The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 14 (2008) No. 1

Celestial Sirens and Nightingales: Change and Assimilation in the Munich Anthologies of Georg Victorinus

Alexander Fisher*

Abstract

The Italianate sacred vocal concerto of the early seventeenth century was transmitted not least through the efforts of northern anthologists. Two anthologies of Georg Victorinus in Munich, Siren coelestis (1616) and Philomela coelestis (1624), containing 200 Latin sacred concertos, demonstrate not only the enthusiasm for the new style in the region, but also the growing importance of vespers as a site for the performance of concerted music. Victorinus’s work with the Munich Jesuits and the contents of both volumes suggest a significant role for the Jesuit colleges as conduits for new sacred music from the south.

1. Introduction

2. Victorinus in Context

3. Victorinus as Anthologist

4. The Thesaurus litaniarum (1596)

5. The Siren coelestis (1616)

6. The Philomela coelestis (1624)

7. Conclusion

References

Appendices

Examples

Figures

1. Introduction

1.1 It is a truism about the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in the age of religious discord, that political, confessional, and cultural geographies need not coincide. With the aid of the 1580 Formula of Concord the Lutheran Reformation had consolidated itself in large swaths of central and northern Europe, and as a mature, institutionalized faith it faced challenges not only from Counter-Reformation Catholicism but also from the more radical stance of the Calvinists. Boundaries between different confessional groups intersected those of the empire’s political units in complicated and uneasy arrangements. If the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 encouraged religious uniformity within the bounds of individual territorial states, many local princes had great difficulty in stamping out religious unorthodoxy, and the imperial cities provided numerous examples of Lutheran and Catholic communities coexisting in a single space, at times uneasily.¹ Further complicating the picture was the still inchoate notion of a “German” polity and culture. Artists, musicians, and their patrons looked increasingly to the south, beyond the Alps (Welschland) for models to imitate, and it is not going too far to suggest that in the early Baroque there was a distinct “transalpine” region of cultural exchange that had relatively little to do with the political geography of the empire.

1.2 These circumstances complicate the study of musical transmission in Germany during a period of rapid change after 1600, as the inherited stylistic language of the sixteenth century made room for both opulent polychorality and the small-scale concertato in the sacred music of Lutheranism and Catholicism alike. Historiographical traditions, furthermore, have clouded our view of the period. Already in 1690 Wolfgang Caspar Printz had singled out Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann Schein, and Samuel Scheidt—“Diese drey berühmte S.”—as the German luminaries in the early part of his century; together with Michael Praetorius these figures dominate modern narratives as well.² All made significant strides, of course, toward the effective presentation of German texts, melding Lutheran traditions with Italian stylistic innovations. Without downplaying the importance of Lutheran developments in the early seventeenth century, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to sacred music in the Catholic lands of southern Germany and Austria, where cities like Augsburg, Munich, Graz, and Vienna served as vital conduits for Italian music and musical ideas.³ It is in these locales that we see the earliest attempts by northern composers to come to terms with novelties like the basso continuo, concertato writing, and explicit vocal virtuosity, observed firsthand during Italian journeys and secondhand through prints and manuscripts. The result was a large body of sacred music for small ensembles and organ continuo, composed, circulated, and published between 1600 and 1630, whose Latin texts and suitability for Catholic liturgy and devotion make it difficult to square with traditional, and at times nationalist, musicological narratives of Lutheran progressivism.

1.3 It is not my aim here to mount an extended critique of the historiography of the period, and in any case an essential prerequisite for this would be a more detailed view of precisely what composers, editors, and musicians in German Catholic lands saw in the Italian repertory and appropriated in their own work.⁴ To this end I would like to focus on anthologies and anthologizing as a means of surveying a new musical landscape, and particularly on the little-studied anthologies of Georg Victorinus (ca.1550–ca.1631), a Munich choirmaster and editor who emerges as a key mediator of the Italian few-voiced concertato in the north. This work complements that of Susan Lewis Hammond in her recent Editing Music in Early Modern Germany, which makes a compelling case for the rising prestige and self-consciously authorial role of the editor in channeling the reception of Italian music in the north in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁵ Like Friedrich Lindner, who for Lewis Hammond exemplifies the professionalized role of the editor with respect to the transmission of the Italian madrigal, Victorinus used his professional position and personal contacts to collect and disseminate a novel repertory, emphasizing his own role by prominently advertising his own name and actions on the title pages of his anthologies. And like Petrus Neander and Martin Rinckart, who carefully designed anthologies of canzonetta and madrigal contrafacta for Protestant audiences, Victorinus addressed the needs of his own Catholic audience by providing a wide variety of small-scale Latin sacred music that could find a place both in the liturgy as well as in devotional contexts characteristic of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, including lay confraternities and religious orders.

1.4 Victorinus had been active as an editor already in the 1590s, producing an anthology of polyphonic litanies by both local and Italian composers in his Thesaurus litaniarum (Munich, 1596). Of greater significance, though, was his Siren coelestis (Munich, 1616, 2/1622) comprising one hundred sacred concertos for two to four voices and continuo, somewhat over half of which could have been drawn from Italian single-composer imprints that had filtered northward. Eight years later, and following a second edition of the Siren in 1622, Victorinus showcased local talent in his Philomela coelestis (1624), demonstrating how quickly and decisively the new style had been embraced by his compatriots in Munich and elsewhere in the southern German orbit. Anchored by parallel sets of falsibordoni, Magnificats, and Marian antiphon settings for various vocal combinations, the Philomela coelestis also points to the increasing importance of the office of vespers as a venue for concerted music in southern German Catholic lands. Together the volumes provide a valuable index of rapid change in sacred music north of the Alps, and draw our attention to the critical position of Catholic anthologies in mediating this change.

2. Victorinus in Context

2.1 Victorinus was an active contributor to the dissemination of the Latin vocal concerto in the north, but he was hardly the most prolific of the anthologists active after the turn of the seventeenth century; nor was he the first German editor to take interest in the musical landscape of the south.⁶ The city of Nuremberg, with its active printing industry and favorable situation on transalpine trade routes, was an early leader in the field of musical anthologizing.⁷ Lewis Hammond’s recent study emphasizes the work of Friedrich Lindner (1542–1597), cantor of the St. Egidius church in Nuremberg, who beginning in 1585 published the first in a series of sacred and secular anthologies devoted mainly to Italian compositions for five to six voices in a traditional vein, a project that followed upon his own compilation of a substantial Italian repertory in manuscript since the early 1570s.⁸ The trend continued strongly in the hands of printer Paul Kauffmann, who brought out numerous volumes of both secular and sacred repertories in the years around 1600 and did much to popularize Venice-inspired polychoral music north of the Alps. Kauffmann’s most important editor of sacred music was the Nuremberg organist Kaspar Hassler (1562–1618), who strongly emphasized polychoral music in his anthologies; the works of his brother, the more-famous composer Hans Leo Hassler, were also strongly influenced by Venetian models.⁹ Also deserving of mention here is a 1615 anthology edited by the Nuremberg merchant Georg Gruber featuring the polychoral music of Gabrieli and Hassler.¹⁰

2.2 A wide variety of scoring, ranging, for example, from five to sixteen voices in the first of Kaspar Hassler’s Nuremberg anthologies, is characteristic of many of these northern collections, and tends to blur the stylistic distinctions between traditional motets, double-choir works, and larger-scale polychoral music.¹¹ A generally conservative—yet practical—tendency also characterizes the larger anthologies of the Schulpforta choirmaster Erhard Bodenschatz (1576–1636) and the Speyer schoolmaster and cantor Abraham Schadaeus (1566–1626). For his two volumes of Florilegium Portense (Leipzig, 1618 and 1621) Bodenschatz built upon the manuscript collections compiled by his predecessor at Schulpforta, Sethus Calvisius.¹² Both volumes emphasize traditional imitative and double-choir music for use in church and school, and the first transmits the works mainly of composers in the German-speaking orbit like Jakob Handl [Gallus], Hieronymus Praetorius, Orlando di Lasso, and Christian Erbach. Showcasing a novel foreign idiom is not the thrust of these volumes, which illustrate the substantial, albeit retrospective, repertory available at one of Lutheran Germany’s leading schools.¹³

