Lute music for a princess

Abstract

This attractively produced facsimile contains a comprehensive selection of lute and vocal music associated with the court of Moritz, Landgrave of Hesse (1573–1638), for whose daughter, Princess Elisabeth (1596–1625), it was compiled. Moritz himself is well known to lute players as the composer of the first of the pavans in Robert Dowland's collection Varietie of lute-lessons (1610), ‘made by the most magnificent and famous Prince Mauritius, Landgrave of Hessen, and from him sent to my Father’, which makes musical reference to John Dowland's famous ‘Lachrimae’ pavan. The elder Dowland's friend, Henry Peacham (himself a composition pupil of Orazio Vecchi), in The compleat gentleman (1622), after noting the talents of other royal musicians, including Henry VIII and the Prince of Venosa (i.e. Gesualdo), declared that ‘above others, who carryeth away the Palme for excellency … is the yet living Maurice, Landgrave of Hessen, of whose owne composition I have seen eight or ten severall sets of Motets, and solemne Musicke, set purposely for his own Chappell; where for the great honour of some Festivall, and many times for his recreation onely, he is his owne Organist. Besides, he readily speaketh ten or twelve severall languages … I passe over his rare skill in Chirurgery, he being generally accounted the best Bone-setter in the Country.’ Not surprisingly, this most widely talented ‘Renaissance man’ ensured that his daughter's education included serious study of both music and languages; her natural inclination was in fact in the field of letters, and a good deal of poetry by her survives in the Kassel archives. Education was something of an obsession for the Landgrave, and this applied not just to members of his own family, but to many of his court servants, including the boy singers of the Hofkapelle, for whom Moritz provided a thorough education at Kassel's Collegium Mauritianum, and often gave them scholarships to study elsewhere; Heinrich Schütz, most famously, was thus given the opportunity to study for a few years with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice.