Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, oil on panel (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
In seventeenth-century Rome, the Lessons from the Lamentations of Jeremiah formed an important part of Matins during the final days of Holy Week. Alongside chant and polyphonic settings, Roman composers increasingly cultivated versions for solo voice and basso continuo, bringing the declamatory techniques of the stile recitativo into the repertory of Tenebrae.
These settings retain characteristic elements of the liturgical Lessons, including the Hebrew letters that introduce individual verses and the concluding exhortation ‘Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.’ Within this framework, however, composers could respond closely to the syntax and imagery of the text through chromatic inflection, dissonance, melisma, changes of register, and shifts between recitative-like and more lyrical writing.
Bologna, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, MS Q.43 preserves twenty-three such Lessons. Most are for solo voice and continuo, with two duet settings. Thirteen are anonymous; the attributed works include three Lessons by Giovanni Francesco Marcorelli, two each by Giacomo Carissimi and Carlo Rainaldi, and individual settings attributed to Girolamo Frescobaldi, Carlo Caproli, and ‘M.M.,’ probably Marco Marazzoli.
Hans Joachim Marx associated the repertory with Roman musicians active during the first half of the century and proposed a date around 1640. More recent investigation of the manuscript itself, however, has identified its paper as Roman and dating from after 1650. The date of the surviving copy must therefore be distinguished from the dates of the individual compositions, several of which may have originated considerably earlier.
Giacomo Carissimi, Lectio Prima, Feriae Quintae in Coena Domini,
Bologna, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, MS Q.43, ff. 1v–5r.
The Lessons are followed by a group of devotional pieces connected with the Passion and penitential themes, including a sacred contrafactum of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna in the voice of Mary Magdalene, as well as several early oratorios. Robert Kendrick has consequently characterized Q.43 as a quaderno di Quaresima: a practical collection of music suitable for Lent rather than a single systematically organized liturgical cycle.
Tenebrae, from Caerimoniale Episcoporum (Rome, 1600), Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
Two Lessons in Q.43 are attributed to Giacomo Carissimi. The first, ⏵︎ “Incipit Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae”, is inscribed “Sr. Carissimi,” while the second, ⏵︎ “Vau. Et egressus est a filia Sion”, bears the initials “J.C.” Their predominantly declamatory writing remains close to speech-like recitation, with the harmonic movement responding closely to the syntax and affect of the text.
The more elaborate passages are generally concentrated on the Hebrew letters that introduce the verses. Elsewhere the vocal writing is largely syllabic, and in some passages ornamental movement is transferred to the continuo rather than the voice. Compared with the more expansive arioso writing found elsewhere in Carissimi’s sacred music, these Lessons maintain a comparatively restrained relationship between text and melodic elaboration.
Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Feriae Quintae in Coena Domini, Lectio Terza, ⏵︎ “Jod. Manum suam misit hostis”, provides a contrasting treatment of the same repertory. The setting is centered on D, with cadential movement helping to articulate the successive verses. Frescobaldi reserves some of his strongest chromatic writing for particularly charged passages of the text.
At “O vos omnes” and “si est dolor sicut dolor meus” (Lamentations 1:12), the vocal line becomes markedly more chromatic. The following verse, “De excelso misit ignem” (1:13), reaches into the highest register of the setting, intensifying the image of fire sent down from above. Such moments stand out against the predominantly syllabic and declamatory character of the Lesson.
The expressive treatment of individual words is characteristic of the repertory preserved in Q.43. Rather than sustaining a uniformly chromatic or florid style, the settings often reserve unusual intervals, dissonances, melismas, or shifts of register for particular textual moments. In Frescobaldi’s Lesson, the chromatic writing on ‘si est dolor sicut dolor meus’ is especially striking, concentrating musical tension around one of the most affectively charged lines of the Lamentations.
Because Q.43 itself was copied after 1650, its date cannot be used to argue that Frescobaldi’s Lesson was a late composition. The work must predate his death in 1643, and scholarship has associated it more broadly with Roman sacred performance practice of the 1630s and early 1640s.
Girolamo Frescobaldi, Feriae V in Coena Domini, Lectio Terza,
Bologna, Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica, MS Q.43, ff. 7r–10r.
Giovanni Francesco Marcorelli is represented by three Lessons in the manuscript. His ⏵︎ “Aleph. Quomodo obscuratum est aurum”, for the second Lesson of Holy Saturday, combines a relatively stable tonal framework with localized chromatic inflection. Q.43 also preserves a duet treatment of the same liturgical text, offering a different balance between declamation, ornamentation, and rhetorical contrast.
Marcorelli’s documented activity at the Chiesa Nuova in Rome in 1646–47 is significant for the context of Q.43. Together with other repertorial connections in the manuscript, it has contributed to the proposed association of the collection with the musical circles surrounding Santa Maria in Vallicella, although the manuscript does not establish a single performance venue for all of its contents.
MS Q.43 documents a distinctive repertory of Roman Holy Week music in which the declamatory procedures of seventeenth-century monody were applied to the liturgical Lessons of Tenebrae. The settings range from the comparatively restrained recitative writing of Carissimi to the more localized chromatic and rhetorical effects found in Frescobaldi and Marcorelli.
Its importance lies not only in the individual works it preserves but also in the repertorial context created by the volume as a whole. Lamentations, penitential pieces, sacred contrafacta, and early oratorios appear together in a manuscript connected with Roman devotional practice, providing evidence of the musical resources used for Lent and Holy Week in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.
References
Carter, Tim, and John Butt (eds.). (2005). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dixon, Graham. (1986). Carissimi. Oxford Studies of Composers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hammond, Frederick. (2002). Girolamo Frescobaldi. Palermo: L’Epos. Originally published in English in 1983.
Kendrick, Robert L. (2014). Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Marx, Hans Joachim. (1971). “Monodische Lamentationen des Seicento.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 28(1), 1–23.