2.3 The second volume of the Florilegium Portense (1621), though, presents a much higher proportion of Italian double-choir music by the likes of Lodovico Balbi, Leone Leoni, and Benedetto Pallavicino, a likely consequence of Bodenschatz’s familiarity with the five- to eight-voice motets of Abraham Schadaeus’s Promptuarii musici (four volumes all published at Strasbourg, in 1611, 1612, 1613, and 1617).¹⁴ A peripatetic schoolmaster and cantor who may have assembled much of this music while serving as rector of the Latin school at Speyer (1603–1611), Schadaeus declared on the title page of his first volume that novelty was a prime concern, as he drew his “sacred harmonies or motets” from “diverse and most excellent authors of present and past times, never before published in Germany.” Indeed, Italians clearly dominate: apart from the 25 works by Caspar Vincentius, the Speyer town organist who helped Schadaeus assemble and publish these books (and who provided continuo parts for the motets as well), the best represented figures are the Vicenza maestro Leone Leoni (15 works) and the Venetians Gregorio Zucchini (15), Giovanni Gabrieli (15), and Giovanni Croce (11); other common names include otherwise-obscure Curzio Valcampi (14), Francesco Bianciardi, the maestro di capella at Siena cathedral (12), and Asprilio Pacelli, active both at Rome and in Warsaw (10). Apart from Vincentius the best-represented German composer is Hassler (6), whose motets in these volumes follow the prevailing double-choir format (though without concertato instrumental parts) stemming from turn-of-the-century Italian practice. Schadaeus and Vincentius organized these volumes according to the liturgical year, but not exclusively for either Catholic or Lutheran contexts: the repertory would easily have found employment in Lutheran civic churches where Latin-texted music for trained choirs continued to be of great importance.¹⁵

2.4 The view of the Italian musical landscape offered by Schadaeus and Vincentius in the 1610s, then, was one in which the well entrenched double-choir idiom shaped the perceptions of their mostly German, and biconfessional, audience. In this context the few-voiced concertos of Victorinus’s Siren coelestis presented an entirely different view of the “novel” in Italian music. No less than 70 of the 100 works in the Siren, though, would appear later in the large anthologies published by Johannes Donfrid, rector of the Latin school at Rottenburg am Neckar (near Stuttgart) between 1622 and 1627, and we cannot leave this survey without addressing these important volumes as well.¹⁶ A superficial comparison of Donfrid’s three books of Promptuarii musici (1622, 1623, 1627) with those of Schadaeus reveals that the liturgical organization and wording of the title pages are nearly identical, suggesting that Donfrid (or his Strasbourg printer, Paul Ledertz) may have intended to complement the Schadaeus volumes by focusing exclusively on an entirely different repertory, motets for 2–4 voices with obligatory continuo.¹⁷ Donfrid also far outstripped Schadaeus in the scope of his anthologies, offering 892 works by 127 different composers (Schadaeus and Vincentinus had edited 432 works by 114 different composers). In his thorough study of these volumes Rainer Schmitt has shown concordances with over 100 individual-composer prints, with some 18% of his motets having no other known source, printed or otherwise.¹⁸ While Venetian music had loomed large for Schadaeus, Roman composers now occupied a principal position (G. F. Anerio: 77 works; Antonio Cifra: 49 works; Agostino Agazzari: 37 works). A younger generation of Venetian composers is also well represented, especially Giacomo Finetti (62 works) and Alessandro Grandi (39 works).¹⁹ It must be recognized, however, that the heavy presence of composers such as Anerio and Giovanni Nicolo Mezzogorri (31 works) can partly be explained by the fact that their printed collections were already organized according to the liturgical year, making it rather easy for Donfrid to integrate these works into his own liturgically organized scheme. Even if Italians dominate, Donfrid was also able to draw upon a large body of work in the stile nuovo composed by Germans by the time he published his first volume: the Passau organist Urban Loth was a clear favorite (51 works), while significant showings are also made by the Würzburg episcopal organist Heinrich Pfendner (15), the Augsburg priest and organist Gregor Aichinger (14), the Brixen cathedral Kapellmeister Christoph Sätzl (12), and the Munich court composer Rudolph di Lasso (11), the younger son of the great Orlando. If the first two volumes of Donfrid’s Promptuarii musici resemble those of Schadaeus in their generic arrangement for the two halves of the church year (dividing at Easter), later volumes imply a primarily Catholic audience: volume three emphasizes sanctoral and Marian music, while the 1627 Viridarium musico-marianum (Trier, 1627) is entirely given over to compositions in honor of the Virgin.

2.5 Like Victorinus, Donfrid offered a view of contemporary sacred composition focused on Italy (especially Rome and Venice) and on the Catholic German south. While institutions on both sides of the German confessional divide could presumably take advantage of much of the repertory found here, these anthologies channel it more strongly toward a Catholic audience. This is entirely consistent with an overall tendency toward confessional differentiation in sacred music publishing in this region beginning around 1600, involving a burgeoning number of Latin-texted devotional prints bearing Marian, Eucharistic, and sanctoral themes, as well as a continuing emphasis on Magnificat, Marian antiphon, and litany settings more broadly.²⁰ The anthologies of Donfrid and Victorinus were but one current in a broader stream of published music encompassing polyphony as well as monophonic Catholic song (one thinks of the vernacular songbooks of Nikolaus Beuttner, Conrad Vetter, and David Gregor Corner) emerging from presses either controlled by the Jesuits directly (Dillingen, Ingolstadt) or dependent on the patronage of and commissions by Catholic bishops or territorial princes (Cologne, Munich).²¹ In turn this music forms but one element of a cultural program sponsored by elites—princes, religious orders, episcopal authorities, and prominent patricians—to inscribe Catholic identity more clearly among the populace in a confessionally contested region.

3. Victorinus as Anthologist

3.1 Donfrid’s dependence on Victorinus’s Siren coelestis cements the latter’s position as an influential, if indirect, early mediator of modern Italian sacred music in the north. Victorinus’s connections to Italy were not only musical, but also religious in nature. He spent his most productive years as the music director for the Munich Jesuits, whose college and church of St. Michael (completed 1597) was not only one of the most splendid examples of Catholic architecture in northern Europe, but also arguably the nerve center of the Counter-Reformation north of the Alps. The Jesuits in Munich—and in southern Germany more generally—were a critical force in turning back the Protestant tide, and it would be no exaggeration to say that through their cultural and political influence they played the most significant role in ensuring the Catholicity of the Bavarian duchy. With the support of and in concert with the Bavarian dukes (Albrecht V, r. 1550–1579; Wilhelm V, r. 1579–1597; Maximilian I, r. 1598–1651) the Jesuits undertook missionary work, spread propaganda and engaged in polemical debates with Protestant antagonists, transformed educational institutions, and, to a certain extent, influenced the course of Bavarian domestic and foreign policy in the critical decades leading to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648).²² Their direct obedience to the Jesuit General in Rome, not to mention their myriad links with Italy, also buttressed the significant and growing spiritual and cultural connections between Rome and Munich—“das deutsche Rom,” in the words of Sigmund Riezler.²³ The weak and decentralized character of the Holy Roman Empire encouraged the emergence, as it were, of a “transalpine” zone of cultural and religious exchange in which the Jesuit colleges and universities played a crucial role.

