OCT. 9, 2015
The dignified profiles of Dante and Michelangelo adorn the proscenium arch of the neo-Renaissance theater inside Columbia University’s Italian Academy. During a concert there by the Ensemble Origo on Thursday, I often gazed up at them, wondering what these luminaries of Italian art and high letters would have made of the evening’s program of motets, madrigals and “moresche” by Orlando di Lasso.
There was little lofty poetry among the texts, save for a setting of Petrarch’s “Canzoniere,” “If my weary lines can fly so high as to reach her,” set in elegant five-part harmony and performed with cool poise and accuracy by the Origo singers. But that text only threw into relief the bawdiness of the surrounding material, most of which might be summed up under the title “If my leering lines can swoop so low as to breach her.”
The program, with its eye-popping contrasts between high-minded art and lowbrow entertainment, was a reconstruction of music performed in honor of the 1568 wedding in Munich of Renate of Lorraine to Wilhelm V, the Duke of Bavaria’s heir. Those festivities stretched over 18 days with musical contributions by Lasso that included a Te Deum, a motet performed during dinner, an evening of moresche (risqué songs sung in the pidgin Italian of African slaves) and a commedia dell’arte show filled with other stereotyped foreigners and lewd innuendo.
Recent scholarship has shown that Lasso’s moresche contain genuine snippets of Kanuri, the language of the Bornu Empire in what is now northeastern Nigeria, which was an important source of slaves for the European market. Mixed with Neapolitan dialect and onomatopoeic gibberish, these words lend an intriguing hint of authenticity to these rustic songs.