This article discusses Henry Purcell's theatre song 'If love's a sweet passion' (from The Fairy Queen, 1692) and its journey into various contexts in England and abroad. The article analyses the song's appearance in printed songbooks, broadside ballads and single-sheet engravings, and in the Dutch manuscript songbook Finspang 9096:7 (now in Norrkoping, Sweden), to show how the song was adapted to various contexts and conventions. The appearance of 'If love's a sweet passion' in Finspang 9096:7 further suggests that there was greater reciprocity in the exchanges between England and continental Europe than hitherto thought. I nuance this claim by arguing that such exchanges were dependent on translation and mediation by musicians such as John Abell (1653-after 1716) or translators such as Abel Boyer (?1667-1729). Boyer used 'If love's a sweet passion' in his Compleat French-Master (1694) and his French lyrics appear in Finspang 9096:7. The article shows the variety of uses and adaptations of 'If love's a sweet passion' in English and French-language contexts. This both challenges notions of 'elite' and 'popular' music as entirely separate, and invites scholars and performers to imagine Purcell's theatre songs performed and consumed in new ways.
This article explores the topos of transformation/metamorphosis and its role in creating unusually fluid and ambiguous scenarios of musico-textual behaviour in Trecento and Quattrocento song. Examining Paolo da Firenze’s ballata Lena, virtù e speranza, I show how transformation spreads from the surface level of specific poetic motifs and musical gestures to the very core of music’s relation to its text and text’s relation to its music. In this analysis, my goal is to follow the trajectory of one specific word (‘mutatio’) as it passes through various theoretical filters on its way from the textual to the musical medium (or back), creating new and often unexpected meanings realized in a musical setting.
The trouvère repertory contains over a hundred groups of contrafacta with a variety of parodic, satirical and devotional functions. This article discusses how certain cases of contrafacture can reshape the ways in which we imagine text–music relations. Through two cases—a serventois protesting the policies of King Louis IX of France, modelled on a song by Blondel de Nesle, and a contrafact of a song by the Chastelain de Coucy that comments on its own contrafaction—I argue not only for a medieval interest in melody’s representative potential, but also that this kind of representation was generated in a process similar to that of language—through repeated use in various contexts. Drawing briefly on semiotics, I suggest that these two melodies become ‘signs’ in that they represent or stand in for something else.