Emanuel Wurstisen, his Tablature and Links to Poland. Lute Music with Medicine in the Background

Abstract

The lute tablature CH-Bu F IX 70 was compiled by Emanuel Wurstisen (1572–1616), a Basel University student, who became a physician in Biel toward the end of his life. His biography has been supplemented here so as to include new information concerning, among other things, his collaboration with German surgeon Wilhelm Fabricius Hildanus during the first decade of the seventeenth century. When commencing his tablature, in 1591, Wurstisen planned to divide it into eight books, each devoted to works of a similar genre. The manuscript comprises nearly five hundred works, mostly anonymous, while among those of known attribution, compositions by Orlando di Lasso take pride of place. Composers mentioned by name include Amandus Polanus a Polansdorf, a professor of theology at Basel University, who wrote his Was Gott will most likely after the death of his wife, in 1605, which thus becomes the hypothetical terminus post quem for the completion of the tablature. There are many Polish elements in the manuscript. Piotr Poźniak long since identified the works signed with the initials C.S. as written by Kasper Sielicki, and noted that the two works by Wojciech Długoraj, as well as the Fantasia by Diomedes Cato, differ from the versions published by J. B. Besard (1603). Hence they may have reached Wurstisen not through printed editions, but in some other way. The author studies how these and other pieces from the Polish repertoire (including Polish dances) could have found their way to Basel. Among those who could have played some part in this ‘import’ of music, she points, first and foremost, to students and residents who came to Basel from Poland, such as Marcin Chmielewski, a professor of Basel University, the medical student Orestes Cato, brother of Diomedes, and the poet Daniel Naborowski, who frequently returned to Switzerland. The attributions of works from CH-Bu F IX 70 are complemented by the identification of the composer of works signed in the tablature with the initials F.D.D (F.D.D.D.) as Fridericus de Drusina Dantiscanus, a lutenist from Royal Prussia, son of Benedict de Drusina. The pieces by this composer found in Wurstisen’s manuscript (Exercitium and a pair of dances, Passomezo and Saltarello) are his only known works.