Autograph Manuscript Research Articles

Guaman Poma de Ayala's "New Chronicle and Good Government" A testimony on the health of the Indigenous populations in XVIth century Peru

elipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s illustrated autograph manuscript of nearly 1200 pages: Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (New Chronicle and Good Government), probably written between 1600 and 1615, has particular importance as a rich, in-depth account of early colonialism, seen in an indigenous perspective. The book is attested at the Royal Library of Denmark for more than two centuries. It is available online as a searchable digital edition. Guaman Poma’s work, addressed to King Philip III of Spain, was also explicitly intended for the hierarchy of the state and the church and for a more general public, both Spanish and native. Some critical messages are reserved to Quechua language speakers. A full-blooded native, Guaman Poma descended from members of an ethnic community, the mitmaqkuna, sent with special privileges by the Inka to settle a newly conquered area. His family, including the priest Martin de Ayala, his halfbrother and instructor, appears to have had a special linkage with the hospital of Huamanga (today: Ayacucho). This situation, as well as the proximity of mercury

Heinrich Schenker and the Photogram Archive

ABSTRACTIn 1927 Anthony van Hoboken, at Heinrich Schenker's urging, founded the Archive for Photograms of Musical Master Manuscripts, the goal of which was to collect photographic reproductions of the autograph manuscripts of famous composers so that they could be made generally available for the purposes of study and preparing editions without the originals themselves being susceptible to damage. The administration of the Archive required a Board of Trustees, on which Schenker and the music historian Robert Haas sat under Hoboken's chairmanship. After the official inauguration of the Archive in October 1927, Hoboken and the Board of Trustees sent out an Appeal to publicise their intentions; this was followed by a radio broadcast, given by Otto Erich Deutsch, and several magazine articles which called attention to the new institution.In the years that followed, there were repeated conflicts of interest among the trustees. Tensions arose, for instance, in connection with the International Schubert Congress of 1928, organised by Hoboken and Haas under the auspices of the Archive, in which Schenker refused to participate. A collected edition of the works of C. P. E. Bach, planned in 1930, never materialised: Schenker could not be persuaded to act as one of its editors. A crisis was reached in 1932, when Hoboken drastically reduced his annual financial contribution to the enterprise. Nonetheless, the Archive developed into an internationally recognised centre for musical documentation, whose holdings steadily increased over time.

Making a Difference: Bilingualism and Re-creation in Charles d’Orléans

In the course of his 25-year captivity in England during the Hundred Years War, Charles duc d’Orleans produced two similar sequences of lyric poetry, purporting to be a reflection of his romantic life, his suffering after the death of his first love, and his eventual finding of a second love. One sequence is written in French, preserved in Charles’ autograph manuscript (Paris BN fr. 25458), and one in English (in London BL Harley 682). One assumes that the French poems were directed at Charles’ French, the English at his English public. But, since the now English-speaking upper class at this period usually knew French well, the impetus behind the English version cannot have been a need to make the inaccessible accessible. Attention to some highly interesting differences between Charles’ French and English poems, and also to his own words about his craft, provides a possible explanation of what that impetus might be.

Concertos pour violon et orchestre op. VII édition by Louis Castelain (review)

