The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 25 (2019) No. 1

Monteverdi and Scacchi in Breslau: Madrigal Contrafacta in a Time of Conflict

Derek Stauff*

Abstract

Two sets of manuscript parts reveal the priorities and practices of musicians from Breslau (Wrocław) when transforming Italian madrigals into Lutheran spiritual madrigals in the waning years of the Thirty Years War (ca. 1640s). One is a previously unrecognized contrafactum of Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel et la terra (Eighth Book of Madrigals) by cantor Michael Büttner, the other a set of contrafacta of Marco Scacchi’s Madrigali a cinque by Ambrosius Profe. Both sets likely served as preliminary stages for selections published in Profe’s anthologies. Many of the retexted madrigals vividly evoke the political and religious conflicts then plaguing war-torn Silesia.

1. Introduction

2. Turning Monteverdi Spiritual and Polemical

3. Creating Ms. 271: Copyists, Provenance, Sources, Date

4. Scacchi’s Madrigals and Their German Contrafacta: Provenance, Date, Sources, and Purpose

5. Parody Procedures and Imagery in Profe’s Contrafacta of Scacchi’s Madrigals

6. Spiritual Madrigals in War-Torn Silesia

7. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendices

Examples

Figures

Tables

References

1. Introduction

1.1 In 1627 Ambrosius Profe, then a little-known cantor in the Silesian town of Jauer, issued an anthology of Italian secular music outfitted with new German texts. His title page advertised it as containing “quite a few prominent and famous authors’ madrigals and charming songs set with German sacred and political texts (in place of the Italian).”^[1] German-language contrafacta (or parodies) of Italian madrigals usually form part of a story about Italian musical taste in northern Europe or Italian-style spiritual madrigals in Protestant devotion. Today we know much about how Protestants replaced the texts of vernacular secular or Latin sacred music with devotional texts acceptable to Protestant doctrine, all this thanks to the work of Susan Lewis, Richard Freedman, Kristin Sponheim, and others.^[2] But we can add to this picture by further considering what Protestants tried to do with their imports, and here Profe’s 1627 title page is revealing: he evidently expected buyers to want madrigals with political texts in addition to the sacred.

1.2 Yet Profe’s 1627 contrafacta do not match our expectations of political music: they do not explicitly advance a political cause, celebrate a major political or military victory, or extol a ruler. This ostensible contradiction stems partly from a mere confusion of terms. For Profe and other early modern Germans, the word politisch most likely meant something like “worldly-wise.” Political texts in their collections offered nuggets of wisdom, scriptural or not, about public life and conduct.^[3] The label politisch did not exclude texts that engaged with current events, people, and issues, but Profe and his Lutheran colleagues rarely evoked these things directly, at least not in print.^[4] In most published Lutheran music of the age, the politics is latent, especially when the text is biblical. It depends on a listener’s knowledge of a text’s original biblical context and on Lutheran interpretations of it.

1.3 Nevertheless, Profe and his fellow musicians in Breslau made other Italian madrigal parodies in later decades that vividly evoke the troubles plaguing Silesia during the Counter-Reformation and Thirty Years War. In the 1640s they penned, in particular, two unpublished sets of parts transmitting contrafacta of madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi and Marco Scacchi respectively. Though the war was slowly winding to a close in these years, Breslau’s Protestants found themselves in a vulnerable position with both their political and religious privileges still in jeopardy. The retexted madrigals seem designed to recall these fears while giving comfort.

1.4 Both manuscript sets come from the Emil Bohn collection, named after its nineteenth-century cataloger.^[5] Thanks to postwar politics, the Bohn collection, originally in Breslau, is now housed in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. The first of these manuscripts, Bohn ms. mus. 271 (hereafter ms. 271), contains just one piece, a previously unrecognized contrafactum of Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel e la terra from Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi (the Eighth Book of Madrigals, Venice, 1638). Several years ago, Barbara Wiermann linked the anonymous manuscript to the collection belonging to Michael Büttner, cantor at the St. Mary Magdalena Church in Breslau for nearly three decades starting in the 1630s;^[6] she further established Büttner and his assistant as the copyists of the collection. The second manuscript, Bohn ms. mus. 197 (hereafter ms. 197), contains contrafacta of Marco Scacchi’s entire Madrigali a cinque (Venice, 1634). The manuscript remains the only complete source for Scacchi’s print, all but two of the original printed partbooks having been lost. Wiermann has traced this set of contrafacta to Ambrosius Profe. These parodies of Scacchi’s madrigals are now relatively well known, thanks to the work of Tomasz Jeż and Aleksandra Patalas.^[7] I hope to expand on their work by more closely examining the German texts and their political context. Now that I have identified the piece in ms. 271 as a contrafactum of a Monteverdi madrigal, we can also compare the Scacchi contrafacta to another from Breslau.

1.5 Taken together, these sets can tell us a lot about the aims and methods of their creators. Most importantly, these two sets show how Italian secular madrigals could be transformed into Lutheran spiritual madrigals that evoke war and religious strife. Secondarily, they reveal common techniques for retexting Italian madrigals. They help us better understand the contrafacta printed in Profe’s famous anthologies, since the manuscripts transmit parodies related to those that ended up in Profe’s prints. And the Scacchi madrigals illustrate how Profe responded to the recent controversy between Scacchi and Paul Siefert. Presumably in order to judge the Italian composer’s writings against his music, Profe evidently became interested in these madrigals shortly after acquiring Cribrum musicum (Venice, 1643), the treatise where Scacchi first accused Siefert of errors in composition. All of these topics will be elucidated below.

1.6 The starting point for understanding these contrafacta is the original Italian and new German texts along with the music. Chapter 2 shows how Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel was transformed into a German spiritual madrigal with a polemical text. Chapter 3 turns to ms. 271 itself, scrutinizing it for evidence of its sources, provenance, and date. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the Scacchi contrafacta and their source, ms. 197, comparing the set to ms. 271. Chapter 6 then places the two manuscripts in historical context, briefly sketching the political and religious situation in Silesia during the Thirty Years War.

2. Turning Monteverdi Spiritual and Polemical

2.1 The piece in ms. 271 transforms Monteverdi’s setting of a Petrarch sonnet into a plea for God to take vengeance on the oppressors of the Church. As will be shown in Chapter 3, the parodist, probably the cantor Michael Büttner himself, engaged in a complicated act of musical and verbal translation.^[8] To make sense of it, we need to recognize his various priorities and goals, some of which turn out to align with features that Tomasz Jeż identified in his comparison of the Scacchi madrigals with their German contrafacta in ms. 197.^[9]

2.2 Appendix 1 offers a comparison of Petrarch’s sonnet, as given by Monteverdi, and its German contrafactum in ms. 271.^[10] The author of the German text turned Petrarch’s first-person singular into the plural, making it a prayer to God for the protection of the Church and a plea for peace. In most cases he observed the Italian prosody, matching Petrarch’s line lengths and syllable stress, or perhaps more accurately, matching Monteverdi’s strong and weak accents. Whether or not the parodist directly took Martin Opitz’s advice about the accentuation of German poetry, the results often agree with it in at least one regard: strong and weak syllables are consistently placed on the relatively strong or weak accents of natural speech, with none of the obviously misplaced stresses that Opitz might have criticized.^[11] But he also makes some obvious departures from the structure of the original Italian, precisely at the same spots where, as Jeż notes, the author of the Scacchi contrafacta also diverged. At moments of text repetition in the Italian, the parodist sometimes took the liberty of adding rather than repeating text. Thus, Monteverdi’s incessant repetitions of guerra, in stile concitato, become the longer phrase “streite, kämpfe, kriege, siege, wach und sorge für dein arme Kirche” (“struggle, fight, war, win, keep watch and care for your poor Church”).

