From Discussions VOL. 5 NO. 2 Four Lines to Immortality: Dido's Renaissance Through Josquin des Prez
It is useful to compare several translations in order to understand these lines fully. John Dryden's translation, given above, attempts to make English poetry of the Latin text. Dryden utilizes rhyme and iambic pentameter in his translation, which indicates that he was not simply aiming to translate the Latin text for his readers. He attempts to create English poetry as rich and meaningful as the original Latin. His ability to recast the original text demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the poetry, and his version is to be applauded for its individual artistic endeavor.
A second translation by Theodore Williams is a more literal treatment, though the language is still lofty.
Sweet relics! Ever dear when Fate and Heaven upon me smiled, receive my parting breath, and from my woe set free! My life is done. I have accomplished what my lot allowed; and now my spirit to the world of death in royal honor goes (Trans. Williams, lines 651-654).
This translation follows the word order as it appears in the Latin. Even though the English seems to be slightly out of place, this translation demonstrates that Virgil writes carefully to the meter, arranging the words so that they fit the dactylic hexameter8 scheme used in all Roman epic poetry. A more literal translation might have read: "and now in royal honor, my spirit goes to the world of death."
Nigel Coulton's translation is particularly helpful in analyzing musical examples of the Dulces Exuviae. His translation is given as part of in the introduction to an edition of five Virgil motet settings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This translation utilizes plain language and follows the Latin progression directly:
What he has left behind, sweet to me while fate and god allowed, take this my life and release me from these my woes. I have lived a life and completed the journey that fate gave me, and now my proud spirit will go beneath the earth (Trans. Coulton, lines 651-654).
Some of the most important features of these four lines are the in nature of Dido's words. Her tone is calm for a woman about to impale herself on her former lover's sword. Regardless of how she fell in love with Aeneas, Dido still dies a queen. She realizes that her destiny is not her own, but dominated by the whims of Fate as stated in the line that reads "uixi et quem dederat cursum Fortuna peregi."
Oliver Strunk, a founding member of the American Musicological Society who is a prominent editor and writer for the society's journal, suggests that this section lends itself to a motet setting because the four lines are complete in themselves. Longer passages would have been far more cumbersome to set to music (Strunk, 488). The composer's poetic association of a tragic queen going solemnly to her death is a poignant text that is easy to manipulate with musical devices for heightened emotional impact. This sentiment is echoed by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, a prominent Renaissance scholar, as well: "Dido's lament seems to draw the composers in because her final words are not simply broken and lovestruck, but full of pride and a resignation to fate." (Holford-Strevens, 371).
The University of Florida's motet database lists 26 motets from the late 14th through the 15th and 16th centuries (Thomas).9 Composers from Josquin des Prez to Orlando di Lasso are represented. In nearly all of the examples, the motets consist of the four lines beginning with "dulces exuviae." Only Orlando di Lasso in his 1570 setting extends the text to include more of the speech (Guentner, 66). The Josquin setting uses lines 651-654; Lasso continues on to line 660. The resulting composition is far longer than any of the other examples, but it is also one of the last incarnations of the Dulces exuviae motet.
Josquin's setting of the Dulces exuviae is attributed to the composer in a manuscript from Brussels/Mechelen dated between 1516-1522 (Thomas). This makes Josquin's one of the earliest extant settings of the text. Josquin's work is highly attentive to the meaning of the Latin, and his overwhelming emphasis seems to be the repetition of important words and phrases and imitative gestures between parts. The motet does not give rhythmic emphasis to support the dactylic hexameter of the original poetry (Guentner, 64). However, the piece's structure is carefully organized by the Latin text; each major cadence10 occurs at the end of a poetic line, and each new point of imitation occurs at the beginning of a poetic line. Josquin's compositional style in this motet is centered around the clarity and meaning of the text rather than complicated melodic innovations.
As the text is so short, Josquin divides many of the poetic lines into two units. The effect of this division is maintained clarity of text declamation in spite of the imitative horizontal motion. However, Josquin reserves prominent cadences (with authentic, or 5-1 bass motion) for the true ends of poetic lines. The strongest cadences occur at m.14 ("sinebat," the end of the first poetic line), m.22 ("curis," the end of line 2), m.33 (on "peregi," the end of line 3), and the final, drawn-out cadence in the last measure. The Dorian cadence at m.14 comes to a complete stop before moving to "accipite hanc" in m.15. The large cadence in m.22 (on "curis," also in Dorian) has a similar sensation of coming to a complete rest before continuing. While there are passing notes in the alto part, they come to rest in m.23 before the half note motion on "vixi et quem."
One of the most striking cadences occurs at the end of the third line, in measure thirty three, on the words "magna mei." The soprano line has an ascending motion to the cadence which seems to highlight Dido's pride. The words "magna mei," which refer to her great name, and the ascending music seems to give the word a majestic emphasis. The bass also moves in a 2-1 motion instead of the stronger 5-1. However, this cadence occurs in the middle of a poetic line, and so the 2-1 motion is likely intentional. The beginning of the piece has a few smaller cadential gestures at the midpoints of lines, such as m. 10 (in the middle of "dum fata") and m.12 (in the middle of "deusque"), but these gestures are not as strong as the other cadences because one of the voices immediately moves to the next note or word of text.Continued on Next Page »
Crane, Gregory R. (ed.) The Perseus Project, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, February, 2008.
