YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

ORLANDO DI LASSO ET AL.: A NEW READING OF THE ROMAN VILLANELLA BOOK (1555)
Yet another potential contributor to Dorico’s anthology is Giovanthomaso Cimello,
a poet-composer and member of the Accademia dei Sereni. Nos. 11, 12, and 20 contain
trademarks of his style, namely, rather flat declamatory tunes and a tendency to
ventriloquize the voices of miserable peasants. 28 These villanelle might have been
transmitted to Rome by Lasso who Cimello claimed ‘had come to see him’, although
he does not specify when and where the meeting took place. 29
Nos. 14, 15, and 16 comprise a historically significant set of serenade-laments
in which song-writing becomes a topos for the first time in the Neapolitan repertory,
possibly implemented by Lasso. Urgent gestures in these poems are matched by welltimed
varieties of rhythmic declamation, demonstrating Lasso’s well-known sensitivity
to the gestural inflection of viva voce delivery (see Example 2). His keen sense
of rhythmic locution and pacing was no doubt refined by arranging villanella models
published by his favorite Neapolitan composers, Nola and Vicenzo Fontana, which
typically contain disjunct tunes distinguished by strong rhythmic contrasts. 30 Thus
immersion in models may have empowered him to assimilate characteristic features
of the three-voice idiom and to imitate it authentically on his own. Processes of imitation
also characterized Lasso’s youthful apprenticeship as a madrigal composer, for
when setting the same poems as his contemporaries he often paraphrased their expressive
rhythmic and melodic figures. 31 Asimilar process underlies nos. 13 and 22, which
are laments conceivably by Lasso (see Examples 3 and 4). They incorporate stock
figures that Neapolitan composers used ironically to convey the tearful content of
their texts, such as broadened motion or descending motives. In the context of short
songs, these figures function as momentary expressive effects, like those practiced
by an actor or improvisor on his audience. Both laments contain points of imitation
based on a motive consisting of repeated notes followed by a descending triadic outline
(compare Example 3, mm.10-12, and Example 4, mm. 11-14). This motive is
unique in Dorico’s anthology and cannot be found in villanelle emanating from Naples
during the 1540s. 32
28 For examples of Cimello’s poetic-musical style, see D. CARDAMONE and J. HAAR eds., Giovanthomaso
Cimello. The Collected Secular Works,(Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance,
126), Madison, 2001.
29 J. HAAR, Giovanthomaso Cimello as Madrigalist, in P. CORNEILSON ed., The Science and Art of
Renaissance Music, Princeton, 1998, p. 241.
30 Among Lasso’s arrangements published in 1555 and 1581 (said then to be ‘products of his youth’) are
six villanelle based on models by Fontana and four on models by Nola.
31 R. BARTOLI, L’apprendistato italiano di Orlando di Lasso, in Studi Musicali, 20 (1991), pp. 235–265.
32 This motive, with the same rhythmic spacing, functions as the subject of a point of imitation in Lasso’s
four-voice madrigal Si com’al chiaro giorno (RISM B, 1566 2 ). See O. DI LASSO, Sämtliche Werke,
8, ed. A. SANDBERGER, Leipzig, 1898, p. 46.
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