Reviewed by: Concertos pour violon et orchestre op. VII éditionby Louis Castelain Neal Zaslaw Jean-Marie Leclair. Concertos pour violon et orchestre op. VII. Édition de Louis Castelain. (Les Essentiels.) (Collection Orchestre.) Versailles: Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2012. [Introd. in Fre., Eng., p. 4–11; scores, p. 13–231; crit. notes in Fre., Eng., p. 233–42. ISMN 979-0-56016-244-7; pub. no. CAH 244. i50.] In the early 1960s, when I first studied and performed the music of Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné (1697–1764), a number of his works weren’t available at all, and many of the modern editions that did exist were of an old-fashioned type, with continuo realizations intended for the piano, and lots of slurs, dynamics, accents, bowings, fingerings, etc., added. Whatever the historical value or musical merits of such editions, they posed a problem for someone like me, who was interested in matters of eighteenth-century performance practice. Most of the recordings available then—and there were not many—were unimpressive technically and stylistically. How times have changed! Now we have access to first-rate editions and recordings of most of his output, and even published facsimiles of the original editions of much of his oeuvre. (His opera Scylla et Glaucusaside, there is no manuscript tradition, presumably because Leclair’s autograph manuscripts were consumed during the process by which his wife engraved his works; the manuscripts that do exist prove to have been copied from the printed editions.) Leclair composed a dozen concertos, published in two sets of six as his opus 7 (1737) and opus 10 (1745). With the exception of op. 7, no. 3, whose solo part bears the legend “violon, flûte allemande ou hautbois,” the concertos are orchestrated for solo violin, strings, and continuo. They were well known in the mid-eighteenth century, especially in France where, as Jean-Benjamin de La Borde wrote in 1780, “His sonatas, duets, trios and concertos are too well known for us to discuss them here; they still represent the finest school for those wishing to specialize in the violin” (p. 8). These attractive works may be summarily characterized as a French take on Vivaldi’s innovations. Leclair had grown up in Lyons, where he trained as a dancer and fiddler. He then went to Turin, where he studied with Corelli’s pupil Giovanni Battista Somis (1686–1763). Within the Vivaldian framework of his violin concertos, Leclair tended to lean to the Italianate side in the fast movements and to the French side in the middle movements, although those of his rondo-finales based on dance types echo French models as well. Some excellent modern editions of single concertos have been published before now, but never a full score of an entire opus. (Leclair’s original publications of course comprised sets of parts.) This new edition by Louis Castelain of the six concertos of opus 7 is therefore a welcome development. Before describing the edition and discussing a few problems with it, I want to make clear that it is eminently serviceable, and belongs in any music collection hoping to support the study and performance of late baroque music. The introduction, in French and English, presents a brief biography of Leclair, a description of the concertos’ only source (the first edition), an accounting of the editorial conventions employed, and notes for performers. Although most of this is comme il faut, there are a few things I would question. In the biography, for instance, Leclair is said to have studied and worked in Turin in 1722 and 1726, but documentation exists for only the latter period; the putative 1722 visit appears to be based solely on a misunderstanding found in an obscure nineteenth-century Italian book. Then, it is true that at the end of his life Leclair directed the music and theater presentations of the Duc de Gramont at the private theater of his country residence in Puteaux, at the time a rural landscape filled with vineyards, now a district of metropolitan Paris; but during “the season” the duke’s entertainments took place at his residence in the city. Finally, it is, I think, misleading...

Musicologist-driven writer identification in early music manuscripts

Recent renewed interest in computational writer identification has resulted in an increased number of publications. In relation to historical musicology its application has so far been limited. One of the obstacles seems to be that the clarity of the images from the scans available for computational analysis is often not sufficient. In this paper, the use of the Hinge feature is proposed to avoid segmentation and staff-line removal for effective feature extraction from low quality scans. The use of an auto encoder in Hinge feature space is suggested as an alternative to staff-line removal by image processing, and their performance is compared. The result of the experiment shows an accuracy of 87 % for the dataset containing 84 writers' samples, and superiority of our segmentation and staff-line removal free approach. Practical analysis on Bach's autograph manuscript of the Well-Tempered Clavier II (Additional MS. 35021 in the British Library, London) is also presented and the extensive applicability of our approach is demonstrated.

Suscipere digneris : Et fund og nogle hypoteser om Københavnerpsalteret Thott 143 2º og dets historie

Suscipere digneris : Et fund og nogle hypoteser om Københavnerpsalteret Thott 143 2º og dets historie

The Chaves Drawing, the Galvin Murúa, and the Miccinelli Claims Regarding Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica

Ivan Boserup: The Chaves Drawing, the Galvin Murúa Manuscript, and the Miccinelli Claims Regarding Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica
 Among the many extraordinary claims of the Miccinelli manuscripts kept in a private collection in Naples and published in 1989 and later, one of those most urgently in need of being closely investigated has concerned the authorship of one of the treasures of the Royal Library of Denmark: the autograph manuscript of the Nueva corónica (Ms. GKS 2232 4º). Authorship of this manuscript has traditionally been assigned, in accordance with its title page and other evidence, to the Andean Indian Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1560?–1616?). Yet, in spite of the flat rejection of the Miccinelli material by the vast majority of leading specialists of the history and literature of early colonial Peru (see Adorno 1998; Zuidema 2001), the Miccinelli claims continue to find adepts at large and sometimes arouse new, fruitless debates. In 2012, however, it was revealed that a drawing included in one of the key manuscripts of the Miccinelli collection, a Contract which states that the mestizo chronicler and Jesuit Father Blas Valera was the real author of the Nueva corónica, is basically a tracing of a drawing of the Nueva corónica as reproduced from a retouched photograph in the facsimile edition of the Nueva corónica that was published in Paris in 1936 (see Boserup and Krabbe Meyer 2012; 2015). Following up on this material proof of the presence of recent forgeries within the Miccinelli collection, the present paper discusses the authenticity of a closely related drawing (the Chaves drawing) discovered c.1998 in the State Archives of Naples. This latter item turns out to be, in all probability, another recent tracing of a drawing of the Nueva corónica, based on the 1936 facsimile edition. The reason for discussing the Chaves drawing so many years later is a suggestion made in 2015 by the art historian Thomas B. F. Cummins (Harvard University). According to Cummins, the Chaves drawing is an authentic creation of Guaman Poma (see Cummins 2015). It is argued, however, that Professor Cummins’s superficial examination of the drawing and his advocacy of its authenticity are closely related to a theory developed by him in 2013 together with the renowned Peruvian anthropologist Juan Ossio (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima) and supported by Conservator at the Getty Museum Nancy K. Turner (2015). Their view, which is inspired by an outdated suggestion of the historian Manuel Ballesteros (1911–2002), is that the Chaves drawing may originate from the manuscript of the long lost illustrated chronicle (1596) of Martín de Murúa (the Galvin Murúa) supposedly consisting to a large extent of illustrated folios originating from other sources. The evidence of the Galvin Murúa itself does not, however, corroborate this view (see Adorno and Boserup 2005; 2008). Hence, as in the case of the demonstrably fake Contract, it is argued that the Chaves drawing was produced in the late 1990s and “dropped” in the State Archives of Naples so as to be innocently “discovered” by a scholar working there, and later promoted as “external” evidence of the authenticity and historical relia­bility of the two main Miccinelli manuscripts. By stepping right into this trap nearly twenty years after others have been lured into it (Cantù 2001; Laurencich Minelli 2001; 2007), Cummins has taken the risk of being counted among the supporters of the Miccinelli manuscripts and of stirring up once more an international debate on the status of forged or corrupted material, which one can hope, however, will be thwarted at an early stage by the present analysis.

La congiura dei Pazzi: I documenti del conflitto fra Lorenzo de’ Medici e Sisto IV. Le bolle di scomunica, la “Florentina synodus,” e la “Dissentio” insorta tra la Santità del Papa e i Fiorentini. Edizione critica e commento ed. by Tobias Daniels (review)