3.2 It was in this context of religious and political ferment that Victorinus began his activity as collector and editor. We know relatively little about his early life, but a matriculation record at the Jesuit-controlled university at Ingolstadt in 1588 indicates that he was from Hultschin (modern-day Hlučín, Czech Republic) in Silesia.²⁴ At the university Victorinus may have made the acquaintance of Gregor Aichinger (ca.1564–1628), a fellow student and later contributor to his anthologies; it is tempting to speculate that during this time both men joined the Jesuit Marian Congregation, an association that would have consequences for their later musical activities.²⁵ By 1591 Victorinus was choir director at St. Michael in Munich and by 1596—following the title page of his litany anthology Thesaurus litaniarum—styled himself the praefectus musicae, or musical director, a post he occupied at least until 1616. By no later than March 1618 Victorinus was schoolmaster at the nearby parish church of St. Peter, where he organized religious-dramatic productions and presumably had some musical responsibilities.²⁶ At some point before his death (1631?) he took holy orders, although it is unclear whether he ever enjoyed a benefice or a fixed position as a parish priest.²⁷ Few details about Victorinus’s musical activity in these years are known, but he did provide the music (now lost) for the lavish Jesuit drama Triumphus divi Michaelis Archangeli Bavarici, produced for the final consecration of St. Michael in July 1597; apart from what appears in his anthologies, only a single six-voice Magnificat setting from his pen survives.²⁸ He enjoyed some connections with the ducal court, as he received payments for dedicated music in 1596 and again in 1624 (quite possibly for the Thesaurus litaniarum and Philomela coelestis, respectively); he housed and taught one of the court’s choirboys between 1601 and 1608; and he edited and published the posthumous collection Cygnaeum melos (1626) by Rudolph di Lasso, the court composer and frequent contributor to Victorinus’s anthologies.²⁹

3.3 It is difficult to tell whether Victorinus had had a role in the compilation of a rather extensive international repertory that was already present at the Jesuit college by 1592, the year affixed to a ordinance for St. Michael that specified “approved” music (Cantiones probatae) and that which was “prohibited due to the text and the notes” (Cantiones quo ad textum et notas prohibitae).³⁰ There is no need to linger here over questions of musical censorship at the Jesuit college, the subject of a recent article by David Crook; rather I would draw attention to the diversity of this collection of manuscripts and prints as a precedent for Victorinus’s later efforts as an anthologist.³¹ Composers active in Germany are well represented in the list, including—in the most prominent position—Orlando di Lasso, accompanied by other local and regional figures like Jakob Meiland, Ivo de Vento, Jakob Regnart, Jakob Reiner, and Jacobus de Kerle. Relatively recent music from Italian presses, though, also finds a place, including motets by Victoria and Palestrina, spiritual madrigals by Marenzio (1584), sacred and secular concertos by Andrea Gabrieli (1587), and four books of canzonettas by Orazio Vecchi (1580–1590).³² Despite the careful circumscription of musical practice at the Jesuit college by this and other ordinances, the list reflects the Society of Jesus’s increasingly liberal and receptive attitude toward polyphonic music in the later sixteenth century, particularly in their larger, urban establishments. One need look no further than the Collegium Germanicum (German College) in Rome, in which musical culture flourished under such notable directors as Tomás Luis de Victoria (1573–1577), Annibale Stabile (ca.1578–ca.1591), Ruggiero Giovannelli (1591–1594), and later under Giacomo Carissimi (1629–1674); important musical centers in the north emerged at Munich, Graz, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Augsburg, Dillingen, and elsewhere.³³

4. The Thesaurus litaniarum (1596)

4.1 The network forged by these colleges, intimately connected with each other and with their Roman leadership, contributed to a dynamic framework for religious and cultural exchange between Catholic Germany and Italy. Both factors are visible in Victorinus’s Thesaurus litaniarum (Munich: Adam Berg, 1596), which offers an international repertory of polyphonic litanies for Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints that were dedicated to and intended for the Marian Congregations, Jesuit-established sodalities of students that gathered regularly at the colleges for devotional exercises and services, and which frequently participated in pilgrimages to Marian and other shrines. While Italian as well as German examples appear among the 67 litanies and three motets in this volume—Lasso and Palestrina dominate with 12 and 10 litanies respectively, while the bulk of the remainder are by local or anonymous composers—Victorinus’s principal aim was not a survey of a foreign and stylistically novel repertory, but rather the collection of available examples of a genre that was closely linked with Catholic pilgrimage (see Appendix 1 for a list of contents).³⁴ In his Thesaurus Victorinus invoked a spiritual geography whose features and boundaries were defined in two ways: by his dedicatees, the network of Marian congregations in the Jesuits’ upper German province (he specifically cites the sodalities at Munich, Ingolstadt, Dillingen, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Hall, Regensburg, Luzern, Freiburg, and Basel); and by the complex of Catholic pilgrimage shrines that demarcated the spiritual landscape of Catholicism for his local audience (some of the most important being Altötting, Andechs, Bettbrunn, Deggendorf, and Tuntenhausen, with Einsiedeln in Switzerland and the Holy House of Loreto in Italy being destinations for more ambitious or wealthy pilgrims).³⁵ Although some of the works in the Thesaurus tend toward greater musical elaboration, even these are reminiscent of the measured, call-and-response format that suited the litany for the steady gait of pilgrims and marked it as a peculiarly Catholic genre in this complicated confessional landscape.³⁶ In its intent for specific Catholic devotional practices the Thesaurus provides a marked contrast with Victorinus’s later motet anthologies, whose contents and organization are not as prescriptive of use. Since musical transmission as such is not his principal aim in the Thesaurus, we will leave it now and focus on these two broad surveys of modern Italian and Italianate repertory, the Siren coelestis and Philomela coelestis.

5. The Siren coelestis (1616)

5.1 The two decades that separated the Thesaurus litaniarum from Victorinus’s next anthology, the Siren coelestis (Munich: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1616), saw fundamental changes to the prevailing style of sacred composition in Italy as well north of the Alps. As Victorinus assembled the repertory for his new volume, innovative currents were becoming visible in the music of at least two local composers who had previously contributed litanies to the Thesaurus. The Augsburg priest Gregor Aichinger (ca.1565–1628), who was responsible for an eight-voice Marian litany to the latter collection, had in the meantime adopted thoroughbass for his 1607 Cantiones ecclesiasticae (following the explicit example of Viadana) and had embraced the lighter, homophonic style of the Italian canzonetta for other volumes of devotional music.³⁷ The Munich composer Rudolph di Lasso (ca.1563–1625) also invoked Viadana in his Triga musica (1612) and composed a full-blown set of vocal concertos with continuo for his Virginalia Eucharistica (1615).³⁸ These, however, were relatively isolated examples. Until the late 1610s German musicians continued to favor the polyphonic idiom of the previous century—Orlando di Lasso’s music continued to exert influence, in part through posthumous publications by his sons—or a somewhat more modern polychoral language indebted to Venetian models, especially in larger institutions able to field substantial choirs with or without supporting instruments.³⁹

5.2 In the first decade and a half of the seventeenth century there were considerable gaps in northern composers’ knowledge of recent trends in Italian sacred music. Of course, several pathways of transmission were open: German composers could travel to the south for musical instruction (for example, Hans Leo Hassler in 1584, Aichinger in 1584 and again in 1600, Heinrich Schütz in 1609, and Ferdinand II di Lasso—grandson of Orlando—in 1609); exemplars of prints by individual composers were selectively available from German booksellers and were offered for sale at the annual book fairs in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main; and musical works certainly circulated widely in manuscript among institutions and individual composers.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, collectors and editors like Victorinus and Donfrid (and/or their respective printers, Anna Berg in Munich and Paul Ledertz in Strasbourg) must have sensed a ready market for few-voiced repertory, reacting not only to the demands of musical fashion but also to the needs of smaller and poorer institutions that were unable to engage more than a few singers. It must not be forgotten that economic troubles—inflationary pressures, in particular—adversely affected many courts and churches in the early part of the century; after 1625 inflation conspired with pestilence and military conflict to decimate church music in many locations, making fewer-voiced music a practical necessity in those institutions that could field musicians at all.⁴¹

