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The Lute in the
Netherlands in
the Seventeenth
Century
The Lute in
the Netherlands
in the Seventeenth
Century:
Proceedings of the International

Lute Symposium Utrecht,
30 August 2013
Edited by
Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford

and Matthew Spring
The Lute in the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century: Proceedings
of the International Lute Symposium Utrecht, 30 August 2013
Edited by Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford and Matthew Spring
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford, Matthew Spring

and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9075-8

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9075-5
Dedicated to the memory of Louis Peter Grijp
1954-2016
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction:
The Lute in the Netherlands in the 17th Century........................................ ix
JAN BURGERS, TIM CRAWFORD and MATTHEW SPRING
I. The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age:

The Social and Cultural Contexts
Psalms for the Lute in the Dutch Republic and Elsewhere .......................... 2
LOUIS PETER GRIJP †
Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Dutch Republic of the Early

17th Century: The Case of the Lutenists Joachim van den Hove
and Nicolas Vallet ..................................................................................... 39
SIMON GROOT
Leiden, an International Lute Centre in the Golden Age ........................... 53

JAN W.J. BURGERS
The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age:

What We Know and What We Play Today ............................................... 73
ANDREAS SCHLEGEL
II. Constantijn Huygens and the Lute
The Shepherd and his Lute: Some aspects of 17th Century Lute Practice
as Recorded in the Writings of Constantijn Huygens and His Circle ...... 104
ANTHONY BAILES
‘A goose among swans’: The Connections and Correspondence

between Jacques Gaultier and Constantijn Huygens ............................... 120
MATTHEW SPRING
Un Bon Nombre d’Illustres: Constantijn Huygens and the World

of the French Lute ................................................................................... 142
FRED JACOBS
viii Table of Contents
Constantijn Huygens’s Lost Instrumental Compositions:

Some Guesses about Their Style ............................................................. 162
JACQUES BOOGAART
III. Lute Sources from the Netherlands
Unknown Pieces for Lyra-viol in Joachim van den Hove’s Autograph

Manuscript: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz (D-B)
Mus. ms. autogr. Hove 1, 1615................................................................ 172
FRANÇOIS-PIERRE GOY
Adriaen Valerius’s Nederlandtsche Gedenck-clanck (1626):

The Songs and the Tablatures for Lute and Cittern ................................. 182
SIMON GROOT
Mr. Q is Mr. R: Johan van Reede, Lord of Renswoude (1593-1682) ...... 237
RUDOLF RASCH
Johannes Fresneau, a New ‘Dutch’ Lutenist

and a New Dutch Lute Manuscript .......................................................... 248
JAN W.J. BURGERS
‘Make long-forgotten musical heritage resound anew’:

The Ghent Lute Manuscripts ................................................................... 271
GREET SCHAMP
A Newly Discovered Dutch Lute Book: MS Enkhuizen 1667-1 ............. 301

JAN W.J. BURGERS, LOUIS PETER GRIJP † AND JOHN H. ROBINSON
INTRODUCTION
THE LUTE IN THE NETHERLANDS

IN THE 17TH CENTURY
JAN W.J. BURGERS, TIM CRAWFORD

AND MATTHEW SPRING
This book contains the proceedings of the International Lute Symposium

‘The Lute in the Golden Age’, held in Utrecht on Friday 30 August 2013.
It was part of an International Lute Festival organised by the Dutch Lute
Society in collaboration with the Utrecht Early Music Festival. This event
took place from 30 August to 1 September and comprised a host of lute-
related activities: concerts, masterclasses, workshops, a summer school,
lectures, and the presentation of three books and a double CD. Many of
these activities were related to the theme of the symposium: the lute in the
17th-century Netherlands. The same is true of the books and the CD,1 and
of some of the papers that were given at other venues: one by Greet
Schamp during the ‘Lute lectures’ on Saturday 31 August and another
delivered by Fred Jacobs on the same day in the summer school series of
the Early Music Festival. Both are included in the present volume. All the
authors have significantly expanded their papers into full-scale book
chapters. As the last part of the symposium was devoted to lute sources
from the Netherlands, two of the authors who had independently written
articles on that subject, François-Pierre Goy and Simon Groot, have
graciously agreed to contribute these to the present book; the description

1
Nicolas Vallet, Collected works for lute, facsimile edn. with an introduction by
Simon Groot, 3 vols. (Haarlem [2013]); Joachim van den Hove: Life and Work of a
Leiden Lutenist 1567-1620, ed. Jan W.J. Burgers, 2 vols. and CD ROM (Utrecht
2013; Muziek uit de Republiek, Speciale projecten); Jan W.J. Burgers, The Lute in
the Dutch Golden Age: Musical Culture in the Netherlands 1580-1670
(Amsterdam, 2013; Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age); Willem Mook,
‘Resveillez vous’: Nicolaes Vallet, Psalms and music for lute, double CD (Spaarne
Muziekdagen, 2013).
x Introduction
by Jan Burgers, Louis Grijp and John Robinson of a recently discovered

Dutch lute source has further been added. Finally, Simon Groot also
undertook to rework the talk on the subject of the entrepreneurship of the
Dutch lutenists Nicolas Vallet and Joachim van den Hove that he had
given at the presentation of the books and CD. With these additions to the
original programme of the symposium, the present book offers a broad
range of texts on its central theme: the lute in the 17th-century
Netherlands.
The choice and scope of this theme requires some elucidation. The
chronological terms ‘Golden Age’ and ‘17th century’, and the
topographical terms ‘Dutch’ and ‘the Netherlands’ used in the title of this
book and in the paragraph above have undergone changes in meaning over
time and require some historical contextualization.
The Low Countries, the region roughly corresponding with the present-
day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, consisted in medieval times
of a number of large and small principalities such as Holland, Brabant and
Flanders. Gradually these principalities came under the dominion of the
Burgundian-Habsburg House, and as a result the Seventeen Provinces of
the Netherlands, as the region now was commonly called, evolved in the
first half of the 16th century into an administrative and to some extent a
cultural entity. This growing unity was broken during the Dutch Revolt,
when from 1568 onward religious dissent on the part of a strong Protestant
minority led to open war. The situation was exacerbated by the widely felt
aversion for the Lord of the Netherlands, King Philip II of Spain, who
trampled over the old liberties of the lands and raised heavy taxes. At first,
most of the Seventeen Provinces joined the rebellion, but Spanish military
successes brought the south back into the royalist and Catholic camp.
From 1585 onward the northern seven provinces began to liberate
themselves from Spanish control and to form an independent state: the
Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. It is this state that evolved into
the present-day Kingdom of the Netherlands, and that is designated with
the adjective ‘Dutch’. The term ‘Holland’ indicates the western provinces
of the Republic, in the 17th century its richest and most important part
(colloquially the name is also used for the country as a whole, but this is
something best avoided). The term ‘the Netherlands’ in this historical
context designates the common entity of the northern and southern parts.
The Southern Netherlands (roughly present-day Belgium and
Luxembourg) remained under foreign rule: first by Spain then from 1598
under the Austrian Habsburgs. During the war the two parts of the old
Netherlands became increasingly estranged. After the Peace of Westphalia
The Lute in the Netherlands in the 17th Century xi
(1648) tensions subsided somewhat, but the two countries continued to