Reviewed by: La congiura dei Pazzi: I documenti del conflitto fra Lorenzo de’ Medici e Sisto IV. Le bolle di scomunica, la “Florentina synodus,” e la “Dissentio” insorta tra la Santità del Papa e i Fiorentini. Edizione critica e commento ed. by Tobias Daniels Melissa Meriam Bullard La congiura dei Pazzi: I documenti del conflitto fra Lorenzo de’ Medici e Sisto IV. Le bolle di scomunica, la “Florentina synodus,” e la “Dissentio” insorta tra la Santità del Papa e i Fiorentini. Edizione critica e commento. Edited by Tobias Daniels. [Studi di Storia e Documentazione Storica.] (Florence: EDIFIR Edizioni Firenze. 2013. Pp. 206. €18,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-7970-649-0.) “The pen is mightier than the sword.” So spoke Cardinal Richelieu’s character in Edward Bulwer Lytton’s popular 1839 play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. The playwright could just as easily have written that line about the hostile propaganda campaigns [End Page 159] launched between Pope Sixtus IV and the Florentines that erupted following the Pazzi Conspiracy. Tobias Daniels’s critical edition and comment brings together for the first time Sixtus IV’s three bulls of excommunication against Lorenzo de’ Medici and his Florentine supporters; the Florentina Synodus, a Florentine defense against them written by Gentile Becchi; and a further little-known papal response, the Dissentio. The latter, aimed to arouse anti-Medici feeling at the imperial court in Germany, was apparently not widely circulated in Italy. The most famous document associated with the Pazzi Conspiracy, Angelo Poliziano’s defense of Lorenzo and condemnation of the Pazzi in his Coniurationis commentarium, is not included in this collection. The second half of the volume contains the documents in their original Latin. Daniels’s meticulous editing records numerous variations in manuscript and incunabular versions of the texts, and he provides erudite notes on persons and events referenced. Close editing is labor-intensive and commendable work, as is the assemblage of the texts themselves. Placed side-by-side, they demonstrate that the exchange of invective reached beyond personal animosities between Sixtus IV and Lorenzo. Rather, it had wider ecclesiastical and European import when viewed in the context of the grander fifteenth-century contests between papal and conciliar authority in which swirled many a war of words. Becchi crafted the Florentine Synodus for Lorenzo to use in drumming up interest, especially at the court of French king Louis XI, for summoning a church council to depose the pope for immoral conduct and abuse of authority. On the other side, in the bulls and Dissentio, Sixtus IV and his secretaries sought to arose support for the expulsion of Lorenzo as unjust tyrant of Florence and for disrespect of the Church. The historical introduction in the first half of the volume leaves one uneasy on several counts for its lacunae and unsubstantiated attributions. The author perememptorily excludes discussing the political implications in the Pazzi Conspiracy regarding the roles of King Ferrante of Naples and Federigo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino. The latter served as condottiere in papal hire and, according to the most recent scholarship by Marcello Simonetta, was certainly implicated in the anti-Medici plot. Strangely, Simonetta’s work (New York, 2008) remains unacknowledged by the author. Yet at the same time, Daniels goes into excruiating detail on other aspects of the Pazzi Conspiracy, most of it derived from the many publications of Riccardo Fubini, author of the preface. In his treatment of the Synodus, Daniels ignores Simonetta’s 2012 edition and commentary, which he dismisses with the erroneous statement that it had been based on a later printed edition by Fabroni rather than an autograph manuscript in the Florentine state archive. For another example, when discussing Giovanni Caroli’s dissent from the Florentines’ call for a church council (pp. 76–78), Daniels makes no mention, even in a footnote, of recent scholarship on the Dominican friar and his views on the Medici. The massive bibliography at the volume’s end obscures these and other lacunae. Daniels’s work is useful but oddly skewed. [End Page 160] Melissa Meriam Bullard University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings by Katherine Austen (review)

Reviewed by: Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings by Katherine Austen Lisa Di Crescenzo Austen, Katherine, Book M: A London Widow’s Life Writings, ed. Pamela S. Hammons (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto Series, 26), Toronto, Iter/CRRS, 2013; paperback; pp. vii, 216; 8 b/w plates; R.R.P. US$27.95; ISBN 9780772721501. In Pamela S. Hammons’s modernised and carefully annotated edition of Katherine Austen’s intriguing autograph manuscript miscellany, Book M, the oeuvre of a pious, ingenious, and literary widow in Restoration London is presented to the reader in an accessible and frequently illuminating text. Largely understudied by literary scholars of the women’s canon of Renaissance England, this elegant edition of Austen’s life writings is a welcome addition to a small body of recent research on Austen’s manuscript. Widowed young, Austen was protectress of her children and her family resources, deploying an innate cleverness and piercing self-awareness to successfully manage, negotiate, and subvert the structures of patriarchy in seventeenth-century London. Hammons sensitively situates Austen in time – she lived from the late 1620s to 1683 – and in the complexity of her social location in the aspirant gentry. Through her multi-generic compilation of texts, written and compiled primarily between 1664 and 1666 – spiritual meditations, sermon notes, financial records, letters, personal essays, and more than thirty occasional and religious lyric poems – Austen elaborated a perspective of herself in relation to the mundane and spiritual worlds. This outlook, refracted through a providential worldview, intersects dramatically with the upheavals and chaos of England’s civil wars, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Great Plague outbreak of 1665–66, and the Fire of London in 1666. Hammons demonstrates a subtle and intuitive grasp of Austen’s writing and the repertoire of her considerable literary capabilities as a thinker, writer, and poet, deftly treating the personal and theological connection of the texts. Footnotes enlarge on Austen’s history, her seventeenth-century vernacular, and biblical discourse, without encumbering the text itself. The short analysis of Austen’s outlook in the introductory essay does not stint on interpretive detail, and offers a comprehensible entrée to the text and its multiple and various genres. The complexity of these textual forms, their modes of discourse, and assumed readerships demand more extended attention here, a purpose that a short review can only partially serve. ‘When I view over the assurances and hopes I have had in this book of my meditations’, Austen writes towards the end of Book M, ‘I have overcome my enemies and my fears, but such is the unsureness of every ground in this world to anchor on as I soon come to wade in deep places again’ (p. 194). A viable and often-used medium for women writers in seventeenth-century England, the manuscript form and the practice of writing itself enabled Austen’s contemplation and comprehension of herself in relation to [End Page 258] the significance of her temporal and spiritual worlds. Hammons argues that this perspective was ‘carefully tailored’ (p. 10): among the most compelling of Austen’s own idiosyncratic preoccupations to shape her sense of self, and examined by the editor, include her engagement with prophetic discourses and her considerable effort to govern how she was perceived as a widow. Most suggestively, Austen’s self-figuration as a widow entails a deliberate inversion of this state and a fashioning of herself, as Hammons’s lucid interpretation emphasises, as ‘a seventeenth-century English Penelope’, ‘heroically loyal’ to her dead husband, while also a shrewd, eagle-eyed guardian of her material resources against suitors (p. 20). The scripted multidimensionality of Austen’s self-presentation is skilfully rendered by Hammons who alerts the reader less familiar with Austen’s works to her deployment of the tropes of female weakness and fragility in her meditations to play down her actual considerable material, familial, and personal resources. Ultimately, however, it is perhaps in the author’s chronicling of the spiritual and metaphysical complexities of her everyday life, and God’s immediate intervention therein through dreams and visions, that the modern reader comes closest to Austen’s sense of...

