Lamento Di Tristano: A Song History

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"Lamento di Tristano" (Tristan's Lament) is preserved, without a composer's name, in the Italian codex the British Library catalogues as Additional MS 29987, and the DIAMM database classes it as a dance.[1] DIAMM ranks that codex among the chief sources of fourteenth-century Italian (Trecento) music, yet its own record does not settle when or where it was made: the entry is headed fourteenth century, while the scholars it cites date the copying to the early fifteenth century (Pirrotta to 1425), and von Fischer's proposal of Perugia or southern Tuscany stands beside Reaney's refusal to exclude Florence.[2] A Medici coat of arms marks its opening leaves; by 1670 it was the property of Carlo di Tommaso Strozzi, who added an index of names, and the British Museum acquired it in 1876.[3][2]

Round carved ivory showing a man and a woman seated under a canopy playing chess

Mirror Case with a Couple Playing Chess, ivory, France, 1325–50. A fourteenth-century French ivory of a courting couple, from the century of the Lamento; it has no connection to the music.

The piece stands in the manuscript beside a group of textless pieces with names such as "Saltarello," "Trotto" and "La Manfredina," and like the Manfredina it is written as a pair, the lament followed by a section headed "La Rotta."[3][1] Sources differ on what these pieces were for: the British Library's catalogue entry describes the group as apparently meant for organ, while DIAMM lists it as a dance.[3][1] Timothy McGee took the latter view in Medieval Instrumental Dances (Indiana University Press), which edits it as one of 47 certain or probable instrumental dances, all older than about 1420.[4]

It is still performed: the ensemble ApotropaïK played it with its rotta on 12 July 2023 at All Saints' Church, North Street, in a York Early Music Festival programme of medieval music for Tristan and Yseult.[5] Deborah Hamouris arranges it in DAC tuning for Indian Summer, subtitled Music & Reflections, a mountain dulcimer collection of ten originals alongside duets, a trio and songs, where it is listed next to a separate "La Rotta" and where her short essays touch on practising, composing and being a late bloomer.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Lamento Di Tristano"

Sources

  1. DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music): "Lamento di Tristano - La rotta".
  2. DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music): "GB-Lbl Add. MS 29987".
  3. British Library: "Add MS 29987: Madrigals, ballads, and motets by Italian composers".
  4. Indiana University Press: "Medieval Instrumental Dances" (Timothy J. McGee).
  5. National Centre for Early Music: "ApotropaïK: The harp, the philter and the sword" (York Early Music Festival programme, 12 July 2023).
  6. Deborah Hamouris: "Indian Summer".
  7. Image: Mirror Case with a Couple Playing Chess, ivory, France, 1325–50. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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