grow apart with an increased religious polarisation between the Calvinists
in the North and the Catholics in the South. The former rich cultural life of
the southern provinces, especially in the cities of Antwerp and Ghent,
never wholly recovered from the war, although in the 17th century the
Southern Netherlands returned to a period of relative prosperity, in which
musical life flourished in many churches and at the Brussels court of the
Archdukes.
It was in the north, however, that the hard-won independence stirred up
an unprecedented economic, scientific and cultural flowering. This cultural
blossoming lasted for the greater part of the 17th century and is generally
known as the ‘Golden Age’. It was restricted in the main to a relatively
small group of aristocrats and city burghers. The Dutch cities and towns,
Amsterdam in particular, grew wealthy and populous thanks to their
industries and thriving international trade. In part the money thus earned
was channelled into grand houses and the production of luxury goods such
as paintings, and into the pleasures of reading, feasting, music making and
dancing. This required architects to build the houses, painters to paint the
thousands of pictures that decorated the walls of the burghers, authors and
printers to meet the demands of the readers, and also musicians to teach
the young and to play at parties.
This brings us to the main theme of the symposium and the present
volume: the lute in the Dutch Golden Age. In the mind of today’s
international public the Golden Age is always strongly associated with its
painting and, to a lesser extent, its architecture; Rembrandt, Hals and
Vermeer are household names all over the world. For educated Dutchmen,
the period was also marked by its flowering of literature and poetry, with
well-known authors such as Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, Adriaen Bredero,
Constantijn Huygens and Joost van den Vondel. Yet of all the arts, Dutch
achievements in music during this time seem to have been almost
completely passed over. This is something of a mystery, as musical scenes
are depicted in hundreds of famous Dutch paintings of the period. Only in
recent decades have musicologists and musicians become aware of the
important, even all-pervasive role played by music in Dutch cultural life of
the 17th century. Wherever people were together in an informal setting,
they were apt to sing and play musical instruments; in this respect, the
paintings seem to be depictions of real life. Hundreds of songbooks were
printed, mostly just giving the lyrics as these were to be sung to popular
tunes everybody knew. We can deduce from the many instrument makers
mentioned in the administrative sources of the cities, and from the
xii Introduction
inventories of goods and chattels of the deceased and the bankrupt that
many people played a musical instrument.
In this period all over Europe the lute was one of the most important
musical instruments and it is reasonable to suppose that in the Netherlands
things were no different. Certainly Dutch paintings give ample support for
this assumption. Yet for the international lute community of modern times
the lute in the Netherlands remained something of a blind spot. Up until
the 1980s, while there was an awareness of the dozens of 16th-century
editions in the Southern Netherlands, first published by Petrus Phalesius in
Leuven, and culminating in the books by Emanuel Adriaenssen printed
later by the same firm in Antwerp, the general impression was that after
that not much of interest happened. That two Dutch lutenists from the
beginning of the 17th century, Joachim van den Hove and Nicolas Vallet,
had published seven lute books, and that a number of lute manuscripts, one
of which is the largest single such book in the world were of Dutch origin,
had received comparatively relatively little notice. Editions and studies of
Dutch lute music remained relatively rare, as were recordings of the
repertoire.
In recent decades this unfavourable situation has rapidly changed for
the better. From the second half of the 1980s onwards editions of Dutch
lute music began to appear, mostly in facsimile but also critical editions so
that today practically all the lute music of the Dutch Golden Age is
available for researchers and players. Among the landmark publications
are the complete works of Vallet and Van den Hove and the facsimile
edition of the Thysius lute book.2 These works now provide the materials
for a closer study of the lute, the lutenists and lute music in the Dutch
Golden Age, which is why the symposium of 2013 was dedicated to that
subject.
Like the symposium, this book is divided into three parts. The first, more
general section is devoted to the lute in its social and cultural contexts –

2
For Vallet see note 1; previously his publications were edited separately in 4
volumes (Utrecht, 1986-92). For Van den Hove see again note 1; facsimile
editions of his publications are also available: Florida 1601 (Utrecht, 2004);
Delitiae musicae 1612 (Stuttgart, 2002); Praeludia testudinis 1616 (Brussels,
1982). A facsimile edition of the Thysius lute book, Het Luitboek van Thysius /
The Thysius Lute Book, eds. J.W.J. Burgers, L. P. Grijp, J. H. Robinson, S. Groot,
3 vols. (Leiden and Utrecht, 2009). Facsimile editions of manuscripts written by
Van den Hove or closely related to him are the Herold lute book (München, 1991),
the Schele lute book (Glinde, 2004), and the Hove-1 lute book in Berlin (Glinde,
2006).
The Lute in the Netherlands in the 17th Century xiii
which is not to say that cultural elements are absent from the other parts.
The first chapter, by Louis Grijp, whose untimely death prevented him
from seeing this book in print, deals with a rather neglected aspect of lute
music, namely its religious repertoire, in this case the Calvinist psalms in
the Netherlands and elsewhere. There is a general awareness of the many
lute settings of religious music, from the earliest surviving pieces from
around 1500 up to the last ones from late in the 18th century, but to our
modern taste these works seem to have little if any appeal. This was of
course different in centuries past for men and women who were often
deeply or even passionately devout, especially for those living through
savage wars of religion. For lute composers and players before the modern
lute revival these settings would often have had a special meaning. It is
therefore fitting that a first step is taken to delve into this repertoire; one
that will highlight the connections between the lute and other vocal and
instrumental music, in which the religious works of course were often the
most important in a composer’s oeuvre.
In order to place the lute in its social context it is necessary to study
not just its music, but above all the archival sources that tell us about
lutenists of the past and the way they dealt with the world. This Simon
Groot has done in his chapter on the lives of Joachim van den Hove and
Nicolas Vallet. Groot shows that life was not easy for these professional
musicians, but that they managed to earn a decent living by giving lessons,
running dance schools (in Vallet’s case) and by playing at weddings,
banquets and other parties. Professional careers were sometimes derailed
through financial misjudgement or misfortune; Vallet and Van den Hove
both went bankrupt at one time or another, and Van den Hove even died in
poverty. We know of the existence of many lutenists in the larger Dutch
cities and towns, and we may assume that they were likewise able to carve
out a reasonable, if perhaps precarious existence from their profession.
In the next chapter, Jan Burgers explores the role of Leiden as a centre
of lute music in 17th-century Holland. Leiden was the second largest city
in the province. Here more professional lutenists (most of foreign descent),
are found than in all the other Dutch towns taken together, Amsterdam
included. The probable reason for this is the presence of a university
(founded in 1575), one which attracted students from all the Protestant
countries of Europe. This international population must have contributed a
good deal to the thriving lute culture found in Leiden.
Andreas Schlegel delves into the rich iconographical material of
paintings from the Republic and also from the Southern Netherlands. He
draws attention to specific problems not acknowledged before, such as the
constant copying of paintings; and considers what this practice means for
xiv Introduction
the accuracy of the depictions of lutes. Combining his iconographic