Evidence Regarding the "Monte" Stage Piece in "Corral" Theatres of the Seventeenth Century

This article builds upon another published in 2002 in the Bulletin of the Comediantes by Patricia Kenworthy, entitled “Lope de Vega’s Drawing of the ‘Monte’ Stage Set,” and revisits the question of the physical nature, location, and use of the “monte” stage piece in the “corral” theatres of Madrid and other locations. In particular, this article discusses the merits and limitations of the “monte” drawing found in the autograph manuscript of Lope’s El cardenal de Belén (Bibliteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence: Ms. Ashb.1898, fol. 51v) and attempts to reconcile textual evidence of “monte” usage in the 900+ plays in the Chadwick “Teatro del Siglo de Oro” database with documentary evidence concerning the “monte” presented by other researchers and found in the “Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España” series published by Tamesis. (BWD)

Scripsi manu mea Hartmann Schedel in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 490

The Padua-trained medical doctor Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514) of Nuremberg is today perhaps best known for his Liber Chronicarum, printed in Latin and German (Weltchronik) in 1493 with an ambitious programme of xylographies. Thanks to his well-spent study years in Padua (1463–1466), he also played an important role in the dissemination of Italian humanism north of the Alps, as witnessed, for example, by his important collection of inscriptions and Humanist texts. His rich library, consisting of manuscripts, both autographs and written by others, and printed books, was bought from his family by H. J. Fugger of Augsburg (1531–1598) in 1552. Fugger’s library was passed to the Bavarian Court Library in 1571 and is now housed at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. This article details one of the autograph manuscripts, the clm 490, containing medical texts. It gives direct access to Hartmann at work on his library, carefully writing out the contents in his all’antica hand, numbering the folios, providing a list of contents, presenting authors in short biographies and, last but not least, scrupulously dating and often localizing the sections copied.

Scripsi manu mea Hartmann Schedel in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 490

The Padua-trained medical doctor Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514) of Nuremberg is today perhaps best known for his Liber Chronicarum, printed in Latin and German (Weltchronik) in 1493 with an ambitious programme of xylographies. Thanks to his well-spent study years in Padua (1463–1466), he also played an important role in the dissemination of Italian humanism north of the Alps, as witnessed, for example, by his important collection of inscriptions and Humanist texts. His rich library, consisting of manuscripts, both autographs and written by others, and printed books, was bought from his family by H. J. Fugger of Augsburg (1531–1598) in 1552. Fugger’s library was passed to the Bavarian Court Library in 1571 and is now housed at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. This article details one of the autograph manuscripts, the clm 490, containing medical texts. It gives direct access to Hartmann at work on his library, carefully writing out the contents in his all’antica hand, numbering the folios, providing a list of contents, presenting authors in short biographies and, last but not least, scrupulously dating and often localizing the sections copied.

