtaposes the emotions of sadness and consolation with sensory experiences such as bitterness and sweetness. One cannot fail to notice that this comparison echoes the descriptions of music discussed above.
Furthermore, the compresence of different emotions affects Odescalchi's interpretation of the ritual and, thus, of its musical accompaniment. In the section of the oration that reviews circumstances provoking sorrow, Odescalchi directs his audience's attention to the funeral decor and the music performed, asking them the following questions: “What kind of funereal and lugubrious apparatus is this that appears before our eyes? What kind of sad and tearful voices resound in this holy temple? What kind of songs are heard, inducing weeping and fear, while reminding us of that day of wrath, of revenge, of examination, and of judgment, in which ‘iudicandus est homo reus’?”Footnote 131 “Iudicandus est homo reus [The guilty man is to be judged]” is a grammatically adapted quotation from the Dies irae, a sequence that evokes the “day of wrath, that day that dissolves the world in ashes,”Footnote 132 and was commonly sung in masses for the dead following the Roman rite. By citing this chant, Odescalchi encapsulates the grieving and penitential side of the liturgy. Later in the oration, he discusses the opposite emotional aspect of the ritual, once again mentioning the funeral decor and music side by side: “Let us add finally that even in these lugubrious apparatuses, in these funereal rituals, one finds matters of great consolation (if one penetrates beyond outward appearances). Among the images of death, one sees other images that represent the true life, happier than the present one. Among these sad songs one hears voices speaking of rest and relief. That joyful voice was heard, calling blessed the dead who have died in the Lord.”Footnote 133 The “joyful voice” refers to a passage from the book of Revelation 14:13 (“Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur”) that featured in different chants of the liturgy for the dead.Footnote 134 Unlike Borromeo, Odescalchi does not address the evocative power of musical sound; his remarks focus on textual content, as can be seen in his quotations of fragments of liturgical formulary. Thus, it seems farfetched to relate his words to specific music genres. Nonetheless, his oration invites us to see the liturgy for the dead not as emotionally homogenous but, rather, as a narrative that provides mechanisms accommodating diverging emotional states. The tension between different emotions is another layer that one must take into account to understand how listeners experienced and verbalized exequial music. In the following, I argue that the dichotomy between sadness and consolation matches the juxtaposition of the semantic domains of sadness and sweetness that recurs in descriptions of music. This reveals the ambivalent emotional power of exequial music and makes it possible to gain a fuller understanding of seemingly generic expressions.
In order to grasp the layered meanings of sweetness, one should recall that sweetness not only constituted an aesthetic category but also was commonly understood in emotional terms: a sort of sweet lachrymosity, for instance, was a central feature of post-Tridentine religious culture.Footnote 135 The ways in which this emotional understanding of sweetness could interact with the experience of exequial music become manifest in a funeral book by Giovanni Battista Domenichi, abbot of San Paterniano abbey in Fano (Marche). In 1582, the monks of San Paterniano celebrated a solemn service for the soul of a prominent benefactor, Pope Sixtus IV (1414–84). Domenichi recalls that “both hearing the compassionate harmony and seeing the setup with many lights softened the hearts of the bystanders, so that many and many were seen crying for sweetness.”Footnote 136 Just like in Borromeo's funeral oration, the music and the lighting are mentioned side by side, and both have a role in prompting the audience's emotional response. Furthermore, the antithetical expression “crying for sweetness” implies not only that music and lighting caused a sweetness that engendered a strong emotional response but also that this emotional response was in itself ambivalent.