2.3 Sometimes it seems that a specific word—regardless of its context—inspired a whole phrase or section of the German. Besides the word tace, explored below, the Breslau musician latched onto the word mille (a thousand) at the end of the second part, even though he ignored its contextualized meaning:

mille volte il dì moro e mille nasco
tanto dalla salute mia son lunge

(a thousand times a day I die, and a thousand am born,
so far am I from my salvation)

This turns into a generically laudatory peroration in the German:

Tausent Engelein singen viel tausent Alleluia,
Und loben deinen werthen Nahmen ohn Ende.

(Thousands of little angels sing many thousand alleluias,
and laud your worthy name without end.)

In both cases, however, the numerous repetitions of the two lines seem well suited to the words. Another instance of direct translation occurs with the word peace (pace/Friede) in the first part, mm. 74–75,^[12] where line 8 of the Italian becomes a petition for peace in the New Year.

2.4 Most importantly, the new German text shows that the author consciously tried to imitate the German spiritual madrigal and its most iconic text, the biblical dictum. Of course, his text is also full of stock phrases that are hard to trace to individual chapters and verses, if to the Bible at all. Nonetheless, at the very opening, he tried to paraphrase specific phrases of Luther’s translation of Psalm 83. It was certainly the famous opening of Hor che’l ciel that sparked the connection. Drawn to the word tace (are silent) at the end of Petrarch’s first line, Monteverdi famously has the full ensemble slowly declaim the first two lines on A minor low in their registers, then move gradually over the next two lines to a Phrygian cadence at the end of line four:

Hor che’l ciel e la terra e’l vento tace
e le fere e gli augelli il sonno affrena,
notte il carro stellato in giro mena
e nel suo letto il mar senz’onda giace,

(Now that heaven and earth and the wind are silent,
and sleep restrains the beasts and the birds,
night leads its starry chariot in a circle,
and the sea without waves lies in its bed,)

The parodist must have caught the expressive possibility in this bit of text painting and linked it to the opening of Psalm 83, with its reference to keeping silent (schweigen):

1 Gott, schweige doch nicht also, und sey doch nicht so still; Gott halt doch nicht so inne,		1 God, keep not silent, and be not so still; God, do not look inward.
2 Denn sihe, deine Feinde toben, und die dich hassen, richten den Kopff auff.[13]		2 For behold, your enemies rage, and those who hate you raise their heads up.

The resulting German contrafactum nearly quotes Psalm 83’s first verse, a move that preserves Monteverdi’s text painting:

Herr, schweige nicht so, sey doch nicht so stille
Weil uns suchet zu tödten der Feind Herodes.
Siehe, er sucht deine Glieder ganz außzurotten,
Ach wieviel Christen Blutt wird itzt vergossen.

(Lord, do not keep silent, be not so still,
for the enemy, Herod, seeks to kill us.
See, he seeks to stamp out your members,
O how much Christian blood will now spill.)

2.5 Although the parody departs from strict paraphrase after the first line, wording and ideas from the psalm continue. In line three of the parody, the command siehe (behold) parallels Psalm 83:2 directly, and the verb ausrotten (stamp out) comes from 83:5. At the same time, the act of paraphrasing led to more polemical wording, especially after line one. The psalm’s unnamed enemies become Herod seeking to spill Christian blood; the author asks Christ to take vengeance on their enemies; and he pleads for the Church’s deliverance and an end to the war. Here warfare, which in Petrarch had been a metaphor for amorous conflict, turned literal.

2.6 Despite seeming to depart entirely from scripture, much of this later wording really stems from Psalm 83, or rather, Lutheran interpretations of the psalm. Lutherans adopted a typological view of the psalm as a prophecy about the Christian Church under persecution. The psalmist’s enemies, in this reading, prefigure the Church’s foes, past and present.^[14] Hence, the parody text conflates Old and New Testaments, with references to Herod’s oppressions and the Christian Church coexisting with Hebrew scripture. By the standards of orthodox Lutheranism, the contrafactum introduces no exegetical novelty. References to Christians and the Church under oppression merely say out loud what many Lutherans thought when they heard Psalm 83. What lies under the surface in the Bible, understood only when listeners knew their Lutheran exegesis, now comes to the fore under the pressures of paraphrase.

2.7 The author could hardly have quoted a more inflammatory psalm. He likely knew that prominent Lutherans had already harnessed it for polemics earlier in the war,^[15] and that they sometimes noted several key verses later in the psalm that recalled specific issues of the Thirty Years War. Though the German parody does not reference these verses directly, listeners could have recalled verse 5, where the psalmist’s enemies join in a league, easily understood by Protestants to refer to the Catholic League or another such Catholic confederation;^[16] and verse 12, where the psalmist’s enemies exclaim, “let us take the houses of God.” Silesian Protestants needed little prompting to link these lines to the decades-long fight over the confiscation and conversion of Lutheran churches and church property, a hallmark of the Counter-Reformation.

2.8 To sum up, a combination of factors explains the nature of the new German text in ms. 271. The original Italian madrigal created a challenge. Monteverdi’s vivid but strange opening combined with the warlike music later on certainly encouraged, if not forced, the parodist to find words that could represent such contrasting affects. Psalm 83 seems to have been an excellent choice. At the same time, the parody text also reveals that the piece was likely written for an event surrounding the New Year. The first part ends with the petition “Schenck uns zum newen Jahre den lieben edlen Friede” (“Grant us for the New Year dear, noble peace”). The references to Herod and persecution fit the Gospel reading for the first Sunday after the New Year, the flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:13–23), a spot in the liturgical calendar when Lutherans often brought up persecution. These factors led to the strong language rooted in the era’s religious conflicts.

3. Creating Ms. 271: Copyists, Provenance, Sources, Date

3.1 Over several decades, the cantor Michael Büttner and his main coworkers built up the collection at the St. Mary Magdelena Church, but no one has yet revealed the evolution of their hands or systematically traced the paper types. As a result, scribal and watermark evidence does not help us pinpoint the manuscript’s date very precisely. Still, handwriting can reveal other things, including what we might call the compositional process, even when only the German text was newly composed.

3.2 Büttner and his colleagues copied enough other manuscripts together to allow us to reasonably distinguish between their hands. Wiermann provides a sample page containing the hands of Büttner and his assistant (her “Hauptkopist”) and documents their standard division of labor.^[17] Subsequently, Barbara Przybyszewska-Jarmińska has confirmed Büttner’s hand; she labels him copyist A and suggests that the second scribe, her copyist B, might be Bernhard Beyer, organist and colleague of Büttner at St. Mary Magdelena from 1634 to 1655.^[18] I will retain her label of the assistant (Beyer?) as copyist B.