Un Fragment du De speculis comburentibus de Regiomontanus Copié par Toscanelli et Inséré dans les Carnets de Leonardo (Codex Atlanticus, 611rb/915ra)

SummaryThis article studies a fragment on the conic sections that appear in the Codex Atlanticus, fols. 611rb/915ra. Arguments are put forward to assemble these two folios. Their comparison with the Latin texts available before 1500 shows that they derive from the De speculis comburentibus of Alhacen and the De speculis comburentibus of Regiomontanus, joined together in his autograph manuscript (Vienna, Öster. Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 5258). Having identified the sources, and discussed their mathematics, the issue of their transmission is targeted. It is shown that these notes were written by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, through whom they reached the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

Review of Lauri Suurpää, Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle (Indiana University Press, 2014)

[1] The study of songs and song cycles has generated a number of questions about interpretive practice-most notably, how understand the relationship between text and music, and make sense of a part in relation its whole. Lauri Suurpaa's Death in Winterreise provides an important contribution both lines of inquiry in its effort to illuminate one narrowly defined area of the musico-poetic aspects of Winterreise, namely, how the notion of death occurs in the poems of the cycle's second part and how this theme is reflected in the (ix). His interdisciplinary approach text-music analysis yields rich insights into the structural relationships between Muller's poems and Schubert's songs, leading readers a nuanced view of the protagonist's attitude towards death.[2] Death in Winterreise consists of three parts: Part (Background, chapters 1-4) clarifies the interpretive context and proposes a method for analysis; Part II (Songs, chapters 5-11) presents detailed analyses of songs 14-24; Part III (Cycle, chapters 12-14) explores cyclic coherencies among the songs discussed in Part II. Suurpaa's decision focus his study on the latter half of the song as it appears in Tobias Haslinger's of the first edition (1828) may, at first, raise the eyebrows of discerning readers who are familiar with the compositional genesis of Muller's poems and Schubert's text settings.(1)The discrepancy between Muller's ordering of the poems in the Gedichte aus den hinter lassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten II (1824) and Schubert's ordering in his song cycle, coupled with the differences in keys between Schubert's autograph manuscript and the first edition, introduces layers of complications the interpretive act, particularly if the preservation of authorial intent is understood be the only pathway towards authentic statements about cyclic coherence and musical meaning.(2) Suurpaa is certainly aware of these issues (Should Muller's final ordering of the poems [as found in Waldhornisten] be taken into consideration in the overall narrative of Winterreise? Should the songs that were transposed be analyzed in the keys found in the manuscript or in the first edition? [5]), and his response can be read as a faithful commitment the authorial intent of the composer: It seems justifiable discuss the narrative only as it appears in the song cycle (5); I will use the keys in the first edition, which we know Schubert accepted, or at least knew about, as he prepared his work for publication (6). As one might expect, the kinds of textual meanings and musical relationships that pass through this sieve indeed point us towards a new reading of the songs in the second half of Schubert's song cycle. The payoff is that it invites us hear these songs with fresh ears and deepen our sense of the cycle's possible meanings.[3] The approach that Suurpaa uses analyze the individual songs in Winterreise was introduced in his earlier study of Le paon and Le cygnet from Ravel's Histoires naturelles (2011). The method involves three stages of analysis: music, text, and musico-poetic aspects. In the first stage, Suurpaa analyzes the music without textual considerations, using Schenkerian analysis in tandem with Robert Hatten's (1994) expressive genres. Meaning is derived from the voice-leading structure--whose components (e.g., motives, enharmonic respellings) are woven into a musical narrative that traces cause and effect, the expressive genres that describe the music's emotional trajectory (35), and the musical texture. To account for shifting emotional intensities in a musical work's expressive genre (35), Suurpaa outlines the music's dramatic curve in terms of its global high point and local peaks, which may or may not correspond the poem's dramatic curve (36). In the second stage, Suurpaa analyzes the poem without the music, drawing from Greimas's theory of narrative grammar (1983 and 1987). …

From Debussy’s Studio: The Little-Known Autograph of De rêve , the First of the Proses lyriques (1892)