5.3 These pressures were not yet fully evident, however, by the time that Victorinus brought out his Siren coelestis, in which novelty was the chief concern. To begin with, the “Celestial Siren” of the title transplants the ancient meme of female seduction into a sacred context, and suggests the brand of spiritual sensuousness cultivated by Victorinus’s Jesuit employers; but, more to the point, the title promises to the reader something strange, never before encountered. The textual arrangement on the collection’s title page implies both newness and liturgical utility, but the former aspect receives greater emphasis (Figure 1). A prospective buyer may have had difficulty in immediately recognizing the nature of the anthology’s contents, for the eye is first drawn to the largest type on the page, reserved for the name of the editor and his actions. The largest fount is used for “quam novavit” (Georgius Victorinus); the verb “novare” here may simply mean “creation,” but it also connotes “refreshment” or “renewal” of an existing repertory for a new audience. The use of the verb form “legit” in line 7 underlines Victorinus’s role as a collector or gatherer, echoing the rhetoric of collection found in other early seventeenth-century German anthologies like those of Schadaeus and Donfrid.⁴² The impression of novelty follows not only from the inclusion of “not yet published authors” but also by the appendage of a verse from Psalm 149, Cantate Domino canticum novum, laus eius in ecclesia sanctorum (Sing to the Lord a new song, and his praise in the church of saints). This verse appears in small italics, but equally small is the description of the intended function: Victorinus prepared the volume “for a variety of times and feast days,” adapting the whole for the needs of organists. In contrast to Donfrid, who would prominently display the words “CONCENTVS ECCLESIASTICOS” on his title page and then organize his volumes according to feast day, the Siren coelestis does not stress an explicitly liturgical function. Indeed the liturgical year was not the organizing principle here, as Victorinus arranged the precisely one hundred works first by scoring (two, three, and then four voices, respectively), and then alphabetically by title (see Appendix 2a and Appendix 2b for a complete inventory of the print and biographical notes on composers represented). The Siren’s title page, in short, draws our attention not to the style or function of the music, but rather to the editor himself, who assumes a confident, authorial voice.

5.4 The links between Victorinus and the elderly duke Wilhelm V are immediately evident on the title page, where the editor identifies himself as “Musicæ ad D. Michaelis & S. Nicolai Præfectus,” confirming his posting not only at the Jesuit college of St. Michael but also at the smaller chapel of St. Nicholas, built by the duke around 1608 as a part of his new residence—the so-called “Wilhelminische Veste”—immediately north of the Jesuit complex.⁴³ Victorinus’s dedication to Wilhelm suggests an acquaintance between the two men stretching back three decades, but otherwise tells us little about the precise nature of their relationship (see Appendix 2c). Couched in a web of classical references ranging from Aristotle to Herodotus, Victorinus’s praise of music’s power is entirely conventional, drawing on ancient themes of modal ethos and legendary musicians. But his claim that modern music, graced by so many “Arions, Orpheuses, and Sirens,” surpasses that of the “rough and storied age” of antiquity underlines the progressivism of the title page, and indeed of the volume’s contents.

5.5 Giacomo Finetti’s Ab initio et ante saecula, appropriately, opens the volume, while Victorinus breaks the alphabetical pattern to provide a gesture of thanksgiving in the final Agimus tibi gratias. Although a significant proportion of the motets could potentially be useful in the liturgy, there is no discernible thematic emphasis in the volume that might indicate an intent for a specific season of the church year or a particular complex of feast days. Despite the strong Marian and Eucharistic currents in contemporary music reflecting the partisan religious atmosphere of Counter-Reformation Munich, flexibility and salability would also have been a concern both to editor and the printer, Anna Berg, who recently had assumed control of the family’s printing business upon the death of her husband Adam in 1610, and faced considerable local competition from the shop of her son-in-law, Nikolaus Heinrich (1597–1654). A collection oriented exclusively toward a specific devotional object, even among Catholic audiences alone, may have posed too great a financial risk.⁴⁴

5.6 The wide selection of forty-eight different composers, almost half of whom are represented by a single work only, strengthens the impression that Victorinus aimed for a comprehensive survey of the few-voiced medium, and one that was focused squarely on Italian developments. It is difficult to identify Victorinus’s sources for these compositions with absolute certainty. He may have possessed as many as 34 single-composer prints that are extant today and have concordances with the Siren, but only a detailed comparison of these widely scattered exemplars with the anthology would reveal whether Victorinus’s sources were these prints, manuscripts, or other Italian anthologies.⁴⁵ A cluster of concordances with an individual single-composer print, of course, strengthens the likelihood of that print being the editor’s source: for example, five out of the six works in the Siren by Giacomo Finetti originally appeared in his fourth book of Sacrae cantiones for three voices and continuo (Venice, 1613); likewise, all four of the motets by Stefano Bernardi could have been drawn from his Motecta for two to five voices and continuo (Rome, 1610).⁴⁶ By contrast, the single work by Giovanni Francesco Anerio, Jam quod quaesivi for three voices and continuo, may have been taken from his second book of Motectorum (Rome, 1611), but it is also possible that Victorinus obtained the piece from another source entirely.

5.7 The best-represented composer in the Siren, with seven works, is Antonio Cifra, who served at the Seminarium Romanum (1605–1607) and then at the Collegium Germanicum (1608–1609) before obtaining the post of maestro di capella at the Holy House of Loreto in 1609. Cifra’s prominence here encourages us to consider the significance of Rome and Roman repertory for our northern anthologist more broadly. Graham Dixon has argued for a reevaluation of Roman church music around the turn of the seventeenth century, suggesting that the traditional view of Roman conservatism—a legacy, in part, of the post-Renaissance reception of Palestrina’s music—obscures the leading role of local composers in developing the few-voiced concerto with organ accompaniment.⁴⁷ It was the German College in Rome, in fact, that enjoyed the efforts of two of the musicians most emphasized by Dixon, Agostino Agazzari (maestro di capella, 1602–1603) and Antonio Cifra. More recently, Noel O’Regan has challenged the primacy of Lodovico Viadana in the genre of the few-voiced concerto in his study of Agazzari’s predecessor at the German College, Asprilio Pacelli, whose Chorici Psalmi et Motecta (Rome, 1599) can be seen as an index of progressive Roman practices dating back at least two decades.⁴⁸ Although we await more concrete documentary evidence, the intimate transalpine networks connecting the Jesuit colleges would have allowed Victorinus to be aware of the musical practices of the German College, and it is hardly out of the question that he could have obtained a substantial number of musical imprints through this conduit.

5.8 Victorinus appears to have used books 1, 2, 5, and 6 of Cifra’s few-voiced Motecta, published at Rome (except book 1, in Venice) between 1609 and 1613; this repertory for two and three voices and continuo may have stemmed, in fact, from Cifra’s time with the Roman Jesuits. Other well-represented composers in the Siren had significant Roman connections. Stefano Bernardi (4 works) was active in Rome, possibly at the church of Madonna dei Monti, between 1603 and 1610, the year his motet book appeared.⁴⁹ The three works in the Siren by Agostino Agazzari are all to be found in his fourth book of Sacrae cantiones, published in Rome in 1606, the same year that he served as maestro of the Seminario Romano in that city.⁵⁰ The previously mentioned Giovanni Francesco Anerio, too, had strong Roman connections, but he would be far more important to Donfrid, who transmitted 20 of his motets in the second volume and no less than 54 motets in the third volume of the Promptuarii musici, respectively. The explanation for this, again, may lie with the existing liturgical organization of the first two books of Anerio’s Antiphonae (Rome, 1613), Donfrid’s probable source.

