Amica mea: Renaissance Love Songs

For Valentine’s Day, Brighton Consort takes you on a journey through music for lovers from the Renaissance. Both sacred and secular music embrace in this concert that is guaranteed to kindle your passions. While love songs throughout the ages have often focussed on either the ardent desire for love or the pain of its loss, our programme instead is a celebration of love when everything is going well! We've banished anguish and torment and instead we revel in being very 'loved up' with this music - in a Renaissance way, of course!

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Concert programme

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Osculetur me
Pierre de Manchicourt - Osculetur me

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Quam pulchra es
Johannes Lupi - Quam pulchra es

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Descendi in hortum meum
Cipriano de Rore - Descendi in hortum meum

INTERVAL

Orlande de Lassus - Bonjour mon coeur

Jacques Arcadelt - Bella Fioretta
Jacques Arcadelt - Da bei rami scendea

Claude Goudimel - Bonjour mon coeur

Orlando Gibbons - Ah, dear heart
John Wilbye - There, where I saw her lovely beauty

Philippe de Monte - Bonjour mon coeur

Francisco Guerrero - Quasi cedrus
Rodrigo de Ceballos - Hortus conclusus

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina - Trahe me post te
Francisco Guerrero - Trahe me post te Virgo Maria

Programme note

It’s Valentine’s Day! (Well, it was recently…) While the more cynical among us may think this is just yet another day for us to line the pockets of the greeting card industry, those who know the joy of saccharine, soft-focus, and gooey-eyed romance would never hear of such a thing. For you, The True Romantics, Brighton Consort presents this programme of Renaissance Love Songs.

When programming this concert, I encountered one small problem: it appears that sometimes love goes wrong (I was shocked to learn this!) and when this happens, it makes for really great music! So much of the love poetry written in the Renaissance and set by great composers such as Claudio Monteverdi or Thomas Weelkes is about the pang and ache of a broken heart, or the insanity of unfulfilled desire, or some other unfortunate situation. But this is (or was recently…) Valentine’s Day! We can be upset and lovelorn for 364 days of the year, but not today. So I decided to choose music and texts that speak of love when love is great, fresh, new, beautiful, and exciting. We can all use the positivity!

When taking on this task of finding Renaissance music about love when it’s going well, a great place to start is, believe it or not, the Holy Bible! The Old Testament book of the Song of Solomon (often known as the Song of Songs) contains beautiful, sensuous, and vivid love poetry that has been a part of the Jewish and Christian religious experience for millenia. During the Renaissance, when the Catholic Church was both the main cultural moderator and financial backer of professional music, composers made use of these texts to experiment with sensuality and expressiveness in music while not having to stray into (even) more salacious subject areas. The intensity of some of this music fits the sometimes extreme nature of these texts but it also expresses the intriguing overlap between religious fervour and romantic desire.

Because the texts themselves are at the forefront, I have chosen throughout tonight’s programme pairs of compositions that set the same or very similar texts to highlight how different composers might approach the same starting material. This idea also allows us to explore an interesting practice in the Renaissance of taking small pieces of this poetry, even individual images, and creating new texts out of these ‘love poetry building blocks’. You’ll notice that the compositions that are paired in tonight’s programme are not necessarily settings of precisely the same texts, and that ideas are repeated throughout the programme in different orders and in different contexts. Composers in this way sometimes actually created their own texts by drawing from the wide range of Song of Songs imagery, a rare practice during the Renaissance.

Within this context, it is perhaps not so remarkable that a composer known in modern times for his serious religious and liturgical music, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, would write and publish, in 1584, an entire volume of motets setting only texts drawn from the Song of Songs. The texts he chose here were strictly biblical, and don’t make use of the various liturgical expansions and reimaginings mentioned above, whereas the works chosen to make the pairings in our programme often did. In choosing four of Palsetrina’s pieces for tonight’s programme, we can present a framework for these texts and this tradition of musical settings of Song of Songs poetry built around Palsetrina’s work. Palestrina was also a prolific composer of secular music, and his 1584 volume can be seen to represent an experiment with writing ‘sacred’ music in a ‘secular’ way - and perhaps vice versa. Given that in 2025 we celebrate 500 years since Palestrina’s birth, grounding our programme in the work of Italian Renaissance music’s greatest genius is more than fitting!

