(Fr.).
A poem lamenting someone’s death, and by extension, any musical setting of it. However, the term is now normally confined to late medieval and early Renaissance compositions inspired by a composer’s death. The earliest is the only surviving composition by F. Andrieu, a setting of Eustache Deschamps’ double ballade Armes, amours/O flour de flours commemorating Machaut’s death.
Many déplorations centre on Ockeghem and Josquin. Ockeghem lamented Binchois’ death in Mort, tu as navré (with Miserere in the tenor) and in his turn inspired various laments, notably the long poem by Guillaume Crétin, Déploration sur le trépas de Jean Ockeghem, which names many musicians and reproaches the poet Jean Molinet for not yet having lamented Ockeghem, since (in Crétin’s phrase, which sums up the emotional impetus behind all such works) ‘the loss is great, and worthy of being recorded’. Erasmus’s Latin verse Ergone conticuit (set by Johannes Lupi) laments Ockeghem’s death, as do Molinet’s two replies to Crétin’s rebuke, Qui dulces modulando (apparently not set to music) and Nymphes des bois. Josquin’s setting of the latter text (with Requiem aeternam in the tenor) appears both in the Medici Codex and in Susato’s Le septiesme livre … avecq troix epitaphes dudict Josquin (RISM 154515) without clefs and entirely in black notation in all voices. The unusual appearance of this funereal eye music justifies Burney’s pride at scoring it for his General History. Two later texts were applied to the same music: one, in Latin, laments the death of Josquin himself; the other, in French, appears to be a humorous lament at Brumel’s departure from the Savoy chapel in 1502.
Despite its late date, Susato’s volume is a memorial to Josquin, closing with three laments for him: Jheronimus Vinders’s O mors inevitabilis (with Requiem aeternam in the tenor) and Musae Jovis, set in full by Gombert and in part by Benedictus Appenzeller. Gombert’s magnificent setting continues the tradition of an independent religious text in the tenor which incorporates the Sarum melody Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis dolores inferni and is isorhythmic. Regnart’s Defunctorum charitates, commemorating Jacobus Vaet, is also noteworthy. Byrd’s elegy for Tallis, the consort song Ye sacred muses, and Andrea Gabrieli’s greghesca for Willaert, Sassi palae, Sabbion, del Adrian lio (RISM 156416), are parallel products.
The texts of several déplorations refer to Parnassus, asking the Muses or Apollo to welcome the dead; this does not prevent the inclusion of traditional Christian prayers for the soul. The music is commonly in the Phrygian mode, traditionally associated with mourning. The word déploration was rarely used as a title; of the four laments in Susato’s Le septiesme livre, the seven voice-parts are variously marked déploration, epitaphium, monodia, lamentatio or naenia.
See also Apothéose; Dump; Elegy; Tombeau.
C. van den Borren: ‘Esquisse d’une histoire des “tombeaux” musicaux’, SMw, xxv (1962), 56–67
F.A. Rubin: ‘Car Atropos’: a Study of the Renaissance Déploration (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1976)
DAVITT MORONEY