5.9 Roman music enjoys some some prominence in the Siren, then, but otherwise the geographical picture of contemporary Italian sacred music is highly diffuse; the only other Italian cities represented by more than a single composer are Bologna (Adriano Banchieri, Domenico Brunetti, and Ottavio Vernizzi), Loreto (where Cifra was joined by the organist Pietro Pace), Comacchio (Giovanni Nicolo Mezzogorri and Biagio Tomasi), and Fiesole (Giovanni Francesco Capello and Giovanni Paolo Nodari). The second-best represented composer in the Siren (six works), and the only one active in Venice, is the Franciscan friar Giacomo Finetti, whose third and fourth books of Sacrae cantiones appear to have been available to Victorinus. Anthologies like those of Victorinus and Donfrid illustrate the only gradual emergence of Venice as a center of composition in the stile nuovo, and provide further confirmation of Dixon and O’Regan’s theses on the largely Roman origins of the concerted style in small-scale church music.⁵¹ For the Siren coelestis Venice was primarily of importance as a printing center, as well over half of the prints serving as probable sources for this music were produced there.

5.10 What makes the Siren coelestis particularly valuable is that it reflects an early attempt by a northern musician to come to terms with a genre in rapid development. It represented a repository of compositional techniques that could not fail to have influenced local musicians in their own early experiments, and indeed there are considerable similarities between the works of such composers as Victorinus, Cesare, and the Lasso family and those of Italian pioneers in the genre like Agazzari and Cifra. Characterizing general stylistic and textual tendencies in such a diverse volume is no easy matter, but some observations are possible.

5.11 Although some of the music of the Siren coelestis was potentially useful in a liturgical setting, on the whole the texts lend the volume a devotional character. Roughly one-third of the texts in the volume can be found as antiphons in the Roman liturgy, while several others appear as responsories for matins, although in certain cases the responds alone are set.⁵² Half of the texts have no liturgical position, and are typically derived from brief scriptural passages (Agazzari’s Fulgebunt justi [no. 10], from Wisdom 3:7–8), individual psalm verses (Belli’s Cantabo Domino [no. 7], from Ps. 103:33–4 [Vulgate]), or non-scriptural devotional texts (Anerio’s Jam quod quaesivi [no. 55], from Pseudo-Bernard’s Jubilus). A group of eight motets based on texts from the Song of Solomon form a special group, as they tend to draw an especially affective compositional response.

5.12 With respect to scoring the Siren coelestis tracks the contemporary Italian convention for two- to four-voiced concerti: 27 motets are scored for two voices, 66 are for three, and seven are for four. In most of these works, a high cantus pair (or tenors, as alternates) dominates the texture: fully 25 of the 27 two-voiced motets are written for this combination, while no less than 54 of the 66 three-voiced motets are effectively cantus duets, as the bass voice tends to track the continuo closely rather than sounding as an independent line. The volume does contain a significant subset of eleven cantus trios, including three by Cifra (nos. 35, 49, and 51), as well as two quartets for three cantus and bass by Giovanni Paolo Nodari (Dilectus meus loquitur, no. 96) and by Victorinus himself (Agimus tibi gratias, no. 100), which are texturally analogous to the trios proper. Otherwise the remaining quartets in the Siren are scored for the combination of two cantus (or tenors) and two basses; there are no balanced CATB quartets. By the time of the Siren’s publication the solo motet had yet to truly establish itself in Italy, and while there are no true examples of that genre here, we should note three works scored for cantus and a bass voice that adheres closely to the continuo: Banchieri’s Exsultate justi (no. 13), Agazzari’s Laudate Dominum (no. 22), and Uffererii’s Repleatur os meum (no. 25). None of these works, however, features the cantus voice in a distinctively affective or virtuosic role, and they suggest the idiom of the traditional bicinium of the previous century. On occasion, though, composers in the Siren employ monodic elements for specific, expressive purposes.

5.13 Befitting the aphoristic nature of the texts, the motets in this collection are relatively brief, with most falling between 30 and 50 breves. An imitative opening in duple meter is practically a requirement; once the full ensemble has been introduced and reaches its first major cadence, a new point of imitation will typically begin for the next phrase of text. Many of these motets, in fact, are constituted formally by assigning successive and contrasting imitative points to each phrase of text in turn. Formal structures are frequently enlivened by homophonic triple-meter excursions which are especially suited for joyous words such as “alleluia” or collective gestures of praise—a rather typical motet that displays both of these features is Agazzari’s Benedicite Domino for two cantus (no. 6, Example 1).

5.14 Many of the traits visible in this motet are reproduced in works by local composers, but it is noteworthy that some of the more virtuosic motets in the Siren stem from this group rather than the Italians. It is worth considering these men together, as the greatest number of composers and works in the volume stem from the Bavarian capital itself. Victorinus contributed five motets of his own; close behind is the court composer Rudolph di Lasso (4) followed by the cornettist Giovanni Martino Cesare (3), who had been active at Günzburg and Augsburg before joining the Munich court chapel permanently in 1615. Ferdinand di Lasso is represented twice, but this is not Orlando’s eldest son (ca.1560–1609), but rather his grandson (d. ca.1636), who after study in Rome served as Munich Kapellmeister between 1614 and 1629.⁵³ Other figures with Munich connections include Albrecht Cornazzano, son of the well regarded cornettist Fileno Cornazzano and member of the ducal chapel from 1612; Vincenzo dal Pozzo, who had served briefly in Munich under Orlando di Lasso in 1586 and 1587 and who published a book of few-voiced motets in Venice in 1611; and, evidently, the lutenist Michelangelo Galilei (1575–1631).⁵⁴ Victorinus also demonstrated the penetration of the new idiom in the nearby imperial city of Augsburg, publishing two motets each by Christian Erbach and Johann Aichmiller, and one by Gregor Aichinger; all three were attached to the cathedral in that city and variously benefited from the patronage of the Fugger banking family, whose own interests in Italianate music were long established. Excluding dal Pozzo, who had long before returned to Italy, none of the twenty works by local composers is known to have appeared previously in print. While Victorinus had been able to rely on readily available prints for the Italian side of his volume, his claim of introducing “not yet published authors” certainly rings true of the Siren’s local repertory, which now reached a broader audience for the first time.

5.15 Rudolph di Lasso’s Hic vir, despiciens mundum for two cantus and bass (no. 52) will stand as an example of the florid style preferred by the Germans in the Siren (Example 2). The text appears as a Magnificat antiphon for second vespers in the Common of Confessor Bishops, and like many sanctoral texts contrasts the saint’s asceticism on earth with the riches of heaven. The first ten bars present two points of imitation in a moderately florid style on “Hic vir, despiciens mundum” cadencing on the final of F and on G, respectively; the bass’s descent to a low D in m. 10 and the octave descents for “et terrena” in the following three measures lend sonic depth to these earthly conceits. A remarkable series of ascending passaggi follow for “triumphans,” leading to a strong cadence on F at m. 18 and the clearest caesura in the piece. The luxuriant passagework for “divitias caelo condidit ore, manu,” continually revolving around the F final, adorns these celestial treasures.

5.16 Such virtuosity is far less evident in Victorinus’s selections by Agazzari and Cifra, for example, but Hic vir, despiciens mundum shares with most of the motets in the Siren a certain conservatism with respect to harmony and chromaticism—“despiciens” does not inspire any unusual treatment from Lasso, and one notes the relentless cadencing on F. We find, though, a subgroup of motets that not only makes use of expressive chromaticism, but also turns to monodic gestures redolent of contemporary secular music: these are the motets based on texts derived from, or closely related to, the Song of Solomon. Nine works fall under this heading: two by Lodovico Viadana (nos. 17 and 72), two by Giacomo Finetti (nos. 80 and 89), and one each by Giovanni Damasceni Uffererii (no. 30), Antonio Cifra (no. 81), Giacomo Moro (no. 48), Marcantonio Tornioli (no. 91), and Giovanni Paolo Nodari (no. 96). Viadana’s Indica mihi (no. 17), whose text is drawn from several passages in the Canticles, features a highly expressive dialogue between the two cantus voices (coded textually as sponsus and sponsa), each of which is given significant solo writing (Example 3); note the striking chromaticism for “vulnerasti cor meum” in mm. 32–3 in the second cantus. A similarly unstable passage underlines the closing words “quia amore langueo” in Uffererii’s Anima mea liquefacta est (no. 30) (Example 4). Two concerti by Finetti, Quam pulchra es (no. 80) and Tota pulchra es (no. 89), intepret the Canticles from a thoroughly Marian standpoint: in the former, triple-meter choral refrains of “Quam pulchra es, amica mea” alternate with a monodic, duple-meter presentation of the Marian hymn “O gloriosa Domina” in the second cantus. In the latter, “O Maria, veni, coronaberis” leads to some of the most virtuosic solo passagework in the volume (Example 5). Finally, the responsory text of Marcantonio Tornioli’s Veni electa mea (no. 91) is drawn mainly from Psalm 44 (Vulgate), but strongly invokes the language of the Canticles as well; in the motet the king’s command “audi filia, et vide, et inclina aurem tuam” is set off from the remaining texture by a lengthy passage for solo bass (Example 6, mm. 31–41). This group of works reminds us of the considerable affective power and allegorical potential of the Canticles that seized many composers of the early Seicento.⁵⁵ Nonetheless, in the context of the volume these works are outliers, and we might better look to Agazzari’s Benedicite Domino as the stylistic center of gravity of the anthology. As we shall see, selected compositions from the Philomela coelestis demonstrate a consistency with the earlier models of the Siren: a preference for the high, equal cantus pair; an emphasis on imitative points and corresponding rarity of monodic writing; and a restrained expressivity created more through melodic virtuosity than chromatic adventures.

5.17 Before leaving the Siren one should briefly note that the collection was given a second edition in 1622, likewise printed by Anna Berg in Munich but financed by Johannes Hertsroy, who had been active over the previous one-and-a-half decades in Munich producing academic and religious literature, much of it connected with the local Jesuits.⁵⁶ Hertsroy must have sensed continued demand for the contents of the Siren, although it is difficult to say how well the original edition had sold. It does not appear among the Frankfurt and Leipzig book-fair catalogues surveyed by Göhler; nor was it advertised in the stock catalogues of Georg Willer (1622) or Kaspar Flurschütz (1613–1628) in Augsburg, booksellers who otherwise marketed an excellent selection of contemporary Italian music.⁵⁷ On the other hand, the revised edition of 1622 was offered for sale each year between 1622 and 1626 at the Frankfurt fair, and at the Leipzig fair in 1622 alone.⁵⁸ The new title page mostly resembles that of the 1616 edition, but we learn that Victorinus has now taken the position of schoolmaster at St. Peter in Munich. His “second edition, corrected and improved,” now omits the psalm verse. The dedication to Wilhelm V is identical to that of the first edition, but Victorinus now replaces two of the 1616 motets with new selections: the original no. 17, Viadana’s Canticles motet Indica mihi quem diligit, has now been replaced by Rudolph di Lasso’s Istorum est enim regnum coelorum, setting a text used as an antiphon in the Common of Martyrs, while Lasso’s own Multae filiae congregaverunt (no. 65), joining verses from Proverbs 31:29–30 on female virtues with a quasi-litany addressing Saint Mary Magdalene, now makes way for Banchieri’s responsory setting Media nocte clamor.⁵⁹ Unlike the two motets from the original edition, their replacements in 1622 both have distinct liturgical assignments, possibly reflecting an increasing interest by Victorinus in liturgical suitability. This interest would manifest itself more strongly two years later in the Philomela coelestis.⁶⁰

6. The Philomela coelestis (1624)

6.1 In the eight years separating the Siren coelestis and the Philomela coelestis musical, political, and religious conditions conspired to transform the profile of sacred composition in southern Germany. Composers attached to larger, wealthier institutions still cultivated double-choir and polychoral music, but this idiom and that of the older stile antico continued to erode in the face of the Italian concerted style, which increasingly dominated new composition and publication. Pathways of musical transmission remained largely the same as before, but by the early 1620s the vocal concerto had reached something of a critical mass and now was to be found not only in Munich and Augsburg, but in more far-flung areas as well, in turn providing more fodder for the efforts of anthologists like Victorinus and Donfrid. Heinrich Pfendner (ca.1590–1631) had begun publishing collections of few-voiced concertos first in his capacity as organist to the bishop of Gurk, and later as organist and Kapellmeister to the bishops of Würzburg; he also contributed to the Parnassus musicus Ferdinandaeus (Venice, 1615), a volume of motets in the new style dedicated to Ferdinand II by 32 musicians, among them Claudio Monteverdi and nine composers in imperial service.⁶¹ In Passau, situated at the confluence of Bavarian, Austrian, and Bohemian territory, the cathedral organist Urban Loth (ca.1580–1636) brought out two volumes of Musa melica in 1616 and 1619, music that would be especially favored by Donfrid.⁶² Monasteries in the Catholic south also welcomed the new currents: Michael Kraf at the Benedictine abbey of Weingarten and Christian Keifferer at the Premonstratensian abbey of Weissenau each published collections of few-voice concertos in the 1610s and 1620s.⁶³ In Augsburg Gregor Aichinger continued to produce music exploring the stile nuovo, while Munich witnessed a great deal of activity in the hands not only of Victorinus, Cesare, and the Lasso descendants, but also of newer figures like Bernardino Borlasca (ca.1580–ca.1631), Vizekapellmeister and Konzertmeister between 1612 and 1624, and Anton Holzner (ca.1598–1635), who after studies in Parma and Rome served as organist at the ducal court from 1619 until his death.⁶⁴

6.2 Despite this flurry of single-composer prints emerging from German presses (with printers in Munich, Augsburg, Dillingen, and Ingolstadt playing leading roles) Victorinus drew mainly on unpublished music, much of it by obscure local figures who otherwise would have little hope of a wide circulation; this continues the trend seen already in the Siren. The wording of the title page is suggestive (Figure 2): the music, drawn from the “most recent tokens of the choicest musicians of our time” (ex præcipuorum sæculi nostri musicorum recentissimis symbolis), is not only “unpublished,” but “never before heard” (antè hac nec auditæ, nec diuulgate). In contrast to that of the Siren, the largest type on the Philomela’s title page is reserved for praise of the music’s “sweetest” and “most excellent” quality (suavissimæ, lectissimæque cantiones). The editor and his role recede somewhat into the background, but the sheer novelty of this music, advertised prominently on the title page and indeed confirmed by the rarity of the music itself, suggests that Victorinus gathered much of this repertory through personal networks.⁶⁵ The Philomela, broadly speaking, is nothing less than a demonstration of the recent, enthusiastic embrace of the concertato idiom by a wide range of German composers, both well known and obscure.