3.3 Other manuscripts in Büttner’s collection confirm these hands and even allow us to distinguish their roles in copying. For instance, in D-B Bohn ms. mus. 236, which contains an anonymous concerto on Psalm 80, the tenor concertist doublet part (Figure 1) shows the same two scribes at work, much as in the samples presented by Wiermann and Przybyszewska-Jarmińska, with the hands changing between lines eight and nine. Telling differences between the two hands are shown in the middle columns in Table 1. The most obvious are the C clefs and breves. The horizontal lines in Büttner’s C clefs are consistently arched while his assistant keeps them shorter and straighter. The assistant’s vertical lines are thus closer together. Breves, whether single or part of a ligature, are also easy to distinguish: Büttner’s have more open space inside and are arched like his C clefs. The assistant’s breves almost resemble the number 2 sandwiched between two vertical lines. More subtle differences are also apparent in other symbols. Büttner’s assistant more often placed a hook at the top of the C in his time signatures (not shown in the table). He added weight on the pen at the end of the eighth note tail when stems go down. He also gave greater weight to the vertical line and two dots in his F clefs. This line is typically longer than Büttner’s.

3.4 A glance at the handwriting in the whole set of parts for ms. 236 (summarized in Table 2) shows that copyist B acted as the assistant. While Büttner wrote out the most important parts—the figured continuo and all concertist parts—the other scribe primarily made copies directly from these, a considerably simpler task than working from a full score. The copying of ms. 236 agrees with Wiermann’s findings. She documents the two hands at work in a series of arrangements Büttner made of existing pieces, all of which put copyist B in a subordinate role, doing the simpler tasks.^[19]

3.5 All this proves relevant for identifying the hands in ms. 271. The bulk of the copying of the music is clearly the work of copyist B. (See the last column of Table 1 as well as Figure 2 and Figure 3.) This should be no surprise, for as an assistant, his task was merely to make a new set of parts from Monteverdi’s printed partbooks, leaving out the Italian text. The scribe replicates even seemingly insignificant details from the printed parts, such as the position of rests on the staff and redundant accidentals, at a rate that is too high to be coincidental. Copyist B, however, left the manuscript unfinished. He did not complete the end of the Violin 2 and Cantus 1 parts, and he did not write the new German text. Here, it seems, a new scribe, probably Büttner himself, stepped in. (The second hand in ms. 271 differs enough from other samples by Büttner that I leave open the small possibility of a third hand at work here.) Although he left the Violin 2 part incomplete,^[20] the new scribe completed the Cantus 1. (See Figure 3, starting in the middle of the penultimate line; the flags on the eighth notes betray a new hand.) He then drafted the new German text and corrected or amended copyist B’s work. This German script is definitely not that of copyist B, whose script is easiest to recognize in ms. 236 directly underneath all the music he copied (Figure 1). A closer match is Büttner’s script, easiest to recognize in ms. 236 directly underneath the music he copied and in ms. 271 in some of the headings and the occasional part designations at the top right of some leaves.^[21] (See the label “I Tenor” in Figure 2). Table 3 offers a comparison of Büttner and Copyist B’s German script in ms. 236 with the script in ms. 271. Though the match is not perfect, I find the script in ms. 271 to be close to Büttner’s.

3.6 This second hand also corrected Copyist B’s work, amended Monteverdi’s music to accommodate the new text, and occasionally changed the German text after his first attempt. Büttner must have seen the impossibility of realizing Monteverdi’s madrigal as printed at m. 87 in the Cantus 2 part. The part contains a half measure too much music and must be corrected either by removing the half rest in the following measure, in which case the Cantus 2 will sing across the rests in the other voices, or by removing two quarter notes from m. 87 and rewriting the last note of the measure.^[22] (See Example 1.) Büttner opted for the latter solution, the better choice because it closely follows the parallel passage at m. 67. He also made changes to Monteverdi’s rhythms to better fit the German text. The Cantus 1 part (see Figure 3 and detail in Figure 4) shows several corrections at mm. 86–87. At m. 86 the rhythm originally matched Monteverdi’s (quarter, quarter, quarter, two eighths, as shown in Example 1), but the later hand intervened, changing the second quarter to two eighths on f ʹ-sharp by adding a tail to the quarter and then inserting another eighth in front of it (Figure 4, notes 7–8). He did the same in the next measure, changing the first two quarter notes on bʹ and f ʹ-sharp to eighth-note pairs. In all these cases, the distinctive flag shapes on upward stems betray his hand. All these changes happened because he decided to alter his original text underlay: in Figure 4, for instance, “die feinde, dämpfe, dämpfe und schlage” is changed to “die feind, und schlage, dämpfe die feinde und schlage.”

3.7 All this detail demonstrates more than just an unsurprising division of labor between the musicians creating ms. 271. The style of Büttner’s script and his many corrections to the German text suggest that the manuscript represents a draft or some other early stage in the creative process. Büttner certainly did not copy the German text from an existing source, a task that would probably have been delegated to copyist B and in any case would have resulted in a neater script. In short, we are apparently witnessing the drafting and early revisions of the German text.

3.8 Ms. 271 stands in an interesting relationship with another source besides Monteverdi’s printed partbooks from 1638: Ambrosius Profe’s anthology Corollarium geistlicher Collectaneorum (Leipzig: Ritzsch, 1649), which contains a different parody of Hor che’l ciel. As mentioned above, copyist B apparently took the music in ms. 271 directly from Monteverdi’s partbooks. He surely did not copy it from Profe’s Corollarium, which departs from both Monteverdi and ms. 271 in key ways.^[23] For his musical text, Profe, too, likely looked to Monteverdi’s print rather than ms. 271, at least in its current, corrected state: as noted above, Büttner fixed the mistake in Monteverdi’s print at m. 87 in the Cantus 2 part (a mistake that resulted in an extra half measure), but Profe transmits Monteverdi’s original. It is also likely that both Profe and Büttner copied from a common exemplar of the Madrigali guerrieri ed amorosi, one that Profe himself probably procured. The Bibliotheca Rehdigeriana in Breslau, which Profe oversaw during these years, contained an exemplar of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals.^[24]

3.9 If the music in ms. 271 seems independent from that in Profe’s 1649 anthology, and vice versa, the two German texts nonetheless show interesting similarities (see Appendix 2, where corresponding language appears in boldface), suggesting that one text served as a model for the other.^[25] Profe’s version, like Büttner’s, is a prayer for the Church’s protection during persecution. He calls on God to observe how the Church’s enemies arm themselves (lines 3–4), a clear parallel to ideas in ms. 271 and Psalm 83. Both versions cry out to God to “beat [the enemies] to the ground.” Prayers for peace may be ubiquitous in Lutheran music of this age, but overt references to the Church are rarer, and their presence in both contrafacta seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Even more notable are the parallels in language that have their roots in Psalm 83, especially lines 3–4.

3.10 While Büttner is very specific in his wording and vivid in text painting, Profe is less so while still including the basic gist. Profe’s version lacks the references to Herod, the New Year, and the opening paraphrase of Psalm 83. Gone are the longing for “dear noble peace” and the many references to war, fighting, bloodshed, and the like. For Profe, the sense of conflict is only implicit. One reason for the difference might be commercial. Like other printed music of the age, Profe’s anthology needed to appeal to as broad a range of buyers as possible, and a contrafactum such as that in ms. 271 was much too rooted in a specific occasion—the New Year—and alluded too frequently to a war that was over by the time Profe issued his anthology.^[26] Profe’s text better suited his public’s broader needs. He has none of the specific passages while still presenting the overall message about persecution, a message that still resonated with his audiences in central Germany despite the official end of the war.