In the early part of his career, one of the areas in which Debussy carried out extensive experimentation was the art song—the mélodie . Having at first set poetry by Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, Debussy decided in the eighteen-nineties to write his own poetry for musical setting, taking inspiration from the free verse (“vers libre”) of the Symbolists. Completed in the years 1892–93, the group of four melodies that he symbolically entitled Proses lyriques was conceived at the moment at which the composer was completing both the String Quartet and the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune . And it is not by chance that he completed these mélodies just as he was beginning work on the opera Pelléas et Mélisande . For the Proses lyriques we possess several manuscript versions, including the autograph manuscript that served the engraver (the Stichvorlage ), today on deposit at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. For the first of the group, “De rêve,” another autograph is preserved in the collections of the Juilliard School. Comparison of the Morgan and Juilliard manuscripts reveals differences not in the structure of the mélodie as much as in the subtle refinements Debussy made in the writing for voice and piano. Indeed these refinements reveal the experimental and pragmatic predilections of a composer anxious to offer his interpreters a musical text accurately reflective of his sonic universe.

Rui Vasques e a Crónica de Íria

Segundo consta no explicit da Crónica de Santa Maria de Íria, a obra foi elaborada pelo clérigo compostelano Rui Vasques entre 23 de abril de 1467 e 29 de março de 1468. O aproveitamento fraudulento de que foi objeto o conteúdo dessa Crónica por vários autores entre os séculos XVII e XVIII levou alguns estudiosos, em tempos modernos, a duvidar daquela cronologia e, portanto, da própria autoria de Rui Vasques. No entanto, uma análise atenta das reproduções pós-medievais reafirma, com notável segurança, a veracidade das circunstâncias temporais declaradas por Rui Vasques e evidencia que o manuscrito custodiado na catedral de Santiago é o original autógrafo.DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/verba.41.1300

Ricezione ed elaborazione della retorica politica contemporanea: il caso della poesia dell'ultimo Raboni

In the last phase of his poetry, Giovanni Raboni was concerned with the the issue of rhetoric and the question of the contemporary language of Italian politics. In Ultimi Versi, published posthumously in 2006 by Garzanti, the author makes a satirical use of syntagms, phraseology and verbose expressions typical of Berlusconi's propaganda, introducing these elements in his verses with a denunciation intent. This peculiar operation can be illustrated by comparing the poems of Ultimi versi and the political compositions of Cadenza d'inganno, another collection published in 1975, as both of them present precise similarities. Contextualising the posthumous collection in Raboni's work makes it possible to analyse this peculiar phenomenon: the poet, by the mean of his poetry, re-uses the language created by Berlusconi's politics. This study is based on the close examination of the autograph manuscripts, the preparatory writings for Ultimi versi, and of the drafts – written in a notebook kept by the private archive “Valduga” in Milan.These materials prove the way Raboni unveiled this specific political language with a mocking and denunciation intent, and the way the power rhetoric became part of one of the most important poetical works of the 20th century, though in a overturning perspective of estrangement.

Producing editions of Cavalli

Rediscovery of Cavalli began in 1967, when Glyndebourne staged Raymond Leppard’s version of Ormisda and Alan Curtis directed Erismena at Berkeley. These were the first operas by the composer to be seen and heard in nearly 300 years. Ormindo was followed by Leppard’s Calisto (1975) and Egisto (1977) and by the first three of Jane Glover’s six revivals—Rosinda (Oxford, 1973), Eritrea (Wexford, 1975) and Didone (Oxford, 1976). More Cavalli was revived elsewhere during the following decades, but a milestone was reached in 2008, when works by him were presented in the same month (September) in two of Europe’s major opera houses—Didone at La Scala, Milan, and Calisto at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The revival of Cavalli’s operas has been accompanied by an explosion of research into the composer, his works, their sources and their contexts. The leading light in this development has been the editor of this new book, Ellen Rosand, whose doctoral dissertation, ‘Aria in the early operas of Francesco Cavalli’ (New York University, 1971), heralded a surge in publications in this area, including her own magisterial Opera in 17th-century Venice: the creation of a genre (Berkeley, 1991). The first monograph on Cavalli, by Glover, appeared in 1978, and the first thorough study of his autograph manuscripts, by Peter Jeffery, was completed at Princeton University two years later. Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker (in articles published in 1975 and 1984) portrayed Seicento Italian opera as an industry, while Beth L. Glixon and Jonathan E. Glixon’s monograph (New York, 2006) describes Venetian opera as a business. This list could be extended, for the field has attracted eminent scholars from many parts of the world.

