I Sing it to an Italian Tune . . . Thoughts on Performing Sixteenth-Century Italian-Jewish Sung Poetry Today

Abstract

Although we know that Jewish musicians and composers were active in Renaissance Italy, very few compositions by Jewish authors or music specifically destined for the Jewish community has survived. There are few exceptions: Salamone Rossi’s works, the tunes from Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro’s dance manuals, Ercole Bottrigari’s transcriptions of Jewish liturgy, a handful of fragments. If we limit the list to pieces with specifically Jewish content, it becomes shorter still: Rossi’s HaShirim asher liShlomo and Bottrigari’s fieldwork. However, next to these rare musical sources, there are hundreds of poems by Jewish authors that, although preserved in text-only form, were probably performed vocally. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish, they usually combine Italian form with Jewish content. The constant transposition and transformation of form, language and content found in works such as Josef Tzarfati’s Hebrew translation of Tu dormi, io veglio, Elye Bokher’s Bovo Bukh, or Moses of Rieti’s Miqdash Me’at (an artful reworking of Dante’s Divina Commedia) mirror the shared and separate spaces that defined Jewish life in sixteenth-century Italy. None of these poems have come down to us with musical notation. However, several have extant melodic models, while others have indications, or are written in meters—like the ottava or terza rima—that point to their being sung, probably often to orally transmitted melodies. Even if it is sometimes impossible to ascertain the exact tune used in performance, sung poetry’s predominance in Jewish musical life remains undeniable. HaShirim asher liShlomo, usually considered the most important collection of Jewish Renaissance music, might not have ever been performed during its composer’s lifetime, while Rieti’s Miqdash Me’at survives in over fifty manuscripts, including four Italian translations. In one of these, translator/author Lazzaro of Viterbo writes, tellingly, about looking forward to hearing his verses sung by his dedicatee, Donna Corcos.