Arde Fillis / Isti sunt : a contrafactum by Gustav Düben based on a madrigal by Stefano Landi, and previously attributed to Giacomo Carissimi

• 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.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Musikvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Musicology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

baroque music

Giacomo Carissimi

Stefano Landi

Düben collection

Gustav Düben

contrafacta

adaptation

re-texting

Musikvetenskap

Musicology

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