findings with the terminology of written lute sources, he tentatively
identifies new regional lute types in the early 17th century in the
Netherlands and in France.
The second part of the present volume is devoted to the fascinating person
of Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687). During the greater part of his life he
held high office serving three consecutive Princes of Orange. In this
capacity he played a major role in the politics and the administration of the
Republic. Huygens made a number of diplomatic journeys abroad,
especially to England and France, during which he met many men and
women of culture. He was a passionate lover of literature and music; and
until quite recently was remembered mainly as one of the leading Dutch
poets of the Golden Age. He was also a lifelong lover of music, playing
the lute and several other instruments and composing himself. This
musical aspect of his life was already well-known, but has recently
received much more attention, thanks also to the new edition of his many
letters pertaining to music.3 These documents, together with Huygens’s
poems, prove to be an inexhaustible source of information about this
gentleman-musician.
On the basis of these writings as well as poems from other Dutch
authors, Anthony Bailes reconstructs various aspects of Huygens’s life as
a lutenist. We learn about Huygens’s schooling on the instrument (he was
mostly bored as a youth, as it turns out), and on what types and sizes of
lutes he played. Huygens considered buying a lute from Jacques Gaultier
in England, and their correspondence on this transaction is instructive of
the way that contemporary connoisseurs judged the quality of an
instrument.
Huygens’s correspondence with the ‘English Gaultier’ is explored
further in the chapter by Matthew Spring. He presents new archival
findings (it is now certain that the Jacques Gaultier died in London, in
May 1656), and analyses the direct and indirect contacts between Gaultier
and Huygens – the men met in person when Huygens was in England, and
they continued to exchange letters on an irregular basis. It was thought that
Gaultier visited the Republic in 1630, but this assumption is questioned by
Spring; this may have been Ennemond and not Jacques Gaultier. Fred
Jacobs analyses Huygens’s contacts with French scholars and musicians as
documented in the Huygens correspondence. France was of course at the

3
Driehonderd brieven over muziek van, aan en rond Constantijn Huygens, ed.
Rudolf A. Rasch, 2 vols. (Hilversum, 2008).
The Lute in the Netherlands in the 17th Century xv
time the leading cultural centre of Europe, and it is clear that Huygens was
fully aware of this. In his own music, he tried to follow French taste and
the newest French fashions as closely as possible. He corresponded with
the leading theoretician Marin Mersenne. When he visited France in
person he met the adored François Dufaut and attempted to buy Bologna
lutes which were in high demand in Paris.
Sadly, of the 800 or so of Huygens’s own compositions almost all have
disappeared; none of his many works for lute has survived the ravages of
time. On the basis of what is left – the Pathodia sacra et profana, a
volume for voice and lute continuo published in 1647, and one piece for
viol solo – as well as later observations of his now lost lute manuscripts
and Huygens’s own remarks concerning musical taste and preferences in
his letters, Jacques Boogaart tries to reconstruct the musical style of
Constantijn Huygens as a composer. His tentative conclusion is that
Huygens was a gifted melodist, and that his instrumental works probably
would have resembled those by Froberger and Dufaut, ‘French in style and
spirit but also strongly influenced by Italian expressiveness’.
The third and last portion of this book is concerned with lute sources that
originated in the Netherlands. As mentioned above most of these are now
available in modern publications, though not all have been exhaustively
studied to date. The first two decades of the 17th century have yielded a
rich harvest of Dutch lute prints and manuscripts, but a later period,
roughly the third quarter of the century, is not as barren as it is often
perceived to be. It is especially in this later period that new discoveries
have been made. Studies of two lute books from the first quarter of the
century are included here. François-Pierre Goy shows that four pieces in
the Berlin lute manuscript Hove-1 (1615), now conclusively proven to be
an autograph of Joachim van den Hove, are in fact not for lute but for lyra-
viol. Although all of them have Van den Hove’s name attached to them,
one is in fact a composition by Alfonso Ferrabosco II, making this
manuscript the oldest continental source with music for lyra-viol. Goy
comes to the perhaps surprising conclusion that in many instances pieces
for this bowed instrument have up to now been considered as lute works.
Simon Groot analyses the music of Adriaen Valerius’s Nederlandtsche
Gedenck-clanck, posthumously published by in 1626, a history of the
Dutch Revolt interspersed with poems and songs. The latter are set to
well-known melodies, though unusually for the time the melodies for all
the songs are given in staff notation. Each song is accompanied by
tablatures for lute and cittern, but Groot makes clear that they were not
composed as accompaniments to the songs. Most of these lute and cittern
xvi Introduction
pieces must have been derived from now-lost prints and manuscripts.
Valerius thus allows us a glimpse of the large body of manuscript lute
music that must once have circulated in the Netherlands.
The last chapters are devoted to lute music from the mid-century and
later. First of all, Rudolf Rasch studies the handwriting in five books for
lute, theorbo and solo viol that originated in Utrecht in the 1660s. These
are the oldest layer of the so-called Goëss tablature manuscripts. On the
basis of palaeographical evidence Rasch concludes that the one hand that
is found in all five volumes belongs to Johan van Reede, an important
Utrecht nobleman and a friend of Constantijn Huygens. Van Reede was
probably also the first owner of the books, which after his death must have
come into the possession of the Austrian Goëss family, possibly via Van
Reede’s granddaughter.
Jan Burgers’s discoveries concerning the now-obscure French lutenist
Fresneau or Dufresneau who lived in Leiden have been complemented by
further evidence that the lute manuscript Kraków 40626, in which many of
Fresneau’s works are found, is largely an autograph collection by this
lutenist. Most of the remaining works of Fresneau’s relatively small but
fine oeuvre (hitherto consisting of 38 pieces for lute and guitar) are found
in the Utrecht manuscript Goëss I mentioned above. From the Leiden
administrative sources we learn that Johannes Fresneau was married there
in 1644, aged 28, and that he died in April 1670.
Greet Schamp has rediscovered a collection of eight long-forgotten
tablatures for lute, guitar, harp and cittern in the Ghent University Library.
These books probably originated in the Southern Netherlands around the
middle of the century. Especially interesting is Hs. 15, a setting for twelve-
course lute of a ballet by Balthasar Richard, for a long time a prominent
musician at the Brussels court.
Recently an unknown manuscript source of Dutch lute music was
found: a small lute book that had been written around 1659 for Andries
van Vossen, a wealthy young man from a prominent family, who was
destined to make a career in the government of his hometown, Enkhuizen.
These Ghent and Enkhuizen manuscripts once again make clear that
dozens of similar collections with music for various plucked instruments
must once have circulated, of which only fragments have survived.
Taken together, the chapters in this book provide a broad and many-
coloured overview of the lute in the 17th-century Netherlands. Most
contributions are concerned with the Golden Age in the Dutch Republic,
but the Austrian-controlled Southern Netherlands are also included.
Collectively the texts bring us some steps further in our understanding of
The Lute in the Netherlands in the 17th Century xvii
the lute in its 17th-century social and cultural context, not only in the
Netherlands but certainly also elsewhere in Europe. The lute was an
instrument for the aristocracy and burghers, and the examples of Huygens
and Van Reede show us how it functioned in higher circles, where it was
used to ease otherwise often rigidly formal contacts. Focusing on extant
Dutch lute books and manuscripts makes it clear how much more there is
to be discovered, especially when research findings can be combined with
archival research.
These results were made possible through the efforts of many people.
First and foremost we must of course thank the speakers at the symposium
and the authors of the chapters; it is their expertise and dedication that
have made this volume what it is. A heartfelt word of thanks has to go out
to those were responsible for the organisation of the symposium: the
members of the committee of the Dutch Lute Society who, under the
energetic direction of Ciska Mertens, organised the International Lute
Festival, together with the staff of the Utrecht Early Music Festival under
the direction of Xavier Vandamme, who delivered the opening speech at
the International Lute Symposium. The editors also owe a great deal to
Christopher Goodwin, who kindly undertook to proofread the entire
manuscript and prepare the finished copy, which has in the process gained
greatly from his considerable editorial expertise. Last but not least the
editors are grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who have been not
only willing to publish this book but also prepared to wait patiently for the
copy to arrive.
I.
THE LUTE IN THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE:

THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
PSALMS FOR THE LUTE IN THE DUTCH
REPUBLIC AND ELSEWHERE1
LOUIS PETER GRIJP †
Psalms have a special place in the Dutch lute repertory. The Thysius lute
book for example contains a large number of settings of psalm melodies.
What is more, half of the printed output of Nicolas Vallet, an important
composer of lute music in early 17th-century Amsterdam, consists of
psalm settings. Vallet’s 21 Psalms (Amsterdam, 1615) is a musical
masterwork, and the Regia Pietas (Amsterdam, 1620) with all 150 psalms,
forms the crown on his oeuvre. As it is the last major lute book devoted to
Calvinist psalms anywhere in the world, it is also a crowning volume in
the international genre of psalm settings for the lute.
The aim of this contribution is to underpin this claim for Vallet’s psalm
book, and to re-echo the special attention paid to him in 2013 with the new
series of facsimiles edited by Simon Groot,2 and Willem Mook’s double
CD of both secular and sacred works by Vallet.3 I will place Vallet’s two
psalm books in both their national and international musical contexts. The
national context is that of the Dutch Republic, a Calvinist country in which
psalms resounded during congregational singing in the churches and from
bells ringing from the towers every hour, a country with carillonneurs such
as Jacob van Eyck and organists such as Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, for
whom psalms were a daily concern. The international context is that of
Calvinist music traditions in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary
with their shared monophonic Genevan psalter on whose tunes composers
1
I am much indebted to John Robinson for his kind help, and deeply impressed by
his vast knowledge of the renaissance lute repertoire. I also want to thank Jan
Burgers whose help went far beyond what one may expect from an editor.
2
Nicolas Vallet, Collected works for lute, facsimile edn., ed. S. Groot (Haarlem,
2013), 3 vols. This is a sequel to The complete works of Nicolaes Vallet in
facsimile, ed. L.P. Grijp with J. Burgers and R. Spencer (Utrecht, 1986-92), 4 vols.
3
Resveillez vous. Nicolaes Vallet – psalmen en luitmuziek / psalms & music for the
lute, performed by Willem Mook (lute), the Nicolaes Vallet Lute Quartet, and
vocalists Tineke Roseboom, Kaspar Kröner, Harry van Berne, Jasper Schweppe,
and Jelle Draijer, double CD (Spaarne, 2013) http:// www.spaarnemuziek.nl.
Louis Peter Grijp 3
such as Claude Goudimel, Claude le Jeune and Sweelinck based their

polyphonic settings, and lutenists such as Adrian le Roy and Nicolas
Vallet their lute settings. With these contexts in mind we can better judge
the qualities of Vallet’s psalm settings.
The Dutch Context

What was the situation in the Dutch Republic when Vallet published
his psalm books in the early 17th century? Calvinism was the official
religion. This meant that official public offices – burgomaster, alderman,
sheriff and so on – were only accessible to members of the Dutch
Reformed Church. Church buildings were only used for Calvinist services.
Other religions were not altogether forbidden, but they were not allowed to
hold public services in official church buildings, only in private churches,
that could not be recognized as such from the outside, to avoid offending
the Calvinists. This situation was the result of the Dutch Revolt against the
Spanish King, who was the legitimate ruler of the Netherlands in the 16th
century. The King’s persecution of the followers of Protestantism was one
of the main reasons for the Revolt, or Eighty Years War as it is sometimes
called (1568-1648). When Vallet’s lute books were published this war was
at its midpoint, though during these years there was a truce (1609-21). Of
all Protestants involved in the Revolt, the Calvinists were the most
militant. It was they who eventually seized power.
Calvinism was very audibly present in Dutch public spaces. Bell
players, such as Jacob van Eyck in Utrecht, played psalm variations from
church towers.4 In their public performances, organists too played psalm
variations. This might appear somewhat confusing as, in the early 17th
century, during Calvinist services no organ playing was allowed, not even
to support the singing of psalms by the congregation. This singing must
have been chaotic, as many people did not know the psalm tunes very
well. One solution was to play psalms on the organ before the service, so
that the people became accustomed to the tunes by listening to them. This
did not prove very effective, and there was a lot of discussion about using
the organ for the accompaniment of congregational singing. Constantijn
Huygens, no less, wrote a treatise on this matter, Gebruyck of ongebruyck
van ’t orgel in de kercken der Vereenighde Nederlanden (Use or non-use
of the organ in the churches of the United Netherlands) in 1641, making a
plea for instrumental accompaniment. In the course of the 17th century,
4
R. Van Baak Griffioen, Jacob van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lust-hof (1644-c.1655)
([Utrecht], 1991), pp.35, 275-95.
4 Psalms for the Lute in the Dutch Republic and Elsewhere
more and more cities allowed the use of the organ during services. The
singing itself, although now accompanied by the organ, remained
monophonic: no polyphonic singing was allowed. So Sweelinck’s beautiful
psalm motets were not sung in church, at least not during service. The
same holds for Vallet’s psalm settings for voice and lute: this was music
strictly for the home.
The International Context

Concurrent with the first half of the Dutch Eighty Years War were the
French Wars of Religion between the Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots)
that took place during the years 1562-1698 and which cost millions of
lives. One musical reference to the lute from these bloody and cruel
confrontations comes from Anne de Bourg, a Calvinist counsellor of the
Parliament of Paris who was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1560. Although
‘confined in a cage where he suffered all the discomforts imaginable, he
rejoiced always and glorified God, now taking up his lute to sing him
psalms, now praising him with his voice’.5 Going to death singing was a
token of great courage and of strong belief in heaven, and a number of
Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Catholic martyrs are reported as
doing so, 6 but De Bourg seems to be the only one who accompanied
himself on the lute.
The Monophonic Tradition

There is some irony in the reportedly awful quality of congregational
psalmody in Dutch churches. John Calvin wanted new melodies for the
psalms, instead of the secular melodies that had been used, for instance in
the Souterliedekens where the psalm texts were translated into the
vernacular and fitted to popular secular tunes. Genevan composers such as
Louis Bourgeois and Maître Pierre wrote the new, immaculate psalm tunes
in what they thought was a very simple way, using only two note values:
whole and half notes. But obviously this was not simple enough for Dutch
church congregations. In the end, they gave up rhythmical singing and
5
Quoted from Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées after New Grove,
‘Psalms, metrical’, ii: ‘The European continent’, 2 ‘France and Switzerland’, (ii)
‘Polyphonic settings’.
6
Dozens of examples of singing martyrs can be found in: L.P. Grijp, ‘Zingend de
dood in’, in Veelderhande liedekens. Het Nederlandse lied tot 1600, ed. F. Willaert
(Leuven, 1997), pp.118-48.
Louis Peter Grijp 5
made all notes equally long – the so-called isorhythmic singing practice.
‘Singing on whole notes’, slowly and loudly, continued to be common
practice, up until the 20th century. In 1840 a church musician observed
that ‘thousands of countrymen are still of the opinion that the Psalms and
Hymns are sung correctly and well and to God’s glory, when the faces of
the singers glow with burning red and purple colours and the vaults
tremble on their foundations’.7
In Vallet’s and Sweelinck’s time church congregations sang the psalms
in Dutch, translated from the French. These translations by Petrus Datheen
were criticized for their supposedly poor poetic quality. Many well-
educated people preferred the original French texts by Claude Marot and
Théodore de Bèze, for instance when singing the psalms at home. This
may be one of the reasons why Sweelinck wrote his psalm motets to the
French texts instead of Datheen’s translations. Vallet also published his 21
Psalms with French texts. In his Regia Pietas, he left the choice to the
singer, who could sing them in French, Dutch, German or Latin.
The most important merit of Datheen’s psalm book is that he was the
first to complete a Dutch translation of the complete Genevan psalter and
to have it published, which he did in 1566. This is only four years after the
publication of the complete psalter in French. At this time psalm singing
was a popular public activity. We know that in 1566, in the city of Ghent,
groups of 200 to 300 people marched through the streets at night, loudly
singing psalms. Many of them were adolescents, but also adult men and
women were seen singing psalms, arm in arm. They learnt the psalms
during field preaching; Petrus Datheen once preached to 15,000 people in
the open air, near to the town of Poperinge in West Flanders.8
Datheen had followed the famous French psalter of Clément Marot and
Théodore de Bèze, including the melodies – the so-called Genevan psalter.
The court poet Marot had started his translations of the psalms at the
Catholic French court, where they were sung to secular melodies. Calvin,
though not very musical himself, acknowledged the importance of
congregational singing during service; the use of the vernacular in the
church was one of the cornerstones of the Reformation. Calvin therefore
persuaded Marot to continue his work on the psalms in Geneva. Marot
7
F. van Lieburg, ‘Reforming Dutch Protestant piety 1780-1920’, in Piety and
modernity. The dynamics of religious reform in Northern Europe 1780-1920, ed.
A. Jarlert (Leuven, 2012), pp.157-85, at p.161, after Het kerklied. Een
geschiedenis, ed. J. Luth, J. Pasveer, J. Smelik (Zoetermeer, 2001), p.251.
8
L.P. Grijp, ‘De honger naar psalmen en schriftuurlijke liederen tijdens de
reformatie’, in Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed. L.P. Grijp et al.
(Amsterdam, 2001), pp.168-73.
translated 50 psalms and the work was completed by the theologist

Théodore de Bèze and published in 1562. Together with the monophonic
melodies that Calvin commissioned from Genevan musicians such as
Louis Bourgeois and Maître Pierre, the Genevan psalter became one of the
flagships of Calvinism. Martyrs such as Anne de Bourg and dozens of
others died with these psalms on their lips. 9 Even nowadays the same
Genevan psalms are still sung and loved by many thousands of people, not
only because of the religious tradition but also for their musical beauty.
Why psalms? As a radical reformer, Calvin believed that only the
inspired words of the Bible were suitable for use in worship. Therefore he
sought to confine the texts to close translations of the psalms and a few
other biblical lyrics, such as the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer,
and the Canticles of Mary (Magnificat), Simeon (Nunc dimittis), and
Zechariah (Benedictus). The Calvinists sang psalms not only in church,
but also at home. There they confined themselves at first to psalms, and
avoided singing other religious songs, especially to secular melodies in
which the old, secular words might be recalled in spite of the new more
edifying lyrics. But in the 1620s, shortly after Vallet’s and Sweelinck’s
last psalm settings, Dutch Calvinists such as Dirck Rafaelszoon
Camphuysen and Bernardus Busschoff started to write and sing new
religious lyrics written to popular tunes.10 After about 1620 the spell of the
psalms seems to have faded.
The Polyphonic Tradition11

When singing psalms at home, Calvinists with musical talent preferred
settings for several voices, such as polyphonic motets and chansons.
French composers such as Certon, Monable, Bourgeois, Janequin, Jambe
de Fer, Ferrier, Goudimel, l’Estocart and Le Jeune provided four- and five
part settings. Sometimes they followed the original monophonic psalm
melodies very closely, in note-against-note settings, and elsewhere in
contrepoint fleuri, that is with the cantus firmus in one voice against a
more polyphonic texture. But there were also motet-like settings or
compositions in which fragments of the psalm melodies occurred in
9
Grijp, ‘Zingend de dood in’.
10
D.R. Camphuysen, Stichtelycke rymen ([Hoorn], 1624); B. Busschoff, Nieuwe
lof-sangen, en geestelijcke liedekens, c.1620-5. For the latter, see E. Stronks,
Stichten of schitteren (Houten, 1996), p.25.
11
Most of the overview in this paragraph is based on the relevant articles in the
New Grove Online, such as ‘Psalms, metrical, ii: The European continent’,
‘Goudimel, Claude’, and ‘Le Jeune, Claude’.
Louis Peter Grijp 7
different voices. Again, all these settings for more than one voice were not
to be sung in the church, but only at home.
Claude Goudimel (1514/20-1572) for instance set the psalms in a
simple four-part homophonic style, note-against-note, so that the texts
could still be easily understood. The psalm melody was usually placed in
the tenor voice, somewhat hidden under the soprano and alto lines. The
Parisian publishers Adrian le Roy and Pierre Ballard published a first
edition with 83 such psalm settings in 1562, the same year that the entire
monophonic Genevan psalter for the first time became available in print.
Goudimel hurried to complete the work, and in 1564 the entire psalter
appeared, in the customary four partbooks, that is, with each voice part
having its own separate book. These simple polyphonic (or rather
homophonic) settings became very popular and were also published in
other languages, including Dutch (translated by Petrus Datheen, Leiden
1620) and German (translated by Ambrosius Lobwasser, Leipzig, 1573
and hundreds of later editions). But Goudimel was not yet finished with
psalm melodies. He began a new series of settings, this time in a more
elaborate, polyphonic style. This second series appeared in 1568 under
exactly the same title as the previous one: Les cent cinquante pseaumes de
David, nouvellement mis en musique à quatre parties (The hundred-and-
fifty psalms of David, newly set to music in four parts). Goudimel died in
Lyons in the days following the infamous St Bartholomew’s night or
Parisian Blood Wedding of 1572, in which thousands of Calvinists were
killed.
The most famous French composer who set Genevan psalms was
Claude Le Jeune (1528/30-1600). He served as maître des enfants ([music]
master of the children) at the court of François, Duke of Anjou, brother of
King Henry III. Because Le Jeune had signed a confession of faith hostile
to the Catholic League, things became too dangerous for him in Paris
when in 1590 the city was besieged by the Protestant prince Henry of
Navarre and he decided to flee. But Le Jeune was detained at the city gate,
and the music manuscripts he had with him would have been tossed into
the fire, had not his Catholic colleague and friend Jacques Mauduit taken a
stand for him. Mauduit convinced the officer on duty that there was
nothing heretical about the music. In 1596, Le Jeune was back in Paris and
even named maistre compositeur ordinaire de la musique de nostre
chambre (master composer in ordinary of our chamber music) to Henry of
Navarre, now King Henry IV, who had in the meantime converted to
Catholicism.
Le Jeune set the whole psalter twice: once in three parts, in virtuosic
counterpoint, and once in simple note-against-note settings, in four and
five parts, comparable to those by Goudimel. These simple settings

became much loved by Calvinists in the 17th century, including those in
the Dutch Republic. They appeared in Dutch translations in Amsterdam
(1629 and 1633) and in Schiedam (1665).12
After Claude Le Jeune’s death in 1600, almost no polyphonic settings
of the Genevan psalter were composed or published in France, where
Calvinist musicians with a Catholic polyphonic training were dying out.
The torch passed to Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621), organist of
the Oude Kerk (Old Church) in Amsterdam. This city had gone over to the
Protestant side in May 1578, when Sweelinck was about 16 years old.
Sweelinck also set the entire Genevan psalter for several voices. It became
a lifetime’s work, because he composed extended polyphonic settings for
four, five, six, seven, or eight voices, often including several stanzas. The
music appeared in four books, published between 1606 and 1621. In using
the French versifications of Marot and De Bèze Sweelinck was choosing
to link into the international tradition for these works. I have already
mentioned the problems connected with the unsatisfying Dutch translations
by Datheen. Moreover Dutch-language polyphony was a poor genre with a
small market. Nonetheless, other composers did set the psalter in Dutch,
such as David Janszoon Padbrué of Amsterdam (1601), Cornelis van
Schoonhoven of Delft (1624) and Lucas van Lenninck of Deventer (1649).
Almost all this music has been lost.
The Lute Settings: French Publications