3.11 As a corollary, Profe used less vivid text painting than Büttner. His opening does not represent the silence so fundamental to Petrarch’s text and Psalm 83. Rather, he opens with the words “O du mächtiger Herr hoch ins Himmelsthrone, / Ach sey gnädig, unser verschone” (“O you mighty Lord, high in heaven’s throne, o be gracious and spare us”). Instead of a vivid depiction of stillness, Profe vaguely represents humility before God.^[27] The low register of the opening A minor chord might even contradict the opening line referring to God high in heaven. The same thing happens at other places in Profe’s contrafactum. Near the beginning of the second part, Monteverdi expresses the sweetness and bitterness in Petrarch’s line “Move il dolce e l’amaro ond’io mi pasco” (“Moves the sweetness and the bitterness, whence I nourish myself”) through a rising chromatic line. Büttner translates this to “Jammer und Elend” (sorrow and misery), nicely matching Monteverdi’s music. But in Profe’s anthology, no such text painting accompanies the neutral words “Dein allein ist das Wort das selbst bewache” (“Yours alone is the word that stands guard”). Absent, too, is the direct translation of the word mille into tausent (starting at m. 35) that is found in the manuscript contrafactum. With Profe, this word becomes Friede. The cries of war in Monteverdi, so well paralleled and even expanded in Büttner’s text, where the repetitions of guerre become streite, kämpfe, kriege, siege, are less vivid in Profe’s text, becoming merely the imperatives eile (hurry), steure (guide), and rette (rescue).

3.12 To be sure, Profe’s text does have its own interesting moments of text painting not found in Büttner’s, some of which Kristin Sponheim has already pointed out.^[28] Starting at m. 24, she notes, Monteverdi has the singers declaim “veglio, veglio, penso, ardo” to a series of triads ascending by fourths. Büttner turns this into a command, “höre, sterke, rette, schütze,” and the relationship to the music is relatively neutral. By contrast, Profe matches Monteverdi’s ascending triads to the command “auff Herr,” opting to repeat the words over and over even when Monteverdi had repeated only the first. And Profe translates the word nasco in the phrase “e mille nasco” (and a thousand [times] am born) into leben in the phrase “Sonst können wir nicht leben” (or else we cannot live). These moments of correlation between the Italian and German do not stem from Büttner’s text.

3.13 To sum up: Both arrangers paid attention to Monteverdi’s musical treatment of the text, but Büttner made that relationship more central than Profe. Büttner’s allusions to Psalm 83 are also more thoroughgoing. Profe’s choices seem an additional step removed from Monteverdi, as they would be if he were principally following an earlier German text. Furthermore, Büttner’s more vivid battle imagery supports the hypothesis that his parody was made during wartime and addressed the kind of religious persecution that Breslau’s Lutherans worried about in these years. If one of these contrafacta was modeled on the other, it thus seems most likely that ms. 271 was the model from which Profe worked, rather than the other way around and that ms. 271 was thus written between 1638, the year of Monteverdi’s printed partbooks, and 1649, the year of Profe’s Corollarium.^[29]

4. Scacchi’s Madrigals and Their German Contrafacta: Provenance, Date, Sources, and Purpose

4.1 Bohn ms. mus. 197, containing contrafacta of the entire Madrigali a cinque of Marco Scacchi (see Table 4),^[30] offers many parallels with ms. 271. Both adopt similar methods of spiritualizing Italian secular madrigals. Like the piece in ms. 271, many of the Scacchi parodies, including one that paraphrases Psalm 83, evoke the era’s conflicts in unusually vivid ways. They also likely served as models for contrafacta published in Profe’s anthologies, some of their German texts relating to the ones in print. But unlike ms. 271, this set reveals less about the process involved in making a parody, for the manuscript is clearly a fair copy.

4.2 Emil Bohn identified a whole series of manuscripts, including ms. 197, as belonging to Daniel Sartorius, a teacher at the St. Elisabeth School in Breslau starting in 1648.^[31] But Barbara Wiermann has argued that Sartorius’s collection originated with Ambrosius Profe,^[32] and that ms. 197 probably represents “Sartorius’s copy of contrafacta prepared by Profe.”^[33] As Tomasz Jeż has explained, Profe built up the musical portion of a larger collection, the Bibliotheca Rehdigeriana, named after the Breslau patrician Thomas Rehdiger (1541–76).^[34] Sartorius took over the collection upon Profe’s death in 1661 and made his own copies of the repertoire. Both Wiermann and Jeż have also argued that, in contrast to Büttner’s library, including ms. 271, the music in the Rehdiger collection remained private, meant for “the needs of a humanistically educated, learned collector,” not intended directly for church, even if it ended up in the St. Elisabeth Church library.^[35] Ms. 197 supports this theory in at least one respect: unlike the text in ms. 271, none of the texts in ms. 197 are specific enough to allow us to pinpoint liturgical occasions when they might have been performed. Even with their new sacred texts, Scacchi’s madrigals probably served as private entertainment, at least until Profe published a few examples. Perhaps these madrigals were heard in the 1640s at the private gatherings of the school rector Elias Major, frequented by both Sartorius and Profe.^[36]

4.3 Ms. 197 is indeed in the hand of Daniel Sartorius, matching a sample identified by Brian Brooks, an identification confirmed by Wiermann.^[37] Unlike ms. 271, ms. 197 was copied by a single scribe, who wrote both the notes and German text (Figure 5). The leaves are clean, with few mistakes and no signs of drafting or correction. Presumably, therefore, Sartorius copied from an earlier manuscript set of parts, probably prepared by Profe himself and perhaps showing signs of editing and correction like those in ms. 271. Or perhaps the new German texts were first drafted directly into Scacchi’s partbooks, from which Sartorius then copied.^[38] Unfortunately, any such earlier sources, including the Breslau exemplar of Scacchi’s printed partbooks, are lost.^[39] In any case, Sartorius likely did nothing apart from copying, and thus ms. 197 cannot serve as evidence of his authorship of the new words.^[40]

4.4 Still, apart from the manuscript itself, other kinds of evidence can help approximate the date when the contrafacta were first drafted. Scacchi’s madrigals were published in Venice in 1634, but there is no evidence that Profe was aware of them before the mid-1640s. In 1643 Scacchi published his Cribrum musicum, a theoretical treatise responding to criticisms of modern music by the German composer Paul Siefert.^[41] It was apparently at that point that Scacchi’s madrigals began circulating widely in the north. It is surely no coincidence that Scacchi’s madrigal partbooks first appear in the Leipzig trade fair catalogs in the same year as the first appearance of the Cribrum musicum; this was in autumn of 1646.^[42] Profe, however, must have had the madrigals before this date, for in that same year he published four of Scacchi’s madrigals, underlaid with German texts, in anthologies that also appear in the same trade fair catalog.^[43] Profe eventually wrote a letter to Marco Scacchi, dated 4 January 1649, claiming to have obtained the latter’s five-voice madrigals several years before and to have performed them with colleagues.^[44] In any case, it seems that the Scacchi-Siefert polemics, beginning in 1643, spurred Profe’s interest in these madrigals, and that Profe obtained Scacchi’s print some time between 1643 and 1646 as a result of the Scacchi-Siefert debate.