6.3 It is unknown what connection, if any, Victorinus had to his dedicatee, abbot Michael Kirchberger (1612–1635) of the Cistercian abbey of Aldersbach, located east of Munich near Passau and the popular Deggendorf pilgrimage shrine. We might speculate that the Munich schoolmaster hoped for a new engagement at that monastery, although the extent to which Aldersbach enjoyed an active musical culture in this period remains unclear (see Appendix 3c).⁶⁶ The preface itself reveals little about Victorinus’s situation or his intentions. He holds up Philomel—according to legend, raped by her brother-in-law Tereus, her tongue removed, and subsequently transformed into a swallow or nightingale—as a symbol for the finest music, and hopes that the abbot will take pleasure in the collection. As a gesture to the Cistercian order, Victorinus cites Bernard of Clairvaux as being among those who were moved to the praise of God by birdsong, and he signs his dedication on the feast day of that saint (20 August).

6.4 Like the Siren, the Philomela coelestis consists of precisely 100 compositions for 2–4 voices and continuo, arranged (mostly) alphabetically by title in gradually increasing scoring. A survey of the actual contents of the Philomela coelestis, however, shows that Victorinus sought to cast a far wider net among musicians active in Germany (see Appendix 3a and Appendix 3b). The geography has shifted dramatically northward, with Munich assuming the leading position. Victorinus showcases his own abilities by offering no less than 15 of his own compositions, three times the number of works by any other composer; among these are not only motets but also Magnificats and falsobordone settings. Not counting eight anonymous pieces, the next best represented group of musicians have local connections. Rudolph di Lasso (5 works) is given pride of place with the very first piece in the volume, a two-voice setting of the Ave Maria, preceding even Victorinus’s own Ab initio et ante saecula, which otherwise recalls Finetti’s setting of the same text that opened the Siren coelestis. Beginning the anthology with an Ave Maria setting is unsurprising given the strong currents of Marian devotion in contemporary Bavaria, but it also points to the likely close relationship between Victorinus and Lasso, not only on account of the latter’s noteworthy position in both the Siren and the Philomela, but also reflected by Victorinus’s editing of Lasso’s posthumous motet collection Cygnaeum melos (1626). The Ferdinand di Lasso represented with four works (including three motets and the final instrumental canzona) is Rudolph’s nephew, the current Kapellmeister. Like those of his uncle, these pieces are unica in the Philomela and do not appear in Ferdinand’s lone individual print, the Apparatus musicus of 1622. Five works in the Philomela are the only extant, secure attributions to one of the two men who had served as interim Kapellmeister during Ferdinand’s absence (1609–1612), the Veronese priest Giacomo Perlazio.⁶⁷ The cornettist Giovanni Martino Cesare, who remained in the chapel’s employ first as a member of the trumpet corps and then (from 1624) the ducal Kammerpartei, is represented by three motets. Other composers known to have been attached directly to the ducal/electoral chapel include the string player Egidius Moet (2 works), instrumentalists Fileno and Albrecht Cornazzano (1 work each), organist Anton Holzner (1 work), and singer Jonas Schiesl (1 work). Rounding out the survey of Munich-based musicians, Victorinus includes five works by Christoph Perckhover, music copyist, singer, and from 1612 schoolmaster at the church of Unsere Liebe Frau, Munich’s principal parish church.

6.5 Altogether, musicians demonstrably active in Munich are responsible for nearly half (43) of the compositions in the Philomela, and this number might rise were we able to establish biographical details about some of the more obscure composers in the volume, like Kaspar Topiarius [or Gartner?] (4 works), Johannes Sagittarius [or Schütz?] (3 works), Bartholomäus Hartmann (2), or Johannes Stuporius (2). In any case the bulk of the remaining music seems to stem from southern Germany. Augsburg continues to be well represented with motets by Christian Erbach (4) and his son, also named Christian (1), Johann Aichmiller (2), Gregor Aichinger (1), and the vicar-choral from the church of St. Moritz, Peter Hempfer (1). Two pieces appear from the episcopal city of Passau, one by the previously encountered Urban Loth and another by Johann Kyrzinger (Kürzinger), organist at the St. Nikola church in that city and author of a 1624 collection of concerti entitled Lesbii modi.⁶⁸ Individual works appear by Peter Guetfreund (or Bonamici), Kapellmeister to the archbishop of Salzburg; Johann Feldmayr, organist to the provostry of Berchtesgaden; Wilhelm Krumper, organist for the Augustinian Canons of Polling; Johann Stadlmayr from the archducal court of Innsbruck; Christoph Sätzl from Brixen cathedral; and Giovanni Priuli, Kapellmeister of the imperial court at Vienna. Victorinus included not a single composer known to be active in Italy.⁶⁹

6.6 Like the Siren coelestis, the Philomela coelestis organizes the music principally by scoring, with each subdivision further alphabetized by title. While this arrangement of the volume (not to mention its modest size relative to Donfrid’s collections) may orient it less toward ready liturgical use, it is immediately evident that each of the sections scored for two, three, and four voices, respectively, conclude with a complex of falsobordone, Magnificat, and Marian antiphon settings that point to the musical elaboration of the liturgy for vespers and/or compline. The three sets of falsobordone settings—composed by Victorinus himself—are each arranged in octenary modal order; the final set for four voices is further divided into a “parte superiori” (no. 93) for high voices (CCAT) and a “parte inferiori” (no. 94) for low voices (ATTB): in this arrangement psalms could be recited either for high voices or low voices, or for both groups in alternatim practice if eight voices were available. The sample psalm text underlaid beneath the incipits is that of Ps. 109 (Vulgate), Dixit Dominus, the first of the five psalms in the ferial psalter for Sunday vespers, not to mention most feasts of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles, as well as Corpus Christi. The settings resemble those of Adriano Banchieri in his Terzo libro di nuovi pensieri ecclesiastici (1613), with recited chords in unspecified rhythm followed by 2–3 measures of contrapuntally conceived cadence points featuring both imitative textures as well as occasional brief passaggi. With minor exceptions, the cadence pitches chosen by Victorinus follow established procedures in the genre.⁷⁰ A remarkable performance direction, though, appears in the vox suprema partbook following the set of two-voice falsobordone settings: here the singer is given the option to perform the cantus part down an octave, while adding a violin to play the cantus part at written pitch.⁷¹

6.7 The two-voice falsbordoni are followed by a rather unusual work, an alternatim Magnificat quarti toni for two cantus in a luxuriant concertato style by Giacomo Perlazio. Some of the verses begin with quasi-falsobordone recitation before proceeding in contrapuntal dialogue toward principal cadences; for the “Deposuit potentes” verse the second cantus is replaced by a bass voice that follows the continuo, temporarily darkening the texture (Example 7, mm. 29–37). Two other Magnificats by Victorinus and Rudolph di Lasso are of the imitation variety, explicitly recalling the practice cultivated so assiduously by Orlando during his tenure, and forming part of a larger repertory of early seventeenth-century imitation Magnificats by local composers like Ferdinand II di Lasso, Anton Holzner, Christoph Perckhofer, and Perlazio.⁷² The model for Victorinus’s parody of Dies est laetitiae remains unknown, but Lasso’s setting parodies the four-voice Dilectus meus loquitur by Lodovico Viadana, originally appearing in the Cento concerti ecclesiastici (1602). The quartets of Marian antiphon settings in each section resemble the prevailing concertato style of the volume, except in that they almost invariably begin with a chant quotation or paraphrase; however, the music proceeds freely after the initial quotation, with no suggestion of cantus firmus treatment. Each quartet of antiphons is followed by an instrumental canzona for the same number of voices. The final work in the volume, a four-voice canzona by Ferdinand II di Lasso, closely resembles a vocally conceived motet, but the two- and three-voice canzonas by Johann Stadlmayr and Bernhard Wolck, respectively, betray a strongly instrumental conception in their rhythmic vitality, echo effects, and disjunct melodic motion (Example 8). The canzonas’ function is ambiguous; conceivably they could also find a place in the vespers service, or be performed extra-liturgically.