There are many lute settings of Calvinist psalms, just as there are many
lute settings of other religious repertoire, whether Catholic or Protestant.
The first printed psalms in tablature appear around 1550 in books by
Francesco Bianchini (for the lute, published in Lyons) and Simon Gorlier
(for four-course guitar, in Paris): see the Appendix below, which gives an
overview of the lute sources with Genevan psalm settings, both printed
and in manuscript. While these early tablature books contained a few
psalm settings amidst secular songs and dances, in 1552 the lutenist,
composer and music publisher Adrian le Roy devoted a whole book to lute
psalms: Tiers livre de tabulature de luth, contenant vingt & un Pseaulmes.
The 21 settings are for soprano voice and lute. The voice sings the cantus
12
Rudolf Rasch, Geschiedenis van de Muziek in de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde
Nederlanden 1572-1795 Hoofdstuk Acht: De Kerken, i: Reformatorische
richtingen, p.11, downloadable (Mijn Werk op Internet, Deel Een) at
http://www.let.uu.nl/~Rudolf.Rasch/personal/Republiek/Republiek08-Kerken1.pdf.
Louis Peter Grijp 9
firmus, which is doubled by the top voice of the lute part, so that the
settings can also be played as instrumental pieces. A different technique is
employed in Guillaume Morlaye’s Premier livre de psalmes, mis en
musique par maistre Pierre Certon [...] reduitz en tablature de leut, 1554,
which contains lute settings of 12 psalms and the Canticle of Simeon set
for four voices by Pierre Certon (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Morlaye 1554, f.8r: Pseaulme II. Quare fremerunt gentes. / La voix, a sur la
premiere. Psalm 2; the psalm melody is in the tenor of the lute intabulation, which
represents Morlaye's altus, tenor and bass. On the vocal staff the superius of
Morlaye’s setting à 4; it starts with the tablature letter a on the first string.
Again the psalms are arranged for voice and lute, but now the voice sings
the superius part of Certon’s setting, and the lower voices are played on
the lute, including the tenor in which Certon had laid down the psalm
melody. This tends to mean that in Morlaye’s settings the psalm melody
does not come out very clearly.
Another important edition of lute psalms seems to have been published
by le Roy and Ballard in 1562: Livre de Tabulature sur le luth par Adrian
le Roy d’Octante Trois pseaumes de David [...] composés à quatre parties
par Cl. Goudimel (i.e. 83 psalms set for four voices by Goudimel,
arranged for the lute by Adrian le Roy). At least this is the title as it is
given in bibliographies; 13 the book itself has been lost. The title is
intriguing enough, because we know that in the same year 1562 Le Roy
and Ballard also published 83 psalm settings in four parts by Goudimel,
only the bass part of which has been preserved. This suggests that Le Roy
must have been working simultaneously on the lute arrangements of
Goudimel’s vocal originals that he was preparing for print. It shows Le
Roy’s eagerness to be up to date with psalms for the lute. We can only
speculate on the layout of the book, with or without a vocal part to go with
the tablature.
Five years later, in 1567, Le Roy published the complete psalter for
lute. This edition we do have, or to be more precise: the title page is in the
Bibliothèque nationale in Paris:
Les Pseaumes de David, composez en musique à quatre parties, par Cl.

Goudimel. Nouvellement mis en tablature sur le leut par Adrian Le Roy. A
Paris. Par Adrian Le Roy & Robert Ballard, Imprimeurs du Roy. 1567.
Avec privilege de sa majesté.
(The psalms of David, set to music for four voices by Cl. Goudimel,
recently put in tablature on the lute by Adrian le Roy, in Paris. [Published]
by Adrian le Roy & Robert Ballard, printers to the King. 1567. With
privilege of His Majesty.)
The rest of the book, from p.20 on, is in the Conservatoire National de
Région de Rueil-Malmaison, in the western suburbs of Paris. It is the
subject of a thorough dissertation by Jean Michel Noailly. 14 The psalm
tune is again in the top part, as it was in Le Roy’s 21 psalms of 1552, but
now the vocal part has been left out, probably to save space.
Le Roy’s 150 psalms for lute of 1567 followed rather closely upon the
publication of Goudimel’s four-part setting of the complete psalter in
1564, again published by Le Roy and Ballard. This publication marks the
end of a period of rapid exploration and exploitation of the polyphonic and
instrumental possibilities of the Genevan psalter. After 1567, it would be
45 years before another complete psalter for the lute would see the light of
day. However, this publication, Cythara sacra by Matthias Reymann
(Cologne 1613), belonged to a German tradition, as we will see below.
13
E.g. H.M. Brown, Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A Bibliography
(Cambridge MA, 1965), [1562]5; P. Pidoux, Le psautier Huguenot du XVIe siècle
(Basel, 1962) ii, p.137 (no.62/V); Noailly 1988 (see next footnote), ii, p.80 (no.66).
14
J.M. Noailly, Claude Goudimel, Adrian le Roy et les C.L. pseaumes, Paris,
1562-1567 (diss. Université de St Etienne, 1988), 2 vols.
Louis Peter Grijp 11
Apart from Le Roy’s lute arrangements, the instrumental exploration

of the Genevan psalter included arrangements for four-course guitar; such
as Le troysiesme livre by Simon Gorlier (1551) mentioned above, and
Gregoire Brayssing’s Quart livre de tabulature de guiterre (1553) with a
handful of psalms among the fantasies and chansons. Adrian le Roy’s
Second livre de cistre (1564) begins with half a dozen psalm arrangements
for cittern, followed by over 30 dances. Outside Paris, A.F. Paladin
published a Tablature de luth, ou sont contenus plusieurs psalmes &
chansons spirituelles (Lyon 1562). This book has been lost but according
to the title contained an exclusively religious repertoire.
French and Dutch Manuscripts

