Sarrazins, Rodiens et Portugaises

This article focuses on the reception of the Southern-Italian villanelle Li saracini adorano lu sole in France and Low Countries between the 1570s and the 1630s. The text of the villanelle lists a series of conventional parallels between love and sea life: in particular, the devotion of the male narrator for his beloved is compared to the religious fervour of Islamic populations, known in Southern Italy as Saracini. This vocal piece was first included in 1565 Adrian le Roy’s Primo libro di villanelle alla napolitana, and in the following two decades spread widely in the Parisian musical scene, where the so called Neapolitan musical style was much in vogue. The first section of this essay examines three French musical versions of the villanella, those by Antoin de Baif, Didier Le Blanc and Guillaume Tessier. These pieces each show a melodic line and a conduct of the parts that is considerably different from the Southern Italian original. Regarding their texts, it can be observed that the Italian poem was not only translated but altered through the substitution of characters and settings. The academic Antoine de Baïf offered a classicizing and hermetic interpretation by replacing the Saracini of the Mediterranean original with the Hellenistic Rhodians, while the court composers Didier Le Blanc and Guillaume Tessier provided their poems with an exotic setting by evoking Portuguese pearl hunting in the Indian Ocean. The second part of the article focuses on the reuse of the most famous French setting of Li saracini adorano lu sole, Les mariniers adorent un beau jour, as a melody for sacred hymns in the first half of seventeenth century. In the Low Countries this air was adapted for religious propaganda both in Catholic Flanders, in the sacred songs anthology La Pieuse Alouette, and in the Calvinist Dutch Republic, in the moral book Klagende Maeghden by Jacob Cats. The analysis of Li Saracini revisions and settings in France and Low Countries casts new light on the ways in which a Renaissance vocal piece could be not only arranged or translated but rather adapted for different cultural contexts.