4.5 The four Scacchi madrigals that Profe published in printed collections in 1646 actually yielded a total of six parody texts, five in German and one in Latin (see Table 4). Two of the German texts are quite closely related to their counterparts in ms. 197. The first of the two for Scacchi, no.1, Herr, gib Friede dem Lande, and the one for Scacchi, no. 4, Herr, höre meine Stimme, both printed in the fourth volume of Profe’s Geistlicher Concerten, differ from their counterparts in ms. 197 only in occasional words and phrases (see the transcriptions in Appendix 3). In these two cases, at least, it seems likely that Profe’s earlier manuscript set served as a source for the printed versions. Profe’s other contrafacta printed in the anthologies are more independent of those in ms. 197, apart from isolated similarities; for instance, in the German texts for Scacchi’s no. 15, the second line of the manuscript contrafactum, “Wie herrlich ist dein Nahme weit und ferren,” becomes in the printed version, “Wie herrlich ists auff Gottes Güte trawen.” Nevertheless, there are enough similarities between the manuscript contrafacta and those printed in that collection to suggest that the former served as a source for the latter. In this way, again, the Scacchi contrafacta resemble the Monteverdi contrafacta. On the other hand, the parody text that Profe printed in Cunis solennibus, his collection of Christmas pieces, has almost nothing in common with the corresponding manuscript parody (set to Scacchi’s no. 11), except perhaps a general structural similarity, with both ending in an encomium to God. The Christmas theme of Cunis solennibus might best account for this divergence. None of the texts in ms. 197 would have suited the Christmas season, and if Profe wanted to use a Scacchi madrigal in Cunis solennibus, he needed to write a new seasonal text.

5. Parody Procedures and Imagery in Profe’s Contrafacta of Scacchi’s Madrigals

5.1 The parodist for ms. 197—as we have seen, likely Ambrosius Profe himself—followed methods closely resembling those of Büttner, preserving syllable stress and matching it to the strong and weak metric accents of Scacchi’s music. Tomasz Jeż has already compared the original Italian madrigal texts and the German contrafacta in ms. 197; his basic findings are worth revisiting here, especially since they complement my own.^[45] Jeż, for instance, notes the high number of psalm paraphrases as well as psalm-like expressions, and I think we can expand upon this.^[46] Profe, it seems, consciously tried to quote or paraphrase well-known biblical dicta, again in imitation of the German spiritual madrigal. Paraphrase accounts for a significant portion of the new texts, especially incipits. See Table 4 for biblical references and Appendix 3 for the complete texts and translations.

5.2 The most interesting of these paraphrases, at least in light of ms. 271, is no. 6, another, looser paraphrase of Psalm 83. Again, the decision to paraphrase Psalm 83 likely rests with the original Italian poem by Giovanni Battista Guarini, which mentions being silent three times at the opening:

Parlo, misero, o taccio?
S’io taccio, che soccorso havrà ’l morire?
S’io parlo, che perdono havrà l’ardire?
Taci: che ben s’intende
chiusa fiamma tal’hor’ da chi l’accende.
Parl’ in me la pietate,
parl’ in lei la beltade;
e dice quel bel volto al crudo core:
chi può mirarmi, e non languir d’amore?

(Do I speak, miserable wretch, or am I silent?
If I am silent, will dying give relief?
If I speak, will boldness be forgiven?
Be silent. It is well understood that
a flame is sometimes hidden from the one that lit it.
Pity speaks in me,
beauty speaks in her;
and [her] beautiful face says to [her] cruel heart:
who can look upon me, and not languish in love?)

This inspired a German text that closely tracks the psalm’s first verse, then continues by riffing on the psalm’s basic ideas:

Ach Gott, schweige nicht so stille,
Auf, Herr, und eröffne deine Ohren,
Erhöre, Herr, erbarme dich doch unser,
Erwache, wen[n] der Feinde Macht uns dränget.
Schweigstu, so trotzt der Feind auf seine Kräften
Und wil uns gar verschlingen.
Ach Herr, eile zur Rache,
Führe selbste deine Sache,
Befreie deine Kirche von solchem Leiden,
So dancken wir dir immerdar mit Frewden.

(O God, be not so silent,
arise, Lord, and open your ears,
hear, Lord, have mercy on us,
awake, when the enemy’s might pushes us.
If you remain silent, the enemy will defy [us] with his power
and will swallow us whole.
O Lord, haste to vengeance,
you yourself lead your cause,
free your Church from such suffering,
thus will we ever give you thanks with joy.)

Just like Büttner’s contrafactum of Hor che’l ciel, this one takes up the Lutheran interpretation of the psalm by calling on God to free the Church from suffering. Again, the polemical nature of this psalm comes to the fore through the process of paraphrase.

5.3 The desire to paraphrase scripture may also have led to a shift away from first person singular in the German texts (Appendix 3), a feature of both parodies of Hor che’l ciel as well (Appendix 1, Appendix 2). Nearly all the Italian poems in Scacchi’s set have a speaker in first person singular addressing someone in the second person. Transformed into German, a significant minority shifted to first person plural or third person.^[47] Several texts intermix “I” and “we.” Again, the desire to paraphrase scripture partly explains this: the two texts that changed to third person (nos. 5 and 9) simply follow their biblical models, and the switch to first person plural in no. 1 also simply mirrors Luther’s paraphrase of Da pacem Domine, “Give peace in our time.” The move from singular to plural pronouns in the Psalm 83 contrafactum (no. 6, quoted above) can also be explained from a theological standpoint, Psalm 83 being a prayer in the collective voice of the Church.

5.4 As with ms. 271, Profe often directly translated specific words from the Italian, even when the new context changes their meaning. In no. 6, Guarini’s taci becomes schweigstu (if you remain silent). In no. 8, the phrase “Chi non hà core è morto” (“He who has no heart is dead”) translates to “Ob ich gleich zeitlich sterbe” (“Whether I here die”). Jeż noted several variants of this phenomenon: in no. 4, Guarini’s references to singing (canto) translate not just literally (lobsingen) but figuratively to strings and harps (Seitenwerck, Harffen) as well;^[48] and in other cases, the contrafacta preserve rhetorical figures such as exclamations, questions, alliteration, assonance, and others. The result, writes Jeż, is “the maximum correlation of these figures and their imitation at special moments in the rhythmic flow of the work.”^[49]

5.5 In most cases, Profe observed the original Italian text setting, but occasionally he made some obvious departures. His reasons for doing so were at least twofold: first, as Jeż notes, at moments of text repetition in the Italian, Profe sometimes took the liberty of adding new text rather than simply repeating an earlier phrase, a practice also found in ms. 271. In the second part of no. 7, where Scacchi simply repeated the line “Che mi ritenne in vita,” Profe turned the repetition into a second line, “Dein Gut hab ich verschwendet, / Und Übel angewendet.” In no. 6 he expanded the Italian by one line instead of repeating line 2 at m. 19 as Scacchi had done (see Example 2):

[2] S’io taccio, che soccorso havra ’l morire?
[line 2 repeated]
[3] S’io parlo, che perdono havrà l’ardire?

(If I am silent, will dying give relief?
If I speak, will boldness be forgiven (bring mercy)?)

[2a] Auf, Herr, und eröffne deine Ohren, erhöre,
[2b] Erwache, wenn der Feinde Macht uns dränget,
[3] Herr, erbarme dich doch unser.

(Arise, Lord, and open your ears, hear,
awake, when the enemy’s might pushes us,
Lord, have mercy on us.)