In the University Library of Uppsala two French lute manuscripts are
preserved each containing a single psalm setting amidst other repertoire
(Uppsala 76b, c.1570-90, and Uppsala 412, c.late 16th century). A third
French manuscript (Uppsala 87, c.1560-70) includes nine psalms and The
Articles of Faith, based on the four-part vocal settings of Pierre Certon
(1555).
Dutch settings of psalms and canticles can be found in manuscripts too,
most of them in the famous Thysius lute book, written by a Leiden student
who would later become a Calvinist minister: Adriaen Joriszoon Smout
(1578/79-1646). For a full description of its contents I refer the reader to
the facsimile edition published in 2008 with its detailed lists of pieces,
cognates and concordances.15 Among all kinds of other music – ‘serious’
dance forms, intabulations of polyphonic chansons, villanelle, madrigals,
motets, merry dances and song tunes – at the heart of the manuscript
(ff.233v-315v) there is a section with an impressive number of psalm
arrangements of all kinds. The core of this section is a numerical series of
psalm settings, though sometimes skipping one or more psalms in their
order. They were written in the earliest phase of copying (called ‘A’ by the
editors) in a characteristic style, probably arranged by a single, anonymous
lute master (Fig. 2).
15
Het Luitboek van Thysius / The Thysius Lute Book, facsimile edition of
Leiden, Bibliotheca Thysiana 1666, Muziek uit de Republiek / Music from the
Dutch Republic, Special projects ii, with introduction J.W.J. Burgers, L.P.
Grijp, concordances L.P. Grijp, S. Groot, J.H. Robinson, (Leiden and Utrecht,
2009), 3 vols.
Fig. 2. Leiden 1666 (the Thysius lute book), f.281r: Psal[m] 116. 74. Psalms 116
and 74 are sung to the same melody.
The upper voice invariably has the melody, and the most diminutions
compared to the other voices. The melody is in principle accompanied
with homophonic chords, the constituent voices of which are
sometimes linked with figuration. The harmonisations are not based on
Goudimel’s settings à 4 (as they are in, for instance, many German psalm
arrangements, as we will see below), but even so are musically attractive.
These settings must have been made especially for the lute, as their style is
idiomatic. The same cannot be said of all of the remaining psalm settings
found in the Thysius book, including the intabulations of polyphonic
settings by Sweelinck, Goudimel and Le Jeune. There are also Sweelinck
psalm settings that are not based on vocal models. His setting of psalm 5
for example seems to be a transcription (in view of the rich chords and the
many corrections) of a now lost arrangement for another instrument,
maybe a keyboard instrument.16 Sweelinck’s two settings of psalm 23 may
also be transcriptions, even if they are slightly more idiomatic than psalm
5.
Most of these secondary arrangements seem to have been added later
between the items of the original series of simple homophonic psalms,
which were notated in a rather spacious layout in an early stage of
compilation. This early layer of copying probably occurred shortly after
1595, when Smout matriculated at Leiden University. Smout may have
planned for the later additions, most of which can easily be found in the
manuscript because of their numerical order.
Apart from the Thysius lute book, very few lute manuscripts have been
preserved from the Dutch Republic, as Jan Burgers has pointed out. 17
Recently, Burgers discovered a reference to a lost manuscript by the
important Dutch Calvinist, scholar and politician Philips Marnix van St.
Aldegonde (1540-98). This lost manuscript is referred to as: Psalmi &
cantilenae variae à Ph. Marnixio conscriptae & testudini accomodatae
(Psalms and various songs intabulated for the lute by Ph. Marnix van St.
Aldegonde) in the auction catalogue of Marnix’s vast library. 18 The
catalogue does not tell us which psalms and songs Marnix arranged, but
we do know that he wrote a metrical Dutch translation of the complete
16
Although this setting is also not very idiomatic for keyboard, at least not in this
arrangement for lute (personal communication from Ton Koopman).
17
Jan W.J. Burgers, The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age: Musical Culture in the
Netherlands 1580-1670 Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam,
2013), p.104.
18
Ibidem, pp.34-36.
Genevan psalter (published in 1580),19 which was regarded as superior to

that by Datheen and gained some popularity in intellectual circles.
Probably it was the Genevan psalms that Marnix had arranged for the lute.
Of the handful of foreign manuscripts with apparent Dutch connections
that Burgers mentions in his book, two contain psalm settings. The
manuscript Berlin Mus. Ms. 40143 was notated by several people around
1600 in Cologne, possibly in the direct vicinity of the famous lutenist
Jean-Baptiste Besard, who lived in the city and published his Thesaurus
harmonicus there (1603). The manuscript contains several psalm settings,
five of which are attributed to Besard and were published in the
Thesaurus.20 In the manuscript the first of these, psalm 24, bears the date
‘Ao 1601. 26 Augusti’. In principle, Besard laid the psalm tune in the
superius and embellished it; in some cases the superius goes somewhat
higher, while the tune appears in the altus. In psalm 42, this procedure
makes it difficult to recognize the psalm melody, a problem that was
solved by writing capital letters indicating the solmisation syllables at the
places where the notes of the psalm appear in the tablature.
The pieces by the Frenchman Besard tell us little about Dutch psalm
settings for the lute, but in the Berlin MS they are followed somewhat later
in the manuscript by a similar setting called ‘Lofsang Mariae’, which is
Dutch for the Canticle of Mary (Magnificat), and that might indicate that
this piece was written out by a Dutchman. This little sacred series
concludes with a setting of psalm 103 in a similar style, anonymous but
dated in the same manner as the first psalm in the section: ‘Ao 1603 26
Decembris’.21
Another foreign manuscript with Dutch connections is the Dallis lute
book, which was started in 1583 by a Cambridge student who had lute
lessons with Dr Thomas Dallis. Here, settings of Dutch psalm and
19
Het Boeck der Psalmen Dauids. Wt de Hebreische spraecke in Nederduytschen
dichte, op de ghewoonlijcke Francoische wyse ouerghesett, Door Philips Van
Marnix Heere van St. Aldegonde, etc. (The Book of David’s Psalms, translated
from the Hebrew language into Dutch verses, on the usual French melodies, by
Philips van Marnix, Lord of St. Aldegonde, etc.) (Antwerp, 1580; second edn.
Antwerp, 1591).
20
In order of appearance: psalms 24, 42, 128, 23, and 2. Between psalms 24 and
42 there is an anonymous setting of ‘Les dix Commandemens de Dieu’ in more or
less the same style and handwriting (f.52r). It has been attributed to Besard in the
C.N.R.S. edition of his solo lute works, without further comment, see: Oeuvres
pour le luth seul de Jean-Baptiste Besard, ed. A. Souris, M. Rollin (Paris, 1981),
p.171.
21
This setting of psalm 103 was not included in the C.N.R.S. edition of Besard’s
works for solo lute, notwithstanding the corresponding handwriting and dating.
canticles are found dotted around the manuscript, between dances and
songs, chansons and other intabulations of vocal music.22 On p.5 there is a
setting of the Canticle of Mary, entitled ‘De Lofsa[n]ck Marie’, with a
slightly embellished melody in the superius. The song is supplied with
solmisation syllables for a singer, who is able to read the lyrics underneath
the tablature staff: ‘My[n] sil maect groot den heer / Myn geest v[e]rhuegt
hem seer / in mynen god vol trouwen’ etc. – this is the commonly used
translation by Datheen (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Dublin 410/I (the Dallis lute book), p.5, detail: De Lofsa[n]ck Marie (the
Canticle of Mary with the Dutch lyrics written below the tablature staff and
solmisation syllables above) and Onse Vad[er] (The Lord’s Prayer).
This Canticle is immediately followed by a simple homophonic ‘Our