Dryden, John, translated. The Aeneid. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, February, 2008.
Edgeworth, R.J. "The Death of Dido," The Classical Journal, 72.2 (Dec. 1976-Jan 1970): 129-133.
Guentner, Francis J. "Dulces exuviae in Sixteenth Century Music," The Classical Journal, 68.1 (Oct.-Nov., 1972): 62-67.
Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. "'Her Eyes Became Two Spouts': Classical Antecedents of Renaissance Laments," Early Music 27.3 , Laments (August 1999): 379-393.
Hollander, Robert. Expanded version of the article "Virgil." Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 2000.
Huelgas Ensemble dir. Paul van Nevel. Josquin des Prez. "Dulces Exuviae." Le Chant de Virgile. Harmonia Mundi Fr., 2001.
Hunter, James m. "Ovid Heroides VII" An Ongoing Translation of Ovid's Heroides. 31 October 2008.
MacKail, J.W. (translated) The Eclogues of Vergil. http://www.sacredtexts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/index.htm, March, 2008. "Motet." The Harvard Dictionary of Music. Ed. Don Michael Randel. 4th ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
MOTET online database. Dr. Jennifer Thomas. Revised May 10th, 2008. Univeristy of Florida. May 18th, 2008. http:// www.arts.ufl.edu/motet/default.asp
"Motet." The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. 16 Mar. 2009 .
Ovid. "Epistulae Heroidum: VII Dido Aeneae." The Latin Library. Posted by David J. Califf from an original edition. 31 October 2008.
Schmalfeldt, Janet. "In Search of Dido," The Journal of Musicology, 18.4 (Autumn 2001): 584-615. Seay, Albert. "Classical Metrics and Medieval Music," The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 23.2 (June 1969): 59-67.
Strunk, W. Oliver. "Virgil in Music," The Musical Quarterly, 16.4 (October 1930): 482-497.
Thomas, Jennifer. "Motet Online Database." Dulces Exuviae. 10 May 2008. University of Florida. 2 November 2008.
Thompson, James Westfall. "Vergil in Mediaeval Culture," The American Journal of Theology, 10.4 (October 1906): 648662.
Townend, G.B. "Changing Views of Virgil's Greatness," The Classical Journal, 56.2 (November 1960): 67-77. Williams, Theodore C, translated. The Aeneid. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, February 2008. Wills, Garry, trans. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2006.
Endnotes
- Virgil, Aeneid, 4:651-654, trans. John Dryden. For translations of the passages immediately surrounding the dulces exuviae text, see Appendix One.
- A form of short unaccompanied choral composition...in use from 13th to early 16th cents. In 13th, 14th, and 15th cents. the motet was exclusively sacred and was based on a pre-existing melody and set of words to which other melodies and words were added in counterpoint. Oxford.
- See appendix two for a listing of motet settings of the Dulces exuviae
- Edgeworth quotes directly from Horace White's eloquent translation of Appian.: Appian VIII.xix. 13 1 , trans. Horace White, I (London 1912 [Loeb Classical Library]) 635-637
- Edgeworth draws a symbolic connection between the fiery deaths of the two queens: "The detail of the blazing pyre, which seemed to serve no purpose in the poem, has been added in order to suggest the blazing fall of Carthage."
- See Appendix Four for a full translation of Heroides VII by James m. Hunter.
- Phrygia was a kingdom in ancient Anatolia, and is used as a descriptive epithet for Aeneas.
- Dactylic hexameter is a metrical scheme utilized in Greek and Roman epic poetry. It consists of lines with six metrical feet broken up into dactyls (a long syllable followed by either another long syllable or two short ones).
- See appendix two for a listing of all the occurrences of the Dulces Exuviae text.
- Any melodic or harmonic progression which has come to possess a conventional association with the ending of a comp., a section, or a phrase. Oxford.
- Included as Appendix Three. All references to measure numbers are to this edition.
- Specifically in Mabriano de Orto and an Anonymous setting from the Bernard Thomas edition
- A group of more than five or six notes sung to a single syllable. Oxford.
- Simultaneously sounding musical lines according to a system of rules. Oxford.
- An Eclogue is a lyrical poetic form which typically contains pastoral imagery.
- When Constantine the Great in 324 A.D. publicly declared the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the Empire, he quoted the Fourth Eclogue as an important testimony to the recognition of the new faith by Rome's greatest poet. This gave Virgil a posthumous reputation as a sort of potential Christian before his time, to be classed in a way with the great Hebrew prophets, though somehow possessing a fuller understanding of the Christian spirit than any of them. Townend, 71,
- See Appendix Three for a full translation of the Eclogue by J.W. MacHail
- Schmalfeldt led the way to the original quotation: Perhaps the most notable example is to be found in the Confessions of St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.), where the early Church father looks back on his school days in Carthage and reproaches himself for having wept then over the death of Virgil's Dido when he should have been weeping over his own youthful alienation from God.
- Or, in Schmalfeldt's opinion on page 588, Dido is not a mirror but a foil for Aeneas. She gives a chart that highlights the pair's opposition. For example, whereas Aeneas is "driven by duty and honor-as public, supra-personal virtues," Dido is "driven by love-a private, individual emotion, thus, potentially subversive and socially disruptive." Or, Aeneas is "rational and strives for order" while Dido "becomes irrational and creates chaos."
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