6.8 On the whole these complexes of pieces reflect the increasing importance of polyphonic vespers music in contemporary liturgical practice, both in Munich—where this tradition had been in place at the court at least since the 1520s—and regionally.⁷³ Apart from the three vespers complexes the remaining 77 motets in the volume have the character of a miscellany, with texts derived most commonly from liturgical antiphons (21 works), miscellaneous prayers or devotional texts (15 works), and excerpts from the psalms (15 works), and fewer numbers drawn from hymns, responsories, and short scriptural passages. The Siren’s emphasis on Canticles texts is mainly missing here: Giovanni Priuli’s Tota pulchra es (no. 17), drawn from the fourth chapter of the Song of Solomon, is the lone exception.

6.9 The Philomela contains precisely the same number of two-voice works as the Siren (27), but significantly expands the number of quartets (22), which slightly favor CATB and CCBB combinations. As in the former volume the cantus pair dominates both in the two-voice works and those for three voices in which the bass remains closely tied to the continuo. The Philomela lacks, however, the cantus trios that formed a distinctive subgroup within the Siren, with the single exception of Christoph Sätzl’s three-cantus-and-bass setting of Laudemus Dominum (no. 84). There are no true monodies here, but the handful of motets scored for cantus and bass show occasional flashes of monodic virtuosity. Particularly striking in this regard is Johannes Sagittarius’ lengthy motet Pater peccavi (no. 12), a setting of a Lenten responsory whose text is loosely based on the parable of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15 (Example 9). The respond fills the first 18 measures, in which we hear a lengthy and plaintive monodic statement for high cantus (G2 clef). The verse “Quanti mercenarii” begins in m. 19 with an extended bass solo, the crowd of the father’s hired servants painted with luxuriant melismas. The son’s resolution “Surgam, et ibo ad patrem meum, et dicam ei” sees the two voices joined together, as the extravagant runs of the bass for “surgam” are answered by the cantus (mm. 39–44). The return of the respond (m. 51ff.) features a shift to triple meter with alternating homophony and imitation, and concludes in the final bars with more extravagant passaggi.⁷⁴

6.10 To characterize the prevailing style of the motets in the Philomela it is perhaps best to begin with Victorinus himself, who accounts for the greatest number. His Ab initio et ante saecula (no. 2) is representative of his approach to the high cantus duet (Example 10): he opens with a restrained point of imitation—motivically referencing Finetti’s setting of the same text in the Siren—followed by more rhythmically active dialogue, and finally long chains of illustrative passaggi for “non desinam.” The G cadence at m. 30 leads to a near exact repetition of the preceding twenty measures, now with the two cantus parts exchanged. All of this follows from the earlier examples of Agazzari and Cifra, but in his motets for three and four voices Victorinus takes a somewhat different approach, largely abandoning the idea of imitative openings in favor of syllabic homophony, and turning more often to triple-meter excursions. His setting of verses from Psalm 80 (Vulgate), Exultate Deo (no. 35) shifts rapidly between duple and triple meter, indulges in occasional word painting (“tympanum,” mm. 15–7), and, like his closely related Cantemus Deo nostro (no. 31), inserts generic textual placeholders that can be adapted for any particular sanctoral feast (mm. 24–5) (Example 11).⁷⁵ Other works by Victorinus in the Philomela are aphoristic settings of hymnic “praise” texts in triple-meter homophony, and can only with difficulty be classified as vocal concertos (Jesu mi bone sentiam, no. 83; Puer natus, no. 89).

6.11 Closer to the volume’s stylistic center of gravity is the motet Emitte spiritum tuum (no. 37) for two cantus and bass by Ferdinand II di Lasso, Bavarian court Kapellmeister at the time of the Philomela’s appearance (Example 12). Lasso’s setting of this Pentecost-related text falls into a responsory-like form, except that the music for the second main section, “Spiritus Sancti,” is repeated beginning in m. 30, now with the two cantus parts exchanged. The bass voice is a modestly decorated version of the continuo line and does not obscure the piece’s character as, fundamentally, a cantus duet. The customary initial point of imitation leads to a full cadence at m. 7, and thereafter rhythmic activity increases markedly, particularly for the “alleluia” passaggi that conclude the respond. The verse “Spiritus Sancti” opens with sober imitation, but the “alleluia” passages closing the verse and repetendum provide modernistic contrast.

6.12 A more substantial composition may be seen in Rudolph di Lasso’s setting for four voices of Salve Regina (no. 99), the last vocal work in the Philomela and one that shows a pleasing balance of traditional and modern elements (Example 13). Like nearly all of the Marian antiphon settings in the volume, the chant incipit figures prominently in the opening bars: the characteristic A–G–A–D motive is presented in the bass initially, to which the tenor responds with the descending fourth figure from “Regina” in the chant (mm. 2–4); other voices weave rapid vocal scales around this framework. Lasso presents a constantly shifting palette of textures, ranging from relatively sober counterpoint to brief monodic outbursts in the cantus (“Vita, dulcedo,” mm. 6–7; “nobis post hoc exsilium,” mm. 35–7). The affective “Ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes” receives vivid harmonic coloring (note the jarring transition from A major to B major in m. 17) and suspension patterns, leading to the textural descent toward a Phrygian cadence on E in m. 23 (“in hoc lachrymarum valle”). “O dulcis Virgo Maria,” by contrast, receives an extended homophonic triple-meter peroration, a favorite concluding device in this repertory.

7. Conclusion

7.1 The question of how far these anthologies penetrated in Germany is a difficult one to answer, given the relative paucity of surviving inventories. Axel Beer notes that anthologies by Victorinus were held at the Jesuit seminarium at Molsheim in Alsace (1614–1625 inventory) and at the provostry of Ellwangen (1643 inventory).⁷⁶ However, a 1651 inventory of the episcopal library of Freising, only a short distance from Munich, includes Donfrid’s anthologies of sacred concertos but only Victorinus’s Thesaurus litaniarum, not his Siren nor Philomela.⁷⁷ A survey of catalogues from the great book fairs of Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig reveals that all three anthologies were offered for sale shortly after their publication, with the single exception of the original 1616 edition of the Siren coelestis, which is entirely absent. The 1622 second edition, however, was offered in Leipzig in 1622 and in Frankfurt am Main for four consecutive years between 1622 and 1626.⁷⁸ Victorinus’s two motet anthologies are absent from the stock catalogues of booksellers Georg Willer and Kaspar Flurschütz in Augsburg, although in 1620 the latter advertised the editor’s litany anthology of 1596.⁷⁹ It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from this evidence, but it is indisputable that the Siren coelestis, at least, served as a critical building block for Donfrid’s much larger anthologies of Latin vocal concertos.

7.2 From a stylistic point of view, the pendants of the Siren coelestis and Philomela coelestis show how dramatically the contours of sacred music in south-central Europe had evolved in the space of eight short years. By 1616 Victorinus, presumably with the aid of his Jesuit employers, had amassed a large collection of music in the new style that had yet to penetrate the German market in any significant way. By 1624 Victorinus was in a position to showcase the contributions of local and regional composers in the new style, now emphasizing its utility for the divine office as well as for devotion. He was not content, however, merely to feature northern composers whose motets already circulated widely in individual prints. True, more prolific figures like Aichinger and Rudolph di Lasso are represented here, but the bulk of the Philomela is given over to relatively obscure men whose works were otherwise unavailable.⁸⁰ The Philomela, then, self-consciously portrays a novel landscape, but one intently focused on the local context. Victorinus perhaps felt a special sense of pride in highlighting a stylistic shift that his own anthologies helped to bring about.

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