Further funeral books support this interpretation of the relation between sweetness, exequial music, and its effects. To begin with, let us consider Muzio Pansa's Essequie del catholico Filippo secondo re di Spagna (Exequies for the Catholic Philip the Second, king of Spain), devoted to the exequies for King Philip II of Spain celebrated in Chieti in 1598. Pansa was a physician and a writer and was active in Chieti as a medical officer, a good example of the educated but not specialized listeners in whom I am interested.Footnote 137 He uses terms related to sweetness to characterize both the music performed and the state of mind induced in the listeners, juxtaposing them with other terms related to mourning. In his publication he recounts that “it was beautiful to hear those lamentable voices of the musicians accompanied by organs and other musical instruments. They created a very sweet harmony with a certain piety and with a tearful and lachrymose sound, simultaneously [insieme] awakening sweetness, piety, and compassion in the listeners.”Footnote 138 Pansa's account encompasses different aspects of the experience of exequial music that I have already discussed above: the pleasure of listening (“it was beautiful”), despite the doleful tone of the music (“those lamentable voices”), and the sweetness of tearful sounds. The listeners’ reaction is also described in ambivalent terms, as an experience of “sweetness, piety, and compassion.” Pansa's emphasis on how these emotions occur simultaneously (“insieme”) is telling. More than sixty years later, the Theatine Girolamo Matranga characterized the exequial music performed in Palermo (Sicily) for another king of Spain, Philip IV (1605–65), in strikingly similar terms. According to Matranga, during the Vespers for the soul of the king a “very sweet grieving melody, tuned to sighs,” was performed, making “the audience simultaneously [ad un tempo] blessed and discontent, sad and happy.”Footnote 139 Matranga's words once again reveal the double-edged character of the music and the contradictory emotions it provokes. The adverbial phrase ad un tempo underlines the compresence of such emotions, much like the account by Pansa considered above, and it represents another manifestation of the rhetorical taste for antitheses.
In order to understand the emotional, and theological, meaning of musical sweetness, one must add another piece to the picture—namely, its relation with heaven. As I showed above, on the basis of Borromeo's oration, music could fulfil a consolatory function by encouraging the listeners’ imaginations to focus on the soundscape of heaven. Further sources suggest that precisely sweetness was regarded as the main feature that enabled this imaginative leap, according to the belief that the sweetness of earthly music represented the sweetness of the celestial harmonies, albeit on a smaller scale. To offer but one example of this omnipresent trope, Grazioso Uberti's Contrasto musico (Musical contest, 1630)—“a guide to discourse about music,” as Dell'Antonio put itFootnote 140—discusses the use of music in order to “vividly present to the hearing a sweet harmony, from which one can argue in conversation how much greater is the sweetness of that celestial music, how much greater the sweetness of that concert of heaven.”Footnote 141
Against this background, I argue that what listeners recognized as sweetness could help them negotiate the emotional climate of exequies, by evoking a parallel between the music heard during the ritual and those celestial harmonies that the righteous would experience (or were already experiencing) in heaven. This relation between sweetness, heaven, and emotion is traced with exceptional clarity in a funeral book by Giovanni Pellegrino Pancaldi commemorating the exequies for the Jesuit Giorgio Giustiniani (d. 1644), which were celebrated in the church of Santa Lucia in Bologna: “The musical meters resounded during the office and the mass, with a pleasing but lugubrious harmony. Stimulating the hearing, they caused in the spirit feelings of compassion, which afterward became a most intense joy, considering that the sweet echo was but a small sample—given down here by father Giorgio—of the ineffable concents that he is enjoying among the angelic choirs.”Footnote 142 Pancaldi's account encapsulates the different facets of the experience of exequial music discussed in this article: the sweetness of music, the centrality of emotions, and the tension between the pleasurable and the lugubrious. Furthermore, it expounds a trajectory from compassion to joy whose poles are mediated by music. Note that Pancaldi's words do not imply that different sorts of music cause different emotions, as I proposed above, in my reading of Borromeo's oration; rather, they suggest that the very experience of exequial music can encompass different emotional states. Music is both lugubrious and sweet, and it causes both compassion and joy. Pancaldi's wording suggests that the very concept of sweetness, when applied to exequial music, is to be understood not only as a conventional term for musical beauty but also as a multifaceted concept with emotional implications that rest on a specific theology of music.
CONCLUSION
The present article set out to investigate the ways in which exequial music was understood and verbalized in post-Tridentine Italy. In order to reconstruct the discourses accessible to listeners without a fully developed training in composing, notating, or performing music, I mapped the lexicon used to describe music in a corpus of ninety-seven funeral books. This revealed that emotions were a key aspect in the verbalization of exequial music, in turn opening a window onto the ways this music was perceived and its relation with the emotional climate of its liturgical context. Furthermore, I have highlighted the pervasiveness of two related but diverging semantic domains, that of sadness and that of sweetness, arguing that their juxtaposition corresponded to an aesthetic principle at the foundation of the entire ritual's artistic setup—namely, the compresence of the mournful and the pleasurable. Reading funeral orations, moreover, I showed that the sanctioned emotional response to death was inherently ambivalent, conjoining sadness and consolation. These contrasting emotional states were embedded in the celebration of exequies, inspiring the symbolic program of the funeral decor and affecting how music was understood. Thus, I argued that the ambivalent terms with which music was described mirrored an ambivalent conception of the liturgy for the dead and, ultimately, of death itself.
