Music of Cyprus, 1413-1422 (Ensemble Project Ars Nova)

"THE ISLAND OF ST. HYLARION"

The reign of King Janus (1398-1432) marked a surge in the musical life of Cyprus. This musical flowering occurred particularly after the arrival in 1411 of his second wife, Charlotte de Bourbon (d. 1422), and is the repertory that is preserved in the Turin manuscript. Charlotte came with a number of French clerks and musicians, among them a Gillet Veliout who is most likely the composer Gillet Velut, a singer known to have been at Cambrai in 1409 and whose music survives in the Oxford chansonnier. Even at the end of Janus's reign we find French singers at court, such as the peripatetic Jean Dupassage, who previously served the King of France, the Duke of Burgundy, Pope Martin V, and eventually returned to Burgundy. Clearly Cyprus was an artistically sophisticated cosmopolitan place.

Detail of the Franco-Cypriot musical codex (dated to around 1413) that Anne of Lusignan took with her
to Savoy from Cyprus in 1434, when she was married to the Duke of Savoy Louis II.

The Cyprus codex begins with a fascicle of plainsong, including several mass cycles as well as offices for St. Hylarion and St. Anne, both of whom are particularly venerated in Cyprus. Then follow a series of polyphonic glorias and credos, several of which are arranged in pairs, a cantus firmus mass lacking the agnus dei (added by a later scribe), 41 isorhythmic motets, 102 ballades, 43 virelais, and 21 rondeaux. The texts of the secular works and eight of the motets are French and reveal familiarity with the poetry of Machaut and his contemporaries.

UNIQUE

The rest of the music uses Latin texts, including a thinly veiled imitation of a motet text by Philippe de Vitry. All the works are anonymous and unique to this codex which stands as one of the few medieval manuscripts that solely represents the musical output of a single court and chapel. In spite of the uniqueness of this repertory it has been neglected by scholars and performers. It is seldom glamorous to deal with anonymous works, and yet the artists responsible for this music were people of uncommon imagination and power. One among them produced a cycle of motets related to the great "O" antiphons of the week before Christmas ending with the vigil motet, "O sacra virgo virginum/Tu nati nata suscipe", and the Christmas motet, "Hodie Puer nascitur/Homo mortalis firmiter". This cycle is clearly a single unit and rivals in scope anything being composed in Europe at the time.

The manuscript probably came to ltaly in 1434 with Anne of Lusignan, Janus's daughter, who married Louis of Savoy. The feast at her arrival was the occasion when Du Fay, Binchois, the blind fiddlers of the Duke of Burgundy and the poet Martin Le Franc, met. This event was commemorated in Le Franc's well known poem "Le Champion des dames" and contains the miniature of Du Fay and Binchois that adorns the beginning of the passage where he recounts their meeting. The manuscript became part of the Royal and later the National Library in Turin, but came close to perishing in a fire at the library in 1904. As a consequence, it lost the front end papers and many of its leaves are badly damaged at the edges. The front leaves, however, had been transcribed by a historian in the 19th century and were important because they transmitted a bull of Antipope John XXIII dated 23 November 1413, allowing King Janus to have composed a special office in honor of St. Hylarion. This gives us a secure historical date for the copying of the manuscript, for it is the very office that opens the manuscript.