YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

(1) Son morto e moro e pur cerco morire,
Nè per tanto morir perdo la vita.
O potenza d’amor sol infinita.
(2) E ben ch’io moro non mor’il martire,
Anzi fra giaccio e foco ho mort’e vita.
O potenza d’amor sol infinita.
(3) Dunque la vita mia si può ben dire,
Peggio che mort’è chi la tien’in vita.
O potenza d’amor sol infinita.
(4) Quest’è la vita di chi segue Amore,
Fra ghiaccio e foco, e fra spem’e timore.
Vivo morendo e non vivo nè more.
ORLANDO DI LASSO ET AL.: A NEW READING OF THE ROMAN VILLANELLA BOOK (1555)
I’m dead and I die even as I seek to die,
lest through so much dying I lose life.
Oh power of love, unique and endless.
Even though I die the martyr does not,
rather between ice and fire I hold death
and life.
Oh power of love, unique and endless.
Then light of my life, one can truly say,
worse than death is one who clings to life.
Oh power of love, unique and endless.
This is the life of one who follows Love,
amid ice and fire, and amid hope and fear.
I live dying and I neither live nor die.
Example 1. Son morto e moro e pur cerco morire, Cantus, 1555 30 ; Tenor, 1558 16 ; Bassus, GB Lbl,
MS Royal Appendix 59–62.
No. 10 cites lines from a poem by Bembo and a madrigal by Hubertus Naich in which
the lover begs Cupid – already invoked as the culprit in no. 8 – to stop inflicting pain.
Even when bordering on the ridiculous, all these villanelle project a sweetly sad tone,
much like the laments of the Neapolitan dandy ‘assassinato d’amore’, a stock figure
in erudite comedy. 18 I have provisionally attributed this set of villanelle to Fabrizio
Dentice, because of his theatrical background and well-known preference for plaintive
texts that open with intertextual allusions to Petrarch – the kind of verse an improviser
might invent and just as easily subject to parody. Furthermore, the aria-like tunes
of nos. 8 and 10 move in the small range of a sixth over sturdy bass lines, like Fabrizio’s
famous villanella, Empio mio cor. 19
All the villanelle in this set were arranged for four voices by composers who,
like other arrangers of the time, sought models worthy of being expanded in the spirit
of competition, homage, or emulation. Cesare Tudino’s arrangement of no. 8 was
published in 1554, indicating that the model circulated freely in Rome before it was
incorporated into Dorico’s anthology of 1555 (see Table 2). Tudino, originally from
Atri in the kingdom of Naples, was employed as ‘soprano’at San Lorenzo in Damaso
18 D. RADCLIFF-UMSTEAD, The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Chicago, 1969, p. 161.
19 For Dentice’s settings of plaintive texts, see FABRIS, Da Napoli a Parma, nos. 1–7.
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