Un manoscritto parzialmente autografo di Alessandro Tassoni e due sue traduzioni inedite da Tacito

This article is the first to shed light on a partial autograph manuscript by Alessandro Tassoni (housed at the Library of the Accademia dei Lincei e Corsiniana). It contains two of his translations of Tacitus (Germany and The Life of Agricola), together with some censures on Justus Lipsius’ edition of the Latin historian’s works. It can undoubtedly be attributed to the first years of the 17th century and may have been meant for the cardinal Ascanio Colonna (for whom Tassoni was working at the time); moreover, this work confirms the Modenese writer’s interest in Tacitus, not only from a historical and ideological perspective, but also from a critical and philological one.

Michael Maestlin and His Unpublished Treatise on the Nova of 1604

Michael Maestlin (1550-1631), professor of mathematics at the University of Tubingen and one of the most significant astronomers between Copernicus and Kepler, published important treatises on the celestial novelties of his period: a short tract on the nova of 1572 in Cassiopeia, which attracted the interest and admiration of Tycho Brahe, who nevertheless criticised Maestlin for his tacit adhesion to Copemicanism;' a larger treatise on the comet of 1577, where Maestiin located the comet in the sphere of Venus according to the Copemican world system;2 and finally a less elaborate tract on the comet of 1580, interpreted as a new creation in the sphere of Saturn.3 But this is not all Maestlin wrote on the subject of novas and comets.Recently, in a collective volume issued with the proceedings of the conference on Michael Maestlin held in Tubingen in 2000, Gerhard Betsch published a survey of Maestlin's printed works, accompanied by a detailed summary of his Nachlass, that is, of his archival papers (manuscripts and letters) preserved in different libraries in Germany and Austria.4 In that publication, Betsch offered, from the two boxes containing Maestlin's papers in the Wurttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart (WLB), a precise description of the contents of Cod. math, quarto 15 b, among them (as item 8) a treatise in German on the comet of 1618-19.5 Surprisingly, however, Betsch did not mention the presence of another treatise (as item 11), this time in Latin, on the nova of 1604, titled Consideratio Astronomica inusitatae Novae et prodigiosae Stellae, superiori 1604 anno, sub initium Octobris, iuxta Eclipticam in signo Sagittarii vesperi exortae, et adhuc nunc eodem loco lumine corusco lucentis (Astronomical consideration of the extraordinary and prodigious new star that appeared near the ecliptic in the sign of Sagittarius one evening in early October in the preceding year 1604, and continues to shine in the same place with a tremulous light).6 The existence of this tract had already been noted by Richard A. Jarrell in his unpublished doctoral dissertation on Maestlin, which remains the best monograph about the Tubingen astronomer to date.7 Jarrell concluded too hastily that the manuscript is scored and illegible, contributing decisively to the lack of subsequent attention by scholars. However, while the manuscript is badly scored, it is not completely illegible. Although very difficult to read, due to the many cancellations and additions both at the margins and between the lines in the very small handwriting typical of Maestlin (moreover with a constant use of abbreviations), the manuscript treatise can be read to a great extent along the main lines of the argument. Unfortunately, however, the treatise is incomplete, suggesting that either Maestlin finally abandoned it or the concluding pages have disappeared. Our intention in the present paper is to offer a full transcription (together with an English translation by Patrick J. Boner) of the legible parts in the manuscript, along with a presentation and a discussion of Maestlin's theses on the phenomenon in the context of the contemporary debate in Germany and in relation to his previous treatise on the nova of 1572.1. Short Description of the ManuscriptThe autograph manuscript extends over 12 pages. Despite the many cancellations and additions, frequently impossible to read, pages 1-10 offer a readily legible text. Significantly, pages 1-4 and 9-12 present a vertical streak extending diagonally across the entire page. Perhaps this indicates that the content of these pages has been transferred to a fair copy, but this possible copy seems to be irretrievably lost. In addition, from the first lines on page 10 to the abrupt end of the manuscript at the bottom of page 12 (where we find the usual indication of the first word of the following page, which is not preserved), the script changes to a very small and quick writing, with constant cancellations and abbreviations, resembling the first notes of an improvised writing to be polished later. …