This moment also illustrates the second reason for breaking with the original text setting: Profe’s desire to preserve an unusual moment of text painting in the original or to create a new madrigalism. Scacchi had set the opening words of line two (S’io taccio) with a rising fourth at mm. 4–5 in imitation between the top two voices (see Example 2). Profe, it seems, saw the chance to mirror this leap with the command “auf, auf” (line 2a). But had Profe simply repeated the same line at mm. 19–25, as Scacchi did, he would have missed the chance to use the chromaticism at the section’s end (mm. 24–25), introduced by Scacchi to express the word morire. Profe’s solution, it seems, was to pen a new second line (2b), ending with the word dränget (pressed, oppressed), a better match for the music than erhöre.

5.6 No. 5 offers the most extreme instance of Profe departing from the structure of the Italian model to take advantage of an opportunity for text painting. Scacchi had originally represented the final phrase, m’ha spento (“has snuffed me out”), by causing the piece to break off suddenly, the last two voices trailing away (see Example 3). Profe could hardly ignore this musical vanishing act. In response, he turned to Psalm 1, whose second half speaks of the sudden demise of the wicked:

1 Wol dem, der nicht wandelt im Rath der Gottlosen, noch trit auff den Weg der Sünder, noch sitzt da die Spötter sitzen.		1 Blessed is he who does not walk in the counsel of the godless, nor tread in the way of sinners, nor sit where the mockers sit,
2 Sondern hat lust zum Gesetz des Herrn, und redet von seinem Gesetz Tag und Nacht.		2 but delights in the law of the Lord and speaks of his law day and night.
3 Der ist wie ein Baum gepflantzet an den Wasserbächen, der seine Frucht bringet zu seiner Zeit; Und seine Bletter verwelcken nicht, und was er macht, das gereth wol.		3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, who bears his fruit in his time, and his leaves do not wither, and whatever he does prospers.
4 Aber so sind die Gottlosen nicht, sondern wie Sprew, die der Wind verstrewet.		4 But not so the godless, [they are] rather like chaff that the wind scatters.
5 Darumb bleiben die Gottlosen nicht im Gerichte, noch die Sünder in der Gemeine der Gerechten.		5 Thus the godless do not remain in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
6 Denn der Herr kennet den Weg der Gerechten, aber der Gottlosen Weg vergehet.		6 For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the godless vanishes.

The resulting German parody (Appendix 3) is a loose paraphrase of the psalm designed to culminate in this moment of text painting (Example 3). For this reason, Profe ignored Guarini’s prosody, disregarding poetic meter and rhyme and expanding seven lines of Italian by almost fifty percent to fit the full psalm text.^[50] Though most other parodies in the set follow the original prosody more closely, this example shows just how willingly the author compromised, presumably to take advantage of Scacchi’s striking conclusion.

5.7 Like both Monteverdi contrafacta, a significant number from the Scacchi set evoke the war and religious conflict. And not all complaints about the war stem directly from the technique of paraphrase as in the examples based on Psalm 83. Though no. 2 starts out with biblical references, the last three lines lament the war in much more up-to-date language:

Dämpfe die Kriegeslast, denn wir sind müde,
Schenck uns doch den lieben Friede,
So loben wir dich Herr mit einem Liede.

(Lighten the burden of war, for we are tired,
but send us dear peace,
thus we praise you, Lord, with a song.)

The word Krieg[e]slast (burden of war) is not biblical but rather contemporary, referring to various tributes, forced contributions, taxes, and other burdens on the populace that came with sustaining occupying armies, friend or foe.^[51] No. 12 offers more of the same, turning at the end toward imprecations against foes:

Er kan den grausamen Kriegen wehren,
Die Feinde müssen bald zurücke kehren,
(Gott ist unser Schutz),
mit Zagen, denn der Herr wird sie schlagen,
Und gar verjagen.

(He [God] can counter the cruel war,
the enemies must soon turn back,
(God is our protection),
with trembling, for the Lord shall smite them,
and even expel [them].)

Finally, no. 13 continues to raise the issue of war and its horrors:

Rette mich Herr, wenn ich so kläglich gehe,
Und durch Seufftzen dir flehe,
Der Kriegesflut [der heissen Glut] verwehre
Daß sie nicht, wie geschick, mich gantz verzehre.^[52]

(Deliver me, Lord, when I go about so miserably,
and through sighs beg you:
Prevent the flood of war, [the hot blaze,]
that they not, as happens, entirely consume me.)

Such texts vividly lament the war and the heavy burden that invading or defending armies had on Silesia. And they all go far beyond their model, the German biblical madrigal motet, where this language is usually muted.

6. Spiritual Madrigals in War-Torn Silesia

6.1 The themes of military and religious conflict found in many of these parodies have various sources of inspiration. The Lutheran spiritual madrigal commonly took up themes of physical and spiritual suffering, and the effort to mimic this genre clearly led to some belligerent language in these contrafacta. Moreover, the original Italian poetry lent itself to these topics. Martial imagery and music were already present in Hor che’l ciel. The language of Scacchi’s madrigals, with their figurative references to death, misery, wounds, languishing, and so on, all within the context of love, easily turned literal in the German parodies. Yet we cannot fully explain the nature of these texts without accounting for their cultural context. The new German texts, I contend, addressed a fundamental concern among Breslau Lutherans: the precarious political and religious position of the city and its surroundings at the end of the Thirty Years War.

6.2 Breslau musicians such as Profe and Büttner had good reasons to cultivate the language of war and persecution in their parodies. In the 1640s, as they rewrote Italian madrigals, they knew that their territory stood between their Swedish enemies in the north and west and the Habsburg emperor to the south. They would continue to face costly occupation, whether by friend or foe, until the conflict ended. They also knew that both the local Catholic bishop and their own territorial lord, Emperor Ferdinand III, looked to strengthen the Catholic Church throughout Silesia. Looking back over the previous decades, they and their fellow Protestants could find little comfort. Once able to negotiate special religious and political freedoms at the beginning of the century, the Silesian Protestant estates had squandered their gains by 1635. They now survived because of the influence of the major Protestant powers such as Sweden, Saxony, and Brandenburg.

6.3 Silesia occupied an odd position in central Europe. It was not part of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus Protestants in the Silesian estates did not enjoy the privileges of the Peace of Augsburg. Its territorial lords, the Habsburgs, had every legal right to suppress all non-Catholics. Yet over the decades since the Reformation, Silesian Protestants had won special rights thanks to their wealth and their geographical proximity to Protestant Brandenburg and Saxony.^[53] Whereas in Austria and Bohemia, the Habsburgs could aggressively pursue religious reform after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, in Silesia they proceeded with more caution and tolerated Lutheranism in some areas, including Breslau. As a result, Silesia remained an exception: a biconfessional territory directly under Habsburg control.

