L'homme armé

L'homme armé in the Mellon Chansonnier , around 1470

L'homme armé ( French: the man in arms ) is a French chanson that was written in the first half of the 15th century at the latest. In the traditional repertoire of Renaissance music, it isthe melody that has most often served as a cantus firmus in polyphonic compositions, especially mass settings .

The song does not follow a traditional ballad or virelai form. The text from the time of the Hundred Years War and the conquest of Constantinople is about the horror of an "armed man" and a call for general armament. The interpretation is controversial.

Text and melody

The presumably original form in Mixolydian key (without preliminary drawing):

«L'homme armé doibt on doubter. On a fait partout crier Que chascun se viengne poor D'un haubregon de fer. L'homme armé doibt on doubter. » - Original text

“One must fear the man in arms. Everywhere it was proclaimed that everyone should arm themselves with iron chain mail. You have to fear the man in arms. " - German translation

Lore

L'homme armé in a Doric version

The chanson has come down to us in a manuscript with six anonymous mass settings that was kept in the National Library of Naples and was made in the late 15th century. It appears there with the presumably original text given above in the tenor of the sixth mass. The earliest arrangements of the melody have the finalis G and no preliminary drawing; the original form would probably have been in the Mixolydian mode. Only later compositions provide the melody with a general preliminary drawing of a ♭ , so that a transposed Doric is created.

Work and impact history

In the Franco-Flemish vocal music , L'homme armé achieved its greatest fame in art music. Johannes Japart composed an early polyphonic chanson arrangement . After 1450 the melody was used as a secular cantus firmus in an almost unmanageable number of parody masses and other vocal works by the leading contemporary composers; it became a sign of belonging to the Franco-Flemish school. The song went out of fashion at the beginning of the 16th century, but continued to appear as a theme until the middle of the 17th century.

Masses , which mostly had a rhythmically simple and undecorated cantus firmus part, were created by numerous composers after their first proven use in Guillaume Du Fay's four-part tenor mass, which was also based on a secular melody for the first time. Traditional works come from Antoine Brumel , Johannes Ockeghem , Josquin Desprez , Guillaume Faugues , Antoine Busnoys , Pierre de la Rue , Matthaeus Pipelare , Pierre Mouton , Jacob Obrecht , Loyset Compère , Johannes Tinctoris , Costanzo Festa and Francisco Guerrero , in the later phase also by Ludwig Senfl . Two masses, the Missa L'homme armé sexti toni and the Missa L'homme armé super voces musicales , were written by Josquin Desprez. Outside the Franco-Flemish circle, Robert Carver , Cristóbal de Morales and Francisco Guerriero also took up the subject.

The last significant measuring works on the threshold of baroque music were the five-part (1570) and four-part setting (1582) by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Giacomo Carissimi's 12-part Missa l'Homme armé, which was completed around 1640 . The Council of Trent put an end to the practice; the Church had long disapproved of the use of secular cantus firmi.

In later times the song appeared occasionally as a musical theme , u. a. in Johann Nepomuk David's organ work Fantasia super L'homme armé (1930), in Peter Maxwell Davies ' L'Homme Armé (1968), in Helmut Eder's Concerto op.50 L'homme armé for organ and orchestra and in Karl Jenkins ' The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace (2000). Gianluigi Trovesi has combined various older and his own compositions on this theme into a suite and interpreted them in a jazz or crossover context on his albums Les hommes armés (1996) and Around Small Fairy Tales (1998) .

literature

• Walter Haaß: Studies on the "L'homme armé" masses of the 15th and 16th centuries . Regensburg: Bosse 1984 (Cologne contributions to music research 136).
• Clytus Gottwald : Palestrina: "L'homme armé" . In: Heinz-Klaus Metzger / Rainer Riehn: Palestrina. Between disassembly and rescue . Music concepts vol. 86. Munich: edition text + kritik 1994. ISBN 3-88377-482-0 , pp. 43–59

Web links

Commons : L'homme armé  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gottwald p. 45
2. ↑ cf. Frank Herzberg, Performance review of Studiosi Cantandi Berlin
3. ↑ Gottwald p. 56
4. ↑ ^{a b} Gottwald p. 43
5. ^ Heinrich Husmann :  Cantus firmus. In: Friedrich Blume (Hrsg.): The music in past and present (MGG). First edition, Volume 2 (Boccherini - Da Ponte). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1952, DNB 550439609 , Sp. 784-800, here Sp. 791
6. ^ Walter Senn :  Mass. In: Friedrich Blume (Hrsg.): The music in past and present (MGG). First edition, Volume 9 (Mel - Onslow). Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1961, DNB 550439609 , Sp. 147–218, here Sp. 173