The Song of Songs repertoire, which constitutes the first half and the later part of the second half, sets Latin texts. In the first part of the second half, however, I’ve drawn on another often-set text, but this time in French, Bonjour, mon coeur. This poem that tells of the joy of a reunited couple was written by Pierre de Ronsard, one of Renaissance France’s most celebrated poets. The first stanza of Bonjour, mon coeur, is nothing other than a long string of beautiful, tender, and playful greetings. The second stanza (set only by Philippe de Monte) gives some context to these greetings, but the overall effect is clear: the language here is simple and the love is fresh. Lassus and Goudimel wrote similar settings; their short, clear, and largely chordal writing is nevertheless delightful and beguiling. De Monte writes a slightly more complicated piece, but it is again one characterised by repeated material and lively rhythms. This music could not contrast more starkly with the subtly seductive music of the first half.

In between these settings of Bonjour, mon coeur come first two Italian and then two English madrigals. Here I found that music by the Italian madrigal genre’s founder, Jacques Arcadelt, better satisfied my quest for music ‘for love when it’s all going really well’ than the later, perhaps more tortured geniuses of Marenzio, Gesualdo, or Monteverdi. Bella Fioretta is a relatively straightforward but beautiful poem in which a lover questions how to adequately describe the look of his beloved, concluding that it is only paradise itself that can compare. While effective and moving, these sorts of comparison conceits can be found throughout Renaissance poetry. In Da' be' rami scendea, however, we get something altogether different, and from the pen of none other than Francesco Petrarca himself. Here is a moment captured in time, a dangled image: the lover describes a vision of the beloved showered in flower petals, describing how each floats through the air and lands. The text leads to the conclusion that here, in this impossible beauty that seems to stop time and last forever, is where ‘Love reigns’. Archadelt’s setting mirrors this wonderfully in his inventive use of rests and his crescendo to a triumphant proclamation ‘Qui regna Amore’!

Our two English madrigals continue with our theme, though these texts only just manage to pry themselves free from the melancholy that characterised so much of Jacobean love poetry. Orlando Gibbons sets a text that appears to complain of separation and a broken heart, but it is in fact a plea whispered at day break after a blissful night together, wishing that this last longer. John Wilbye’s work is more poetically complex and makes use of night and day imagery as well to express the completeness of the poet’s love. Both pieces are superlative examples of the musical skill of these two composers to create ravishing and opulent music, full of yearning and longing, but forever assured.

The programme concludes with a return to Song of Songs texts, but with a focus on two Spanish composers. Emotional intensity in religious music is a hallmark of the Spanish Renaissance, typified by the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria. Here, however, we focus on Francisco Guerrero, Victoria’s less well known contemporary but still among the leaders of the school, and a little known composer Rodrigo de Ceballos. These two vie with Palestrina for how best to bring our love-fest of a concert to a close, but that honour must go to Guerrero with his amazing setting of Trahe me post te, Virgo Maria. In our last piece tonight, we are briefly able to touch on the most fascinating and overt ‘sanctification’ of these astonishing love poetry texts yet in their use in Marian devotion, devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary is (and ‘paradoxically’ doesn’t even begin to cover it) worshipped and adored here with words that normally so obviously would be reserved for sensual and romantic desire. The effect is spellbinding. There can be no clearer assertion of the equality of divine and earthly love.

Programme note by Greg Skidmore
February 2025

Texts & Translations

Palestrina & Manchicourt

Manchicourt also sets the following text, as part of the same piece:

Palestrina & Lupi

Lupi also sets the following text, as part of the same piece:

Palestrina & Rore

Lassus, Goudimel, & De Monte

De Monte also sets the following text, as part of the same piece:

Palestrina sets the following text:

Guerrero sets the following text: