El Cancionero de Uppsala

Abstract

When the anonymous volume entitled Villancicos de diversos autores, a dos, y a tres, y a quatro, y a cinco bozes came off the press in 1556, it was unlikely that Venetian primer Girolamo Scotto regarded it as being of greater or lesser significance than any other of the hundreds of music volumes he had published. The particular renown that now surrounds this Italian print of Spanish vernacular music is more to do with the survival of so few other sources of sixteenth-century Spanish secular polyphony. No-one knows how many copies of this book of villancicos may have been printed but the fact is that, today, only one copy appears to have survived. Its importance was immediately understood by Spanish diplomat and musicologist Rafael Mitjana when he uncovered it almost exactly a century ago in the library of the University of Uppsala and, in baptizing it the Cancionero de Uppsala he unwittingly bestowed upon it a status more commonly associated with unique manuscript incunabula than with a humble and unassuming print. This myth is now perpetuated further into the future through the title of this new edition, due both to its common scholarly currency and the politics of regional identity in contemporary Spain. Published by the regional government of Valencia, it could equally have been named according to its alternative nickname, the Cancionero del Duque de Calabria, that refers to the provenance of this collection of Villancicos by diverse authors' at the court of the last exiled Aragonese rulers of southern Italy in Valencia. Titles aside, the collection is special in a number of ways. Above all, it is one of the very few mid-sixteenth century sources of secular polyphony to survive in Spain. As such, it must inevitably be seen in a historical context that identifies it closely with other sources such as the Cancionero de Medinaceli or Juan Vátzquez's Recopilación de sonetos y villancicos (1560), and not just simply along a regional Aragonese continuum, even if that does attempt to align it with such important manuscripts as Montecassino 871 and the Cancionero de Palacio that admittedly share textual concordances, but that were both compiled some half century earlier.