6.4 Until the late 1620s, the region suffered only mild confessional strife and in some cases even witnessed religious toleration.^[54] But underneath the surface, tensions mounted. The city of Troppau provides one example. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, Cardinal Bishop Dietrichstein won the right to appoint clergy to the parochial church in Troppau. When the local Protestants challenged his prerogative, the conflict escalated to the point where Emperor Rudolf II intervened in 1604, eventually imposing the Catholic position through military force.^[55] A second incident, however, shows how strong Silesian Protestants still were: in 1608 the younger brother of the future Emperor Ferdinand II, Archduke Charles, was elected as Bishop of Breslau, a move that the Protestant estates stiffly resisted. They refused to confirm the bishop, began withholding taxes, and forged an alliance with the Bohemian estates. Internal divisions within the Habsburg family aided their cause, and in the end, they forced Rudolf II to issue his so-called Letters of Majesty. These brought Silesia under the Peace of Augsburg, recognizing the free exercise of both Lutheranism and Catholicism along with the right of Lutherans to build new churches.^[56] They also lessened the Bishop of Breslau’s authority, excluding him from the governorship of Silesia, the appointment going instead to a Lutheran duke.^[57]

6.5 The Letters of Majesty ultimately settled little. Archduke Charles, as Bishop of Breslau, ignored them as best he could, especially in his own residence of Neisse.^[58] In the end, the letters simply fueled discord, eventually dragging Silesia into the Bohemian revolt in 1618.^[59] Fortunately, Silesia also enjoyed the protection of Saxony. Even after the Silesians allied with the Bohemians to oust Ferdinand II as their king, even after they elected Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, as Ferdinand’s replacement, and even after they sent troops to Bohemia to fight the emperor and the Catholic League, Silesia was spared the severest consequences when the revolt met defeat at White Mountain in 1620. With the Dresden Accord (February 1621), the Elector of Saxony, acting as Ferdinand’s representative, managed to salvage many provisions in the Letters of Majesty. In return, Ferdinand received a sizeable payment and the estates again swore their fealty. All but the most rebellious Silesians received mercy.^[60]

6.6 This clemency proved to be only temporary. In 1626 Count Ernst von Mansfeld, leading an army in the service of Christian IV of Denmark, marched through Silesia. Because some of the upper Silesian estates sided with Mansfeld, the incursion gave Vienna the excuse to accuse Silesian Protestants more broadly of sedition.^[61] Trials were held against 251 nobles and burghers accused of collaboration;^[62] Albrecht von Wallenstein quartered his army in Silesia during the winter without approval of the princes; and in 1629 Ferdinand forced Duke George Rudolf of Liegnitz to give up his governorship, handing the post over to a loyal supporter. The emperor also forbade the Silesian estates from debating anything other than taxes.

6.7 Most importantly, the war spurred increasing activity of the Counter-Reformation in the hereditary principalities. Before then, efforts to suppress non-Catholic teaching and win over the populace proceeded intermittently. The Habsburg emperors had worked since the early seventeenth century to place Catholics in the Silesian estates. Some of the nobility had converted. Some had died without heir, and the emperor held the right to appoint their successors. Furthermore, in the wake of the Bohemian revolt and again after Mansfeld’s invasion, the emperor confiscated the lands of rebellious Protestants and deliberately gave them to Catholics. Throughout the crucial years of the Counter-Reformation, Habsburg family members or their allies also occupied the Breslau bishop’s seat.^[63] By the war’s end, Protestants in the Silesian estates had turned from a near monopoly into a beleaguered minority.

6.8 The events of the late 1620s also emboldened Ferdinand and Silesian Catholics to take a more aggressive stance toward the non-Catholic populace. The lower Silesian territories of Glogau, Sagan, Schweidnitz-Jauer, and Münsterberg witnessed forced Catholicization. Karl Hannibal von Dohna undertook the most notorious of these campaigns, quartering troops with families that refused to attend Catholic worship. Even sympathetic Jesuits found this approach heavy handed, making “the holy Catholic religion hated,” as one father lamented.^[64] Protestants could decide either to conform outwardly or flee into exile. In 1629 these efforts would force Profe himself to flee Jauer along with all non-Catholic clergy and school teachers.

6.9 The Swedish intervention in the war briefly gave Silesian Protestants greater autonomy but cost them more in the end. Though the city of Breslau tenaciously maintained its neutrality, the Swedish-Saxon victory at Steinau in September 1632 eventually forced the city to let the invaders occupy and plunder the Breslau cathedral and sand island outside the city walls. Less than a year later, the Silesian estates gathered and at the urging of the Saxon commander Hans Georg von Arnim formed a so-called “conjunction” with Sweden, Saxony, and Brandenburg. They insisted that the purpose was purely defensive, concerned with religious matters, and must not injure their duties to the emperor.^[65] Over the next year, however, the Swedes would lose several key battles, especially at Nördlingen in September 1634, convincing Saxony and Brandenburg to make a separate peace with the emperor. This time the electors had no room to win concessions for their Silesian allies. At the Peace of Prague in May 1635, they essentially left Silesia in the lurch. One of the consequences was that Breslau lost control of its surrounding principality without compensation. Yet the emperor still reaffirmed the rights of Lutherans in the duchies of Brieg, Liegnitz, and Oels along with the city of Breslau. Even so, the Protestant estates had lost all control over their fate. From this point on, they would be governed from afar by the major powers, their religious privileges having become a pawn in international diplomacy.

6.10 Meanwhile, the war continued to rage in Silesia. Sweden made successive incursions in 1639, 1640, and 1642, and thereafter remained a permanent occupier until 1650. This, however, put Silesia in an awkward political position, tying the hands of the Silesian estates for the remainder of the war. As Norbert Conrads explains, because of their history of rebellion, “Every initiative of individuals or the estates that appealed to non-Habsburg powers and aimed at an improvement in the confessional situation remained under suspicion of undermining Imperial authority.”^[66] The issue of religious toleration in Silesia was still on the negotiation table leading up to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), but Silesians had to tread carefully to avoid the appearance of treason. Breslau itself approached Ferdinand’s chief negotiator at Münster, Maximilian von Trauttmansdorff, an act that bordered on disloyalty in Conrads’s opinion.^[67] Thankfully for Silesia, Trauttmansdorff hoped to win Saxon support for the peace by granting concessions to Silesia. As a result, in the final treaty, through the help of Saxony and other Protestant allies, Silesian Protestants in the duchies of Brieg, Liegnitz, Münsterberg, Wohlau, Oels, and the city of Breslau won the right to continue following the Augsburg Confession.^[68] For Silesia the war ended officially in 1650 when the last Swedish garrisons pulled out.

6.11 In hindsight, the Peace of Westphalia turned out to mark not the end of religious conflict but rather the start of an even more aggressive phase of the Counter-Reformation. Churches in the principality of Breslau and even in the suburbs were compelled to turn Catholic.^[69] Yet in the end, the city itself remained Protestant, unlike the whole of Bohemia, Austria, and many other towns and cities in Silesia. As a result, throughout the era Profe and his Breslau colleagues, unlike their coreligionist neighbors, still enjoyed enough security to express their anxiety in elaborate music. Their geographical position and cultural ties to Catholic central Europe even gave them unprecedented access to the most up-to-date Italian music, concerted madrigals included. And because Protestantism in Breslau survived in the long run, so too did the music as it passed into the libraries of Breslau’s principal churches. Had the city ended up in the same position as its neighbors in Austria or Bohemia, these contrafacta might have been dispersed, lost, or destroyed, like the libraries of so many converted Protestant congregations.

7. Conclusion

7.1 Both sets of Breslau contrafacta show a group of priorities that governed their creation. The parodists clearly wanted to imitate German spiritual madrigals, paraphrasing biblical texts common in Lutheran devotional culture. But they also wanted to translate the most striking moments of text painting in the Italian originals, something that they and their listeners evidently delighted in. Some of the frank language about war and persecution certainly was a byproduct of these general stylistic goals. And yet, in some cases, this language also seems to have been deliberately cultivated for political reasons.

