D'amor languire, ballata a due voci
A gorgeous, stirring work from 1405, reconstructed by MIT musicologist Michael Cuthbert; composed by by Antonio Zachara da Teramo; and performed by Ensemble Micrologus.
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Antonio da Teramo, called Zachara (“shorty”), was one of the most innovative and influential composers in Europe around the year 1400. He invented a form later called the “parody mass,” where parts of a polyphonic mass would be based on sections from a pre-existing secular song by the same composer. One of his first parody mass movements, the Credo Scabioso, was long thought to have been based on a lost song which was only discovered in the early 1990s in two separate copies.
Both copies of the song are incomplete and heavily damaged. Cuthbert reconstructed as much of the song as possible and filled in the missing sections with music extracted from the Credo (ironically reversing Zachara’s process) and with his own music in Zachara’s style. The completion was premiered by the Ensemble Micrologus in Zachara’s home town of Teramo in 2002 and this recording was released in 2008.
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