The understanding of exequial music was also informed by the rituals during which it was performed, and the associations those rituals conjured. This interaction between the context of performance and the experience of music shows the one-sidedness of interpretative frameworks based exclusively on work analysis. In fact, it cannot pass unnoticed that features such as chant paraphrase or stylistic restraint, which are often mentioned in musicological discussions of early modern music for the liturgy for the dead, are not mentioned or even hinted at in any of the sources I discussed. This disjunction between the results of work-based analytical research and my listener-oriented inquiry is surely related to the fact that authors of funeral books and funeral orations were not interested in discussing the details of musical composition. In many cases, they might even have been unable to discern such details. Their silence on the stylistic and technical features of the music they heard, however, should not lead us to dismiss their discourses about music: simple as they might seem from a music-theoretical point of view, such discourses convey the views of people who heard early modern music for the dead performed during the events for which it was conceived. One should not dismiss what these people have to say out of hand simply because it does not satisfy our modern desire for technical detail and precision. At the same time, I am not arguing in favor of rejecting work-based analytical research when approaching early modern music for the dead. Quite the contrary: it is fundamentally important to embrace both perspectives; otherwise, one runs the risk of simplifying the musical past in an attempt to save its complexity. I believe that privileging one perspective over the other entails a methodological risk that becomes particularly evident when considering the emotionality of exequial music. An analysis of music for the dead that ignores the written accounts of contemporary listeners could easily conclude that this music was largely uninterested in expressing emotions, an impression that is strengthened vis-à-vis the overt expressiveness of other genres of early modern sacred music—not to mention secular genres such as the madrigal or the early opera.Footnote 143 Against the background sketched in this article, however, such a conclusion proves misleading: emotions did play a central role in exequial music, albeit probably by means that differed from those deemed appropriate in other performance contexts. At the same time, taking into account only the literary texts scrutinized here would fail to convey the stylistic specificity of music for the dead, which, in turn, might have contributed to defining its emotional character.
The discourses about music presented in this article solicit a more nuanced approach to early modern exequial music, as well as sacred music in general. They reveal the importance of performance in the representation and negotiation of emotions, exposing the limits of those analyses that focus solely on textualized musical features transmitted by notation. Furthermore, these discourses invite us to take into account the relation between liturgy, music, and emotional change:Footnote 144 the different sorts of music performed—whether plainchant, vocal polyphony, or instrumental music, each one with its own emotional connotation—could constitute an emotional roadmap for the faithful, conveying messages that matched the ideological blueprint of the ceremony. Grazioso Uberti suggests such an emotional way of listening to sacred music, noting that “while the musicians use the sad style, and then change to the joyful, thus the devout man could grieve for his sins, and at the end console himself in God's forgiveness.”Footnote 145 Even though Uberti's words were not specifically aimed at music for the dead, the listening practice he describes resonates well with the experience of music discussed in this article.
Moreover, the discourses I recovered from funeral books and funeral orations reveal not only how early modern listeners understood exequial music but also what their expectations of it were—expectations that may well have been shared by music professionals, who were certainly aware of the special character of the ritual context in which they operated. Nowadays, such horizons of expectation have vanished and the performance context of early modern music for the dead has changed radically: Requiems and other exequial music are sung more often during concerts than as part of actual liturgies. Nonetheless, I believe that the relation between music and emotion expounded in this article represents an opportunity not just for historians but for performers, too. Early modern music for the dead is often part of concert and recording programs, but it can bemuse twenty-first-century listeners accustomed to the heightened expressiveness of later works, such as the Requiem masses by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Giuseppe Verdi, to mention but two obvious examples. I hope that understanding the emotional palette and diverse meanings that early modern listeners associated with exequial music will inspire twenty-first-century musicians to search for innovative ways to reenact its “sweet but grave and sad melody.”
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Antonio Chemotti is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Leuven (in association with the Alamire Foundation) and Work Leader at the Royal Library of Belgium in the context of the program From Script to Sound. His research interests include early modern music (especially in Central Europe, Italy, and the Low Countries), source studies and text criticism, music and death, and music and emotion. He is the author of Polyphonic Music pro mortuis in Italy (1550–1650): An Introduction (Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2020).
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