7.2 Here Silesia’s vulnerable position at the twilight of the Thirty Years War provides a richer context for the Breslau madrigal contrafacta. The concern to remain the emperor’s loyal subjects meant that Silesians had to mute their criticism, including of the Counter-Reformation. Like most Lutheran sacred music of the age, none of these madrigals names specific opponents. The listener must infer them. Complaints about the soldiers, plundering, and taxation that burdened the region also remained generic, not taking sides. Whatever their true opinions, Silesian Protestants were in no political position in the 1640s to risk giving offense.

7.3 Still, in a few key instances political and religious grievances nearly rise to the surface. Both Scacchi and Monteverdi had dedicated their original printed music to the reigning Holy Roman Emperors Ferdinand II and III, a fact that Breslau musicians surely knew since they had copied directly from the printed partbooks. By reworking these madrigal texts, the Breslau musicians might have engaged in a symbolic act of defiance, turning this music against its original dedicatees. Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel, meant in the Eighth Book of Madrigals to flatter the military prowess of the emperor, as contrafactum becomes an implicit critique of Ferdinand’s religious policies and the fears they provoked.^[70] The same muted criticism appears in another piece from Profe’s 1649 anthology, printed along with his contrafactum of Hor che’l ciel: Profe issued a concerto by Giovanni Rovetta with two new texts, one in Latin, the other in German:^[71]

1. Jove rector coeli, Jove rector terrae, Dona nobis pacem, In hoc seclo nostro.	Jehovah, ruler of heaven, Jehovah, ruler of earth, grant us peace, in this, our time.
2. Quia non est alter, Qui pro nobis pugnet, Nisi tu qui noster, Deus et Pater.	For there is none other, who fights for us, save you, who are ours, Lord and Father.
3. Nostro Ferdinando, Regibus qui piis, et regni filicem, Statum da et pacem.	To our Ferdinand, pious King, give a station of happy reign and peace.
4. Ut nos Horum umbra, Tecti simus fausti, Sitque vita nostra, Recta pia sancta, Amen.	That our hour of darkness be auspiciously sheltered and our life be upright, pious, and holy. Amen.

1. Jesu wollst gewähren, Was wir stets begehren, Friede, Friede eben, Den wollst du Herr geben.	Jesus, would [you] grant what we ever desire, peace, even peace, would you, Lord, give us this.
2. Friede unserm Lande, Glück, Heyl, allem Stande, Laß uns diß geniessen, In gutem Gewissen.	Peace in our lands, good fortune and prosperity to all estates, let us relish this, in good conscience.
3. Unruh hat mit Schmertzen, Bißher unser Hertzen, Marck und Bein genaget, Land und Leut verjaget.	Turmoil with anguish has hitherto pierced through our hearts, expelled the land and its people.
4. Wollst dich doch der Armen, Deiner Kirch erbarmen, Trost und Hülffe senden, Fried an allen enden. Amen.	Would you yet show pity to the poor ones of your Church, send comfort and help, peace everywhere. Amen.

Ostensibly, Profe has merely provided two alternative texts, the first of which honors the emperor by name in verse 3. But the German words underneath in the partbooks seem to take aim at the emperor’s religious policies. Turmoil (verse 3) has expelled the people from the land, and therefore the poet prays (verse 4) for God to pity his Church. This language suggests that over and above the general suffering of the age, Profe here aimed to evoke religious conflict driven by Habsburg policies. Yet ultimately, the critique of Ferdinand—negated or lessened in performance, since only one of the texts would be sung—remains visible only on the printed page.

7.4 Silesia’s vulnerability at the close of the Thirty Years War helps to explain more than just the political motivations behind new texts added to Italian music. It helps account for the access that Profe had to Italian music in the first place. We might think of Heinrich Schütz as an important conduit of Italian music north of the Alps, but Scacchi’s music clearly did not reach Lutheran Germany through him. Profe seems to have lapped Schütz in the race to get Scacchi’s music after controversy with Siefert broke out. In 1646 Schütz wrote a letter to Christian Schirmer, eventually published in Scacchi’s Judicium cribri musici, where he pleads ignorance of Scacchi’s music:

Indeed, I for my part would wish that Herr Siefert had not begun this business, since insofar as my judgment has weight and insofar as I was able to gather from a cursory and random reading, Herr Scacchi, whose compositions I have not yet seen [emphasis added], is a well-grounded musician of distinction … And seeing that [Herr Kaspar Förster] indicated to me that the aforesaid Herr Scacchi had published some Masses, I beseech the same Herr Förster most warmly to procure these for me at a good price, likewise (since thus far I have seen little or nothing of his concerted music and madrigals) to share with me at least something from his written compositions, which would be of the utmost pleasure to me.^[72]

In this same year, it should be recalled, Profe had already published four of Scacchi’s madrigals as contrafacta.^[73] Two years later, according to another letter published in Judicium cribri musici, Schütz still awaited the requested Masses from Förster, though he says nothing about the madrigals.^[74]

7.5 Profe, for his part, experienced similar roadblocks. His letter to Scacchi surveys his own troubles finding printed music besides the madrigals, even with help from contacts in Munich and Warsaw.^[75] Nevertheless, Profe, through his extensive mercantile network, had already obtained Scacchi’s madrigals by 1646, the year they first attracted central-German customers in the Leipzig trade fair catalogs. All this suggests that because he lived in a political and confessional borderland, and because his mercantile business likely crossed these boundaries often, Profe had better access to Italian music than Schütz and his circle, at least in the 1640s. But of course, in the religious conflicts of the age, living close to the frontlines also carried great risk: Profe himself numbered among the religious refugees. No doubt this fueled the unusually polemical tone of the texts that he and his colleagues added to their imported madrigals.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks, most of all, to Daniel Rogers for his work tracking down and obtaining scans of Scacchi’s published madrigals. Daniel, as well as the JSCM editorial team, tackled the Italian translations. The staff at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz assisted me during multiple visits and procured scans for me. Portions of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the second annual Madrigal Studies Symposium in Bloomington, Indiana, both in 2017. I thank those who commented then as well as the anonymous reviewers for this Journal.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Text and translation of Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel and its contrafactum, ms. 271

Appendix 2. Text and translation of the two German contrafacta of Monteverdi’s Hor che’l ciel

Appendix 3. Marco Scacchi’s madrigals and their contrafacta: texts and translations

Examples

Example 1. Monteverdi, Hor che’l ciel, mm. 86–88, with uncorrected reading of Cantus 2

Example 2. Scacchi, Parlo, misero (no. 6) with German contrafactum, mm. 1–25

Example 3. Scacchi, Sì, mi dicesti (no. 5) with German contrafactum, mm. 53–57

Figures

Figure 1. Bohn. ms. mus. 236, Tenor 1 (concertist) doublet, recto

Figure 2. Bohn ms. mus. 271, Tenor 1, recto

Figure 3. Bohn ms. mus. 271, Cantus 1, verso

Figure 4. Bohn ms. mus. 271, Cantus 1, verso, detail

Figure 5. Bohn. ms. mus. 197, Cantus 1, fol. 2v

Tables

Table 1. Comparison of handwriting, Bohn mss. mus. 236 and 271

Table 2. Copyists of Bohn ms. mus. 236

Table 3. Sample script of Büttner, copyist B, and scribe of ms. 271

Table 4. Marco Scacchi, Madrigali a cinque (1634) and their contrafacta