Orphans of Orpheus: Music Lost and Regained in Spanish Golden Age Poetry

Abstract

Early modern Spanish lyric's connections with music are manifold, and imagery of instruments and singing voices is virtually everywhere in the texts, often playing a part in the articulation of affect and providing a vocabulary for poets to reflect about their own verbal powers. And yet, as I argue in this article, the story of Golden Age lyric begins with tension and conflict at the center of the music–poetry relation. There is, I contend, a discrepancy between the Orphean tropes that equate writing verse with playing music, and the relative autonomy that poetry and music were developing in Renaissance Spain. In this context, I draw attention to a nostalgia that cuts across the texts: the sense that poets have only inherited one half of Orpheus's torrential and effective mixture of media, poetry, and song. To make these points, I draw from a collection of printed and manuscript sources from 1500 to 1700, by poets canonical and obscure.