Melodien aus mittelalterlichen Horaz-Handschriften: Edition und Interpretation der Quellen (review)

With this volume, Silvia Wälli has made a splendid contribution to a distinguished series. Her subject, the melodies to which Horace's poetry was set in the Middle Ages, is fascinating, the treatment thorough. She has collected every known manuscript that includes music, however fragmentary, of any portion of Horace's oeuvre. Each page of every manuscript is represented by a full-page photograph, most of which are supplemented by a close-up of the segment of the page that contains the music. She then judiciously transcribes each passage of music: melodies in unpitched notation receive diplomatic transcriptions (i.e. the notational symbols are reproduced without interpretation), and those whose pitches can be determined appear in modern notation. To these materials is prefaced a synoptic list of the contents of each manuscript, with the portions that contain music printed in bold and the specific lines of poetry set to music identified in a box. The section on each manuscript ends with a brief commentary on the music and notation.

Among these documents are some remarkable witnesses of the Horatian tradition. Four of the oldest and most important manuscripts in the Horatian corpus contain music added in the space between the lines of the main text: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 7900A (Wälli's siglum PA 7900A); Munich, Bäyerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 14685 (MÜ 14685); Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reg. lat. 1703 (VAT 1703); and PA 7972. A fifth manuscript of similar importance to the literary tradition, Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS B. P. L. 28 (LEID 28), presents a noted text from the Carmina (3. 13. 1–4) in the margin of this source's text of the Sermones.

These five represent both principal groups of Horatian witnesses, as defined by Friedrich Klingner (editor of Q. Horatius Flaccus: Opera (3rd edn., Leipzig, 1959)), each thought to have derived independently from ancient exemplars. These groups are not considered to be completely unrelated (R. J. Tarrant, 'Horace', in L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 182–6), but have been accepted, with some reservations, by both István Borzsák and D. R. Shackleton Bailey in their competing Teubner editions (Borzsák: Q. Horati Flacci Opera (Leipzig, 1984); Shackleton Bailey: Q. Horati Flacci Opera (Stuttgart, 1985)).

Alongside these important witnesses, I would single out three other manuscripts for the exceptional nature of the musical evidence they transmit. The text of Carmina 4. 11 in Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l'école de Médecine, MS H. 425 (MO 425), alone among the manuscripts surveyed for this volume, is formatted to accept the inscription of the musical setting for the complete poem (pp. 156–9). The poetic text is written on alternate rules of the page, leaving each intermediate rule to serve as a one-line stave for the music. The notation is Aquitanian, and music manuscripts from this region use this format c.1050–1150. Wälli identifies the melody as that of the hymn Ut queant laxis (pp. 90–4, 283–7, 291–3).

Two other manuscripts preserve a significant quantity of melodies. Codex PA 7979 presents portions of nine poems from Carmina 1 and 3 written with music in the bottom margins (pp. 174–90), while St Petersburg, Gosudarstvennaja Publichnaja Bibliotheka, MS Class. Lat. 8 v 4 (PET 4) contains music for fifteen poems from Carmina 1, 3, and 4, and for Epodus 1 (pp. 206–38) integrated into the main text. In both cases, the scribes appear to be providing neumations for a variety of metres found in the Carmina. The latter, PET 4, for example, presents melodies for portions of the first eleven poems in Carmina 1, which exemplify the ten strophic forms used in the book (pp. 52–3). Similarly, PA 7979 includes examples from the same book that illustrate four of the five strophic...