Father’, again with its Dutch title (‘Onse Vad[er]’), but this time without
syllables or lyrics. On p.34 another Dutch text can be found: ‘heft op u’,
the incipit of Datheen’s translation of the Ten Commandments (‘Heft op
uw hart, opent uw ooren’), at the beginning of a very basic setting of this
22
For an inventory see J. Ward, ‘The Lute Books of Trinity College, Dublin’, Lute
Society Journal ix (1967), pp.17-40.
tune. It is an oddity of the Dallis lute book that someone seems to have
notated this short tune on empty staves throughout the manuscript. This
occurs a few times with its first words in French (‘Leve le coeur’), once
with the Dutch incipit just quoted, and a dozen times without a title at all,
sometimes just giving a fragment of the piece. It looks as if this scribe was
obsessed with the Ten Commandments. Apart from this particularity, on
p.109 we find a setting of psalm 4 with the musical phrases nicely linked
with small interludes. From p.156 onwards there is a short series of
psalms: 23, 27, 15 (four settings, one of which is probably Dutch and has
solmisation syllables), psalm 5 (with Marot’s incipit ‘Aux p[ar]oles que je
veux dire’), and psalms 42 and 81 (both with Datheen’s incipit: ‘Als een
hert’ and ‘Singt den heere bly’).
The piece entitled ‘Psal. 103 belg. vet. Languir me fais’ in the Dallis
manuscript is of special interest. This must refer to Souterliedeken 103.
The Souterliedekens, the first complete psalter translated into a European
vernacular language, were published in Antwerp in 1540 with monophonic
notation for all secular tunes to which the psalms were set in Dutch rhyme.
After 1566, when Datheen’s translation to the Genevan (Calvinist) tunes
appeared, the Souterliedekens remained popular among the Dutch
Mennonites for quite a while. Sometimes they referred to the
Souterliedekens as ‘the old Psalm book’.23 The scribe of the Dallis lute
book does the same: ‘belg. vet.’ has to be read as ‘belgicus vetus’, Latin
for ‘the old Dutch’.24 Thus the heading of the piece is: ‘The old Dutch
psalm 103, to the tune of Languir me fais’. Sure enough, the tune of
Souterliedeken 103 is Sermisy’s chanson ‘Languir me fais’. But on closer
inspection, one discovers that the notation in the Dallis lute book is
actually a lute setting of the chanson ‘Languir me fais’, with that title, and
that the reference to the old psalm is a later addition. 25 A similar
inscription is found on p.214 of the Dallis lute book, in the margin of a
lute setting of the popular Dutch tune ‘Den lustelijcken mey’, also known
23
For instance, in tune indications in Mennonite songbooks such as David Joris, Een
Geestelijck Liedt-Boecxken [Haarlem?, c.1600?]: ‘Int oude Psalmboeck van Nievelt,
Psal. 52. Int herte spreeckt een zot’, referring to Willem van Zuylen van Nijevelt, the
author/translator of the Souterliedekens; T.C. Honig, Schriftuerlijck Lied-boecxken
[Amsterdam 1591 or 1592]: ‘int oude Psalmboecxken die Loffsanck Symeons’; L.
Clock, Veelderhande Schriftuerlicke Nieuwe Liedekens (Haarlem, 1598): ‘van den
70. Psalm, in d’oude Psalmboeck: In u staet al mijn hoep, O Heer’.
24
Up to now this has been read by scholars as ‘belg. bef.’, which could not be
explained.
25
This is affirmed by an almost exact concordance in the Thysius lute book (f.165),
also marked ‘Languir me fais’, but without any reference to the souterliedeken.
as ‘Den mey staet vrolijck in sinen tijt’, to which Souterliedeken 73 was

sung. The incipit of the souterliedeken has been written in the margin and
underneath the beginning of the lute piece: ‘Waero[m] wilt ghy ons
v[er]laten’, and in the margin the following: ‘Psal 73. vetus’ (the old psalm
73). This piece introduces another Dutch-influenced section in the
manuscript, containing settings of the Genevan psalm tunes 5 and 6 by
‘Mr Dallis’, two notations of ‘Almande Prince’ (taken from Adriaenssen’s
Pratum musicum of 1584, behind whose neutral title the tune of the
political song ‘Wilhelmus van Nassouwen’ is hidden, later the national
anthem), a notation of ‘Almande Slaepen gaen’ (also from Adriaenssen
1584), psalm 81 with its first word in Dutch (‘Singt’), and a lute setting of
the Canticle of Simeon with Datheen’s entire first stanza scribbled under
the tablature (f.235). All in all, there are enough Dutch elements to affirm
Burgers’s assumption ‘that Dallis had connections with one or more
Calvinists from the Netherlands, who provided him with some sacred lute
music’ – although one of these ‘Calvinists’ may have been a Mennonite,
who still remembered singing the Souterliedekens. One of Dallis’s Dutch
contacts must have written, flawlessly in a confident hand, the words of
the abovementioned canticles directly into the lute book.
The song ‘Cur mundus militat’ is another special case. The original
medieval Latin appears twice in Dallis’s book: it was written on p.210 with
its melody in mensural notation, accompanied by a lute part in tablature,
and again on p.234 without notation, probably by an Englishman26:
Cur mund[us] militat sub vanae gloria?

Cui[us] prosperitas e[st] transitoria:
Tam citò labitur eius potentia,
quàm vasa figuli, quae sunt fragilia.27
On p.211 there is a lute setting titled ‘Cur mundus militat’ with a melody
different from the setting on p.210. At the bottom of the page there is a
Dutch translation. There are several corrections in this text, so that it
seems that it was more or less translated on the spot:
waero[m] dient daertsen o mensch de weerelt eeuwelick

wiens macht valt in de gront even so lichtelick
wiens voorspoet so men siet is al v[er]ga[n]click
Als een swack eerde vat twelc is seer breckelick.28
26
This scribe also added English poems on pp.233 and 234.
27
Translation: ‘Why struggles the world for vainglory? Its prosperity is short-
lived: as rapidly fall its powers as the vessels of the potter, which are fragile’.
28
Transcription kindly provided by Jan Burgers.
Three other Dutch translations of ‘Cur mundus militat’ are known from
printed songbooks, all by Catholic authors.29 The translation in the Dallis
manuscript is unique, to my best knowledge, as is the Calvinist context –
although Vanity and Vainglory were popular themes amongst Calvinists.
To avoid a misunderstanding, the Lowther lute book, another English
lute manuscript, should be mentioned in this context.30 This was begun in
1637 by Christopher Lowther (1611-44), a young English nobleman who
was living in Hamburg in that year.31 He had signed a contract with an
unnamed ‘Dutchman’, a teacher who would give him daily tuition on the
lute. Some space has been left open for this person’s name. Obviously, the
teacher was supposed to write pieces in the lute book during the lessons.
There are already titles written for sections, but in most cases the
following tablature pages have been left empty. Unfortunately Lowther’s
father died in England the very day that he began his lute book and he
presumably returned shortly afterwards to his homeland. This may explain
the unfinished state of the book.
Two sections, headed ‘Calveniste French Psalmes’ and ‘Lutheran French
Psalmes’, remain unused, but the section ‘Leutheran Dutch Psalmes’ (ff.32-
40) contains lute settings of ‘Eine Morgenlied / Ich dank dir lieber Herre’,
‘Aus meinem Herzen gründe–ein morgen gesange’ and the well-known
‘Wie leuchtet uns die Morgensterne’: all Lutheran chorales, cited in High
German, definitely not in Dutch. Similarly a section titled ‘Calveniste Duch
Psalmes’ (sic) starts on f.42, containing just two pieces: ‘Ich hab mein sach
[Gott heimgestellt]’ and ‘Wie nach einer Wasser quellen’. Only the latter is
a psalm, and both titles are, again, in High German.
Nowhere in the manuscript is there any trace of the Dutch language or
specific Dutch repertoire. Moreover Lowther never uses the word
‘German’ in his manuscript. This leads to the suspicion that where he
wrote ‘Dutch’ he actually meant ‘German’. This hypothesis is affirmed by
the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the first entry for the word
‘Dutchman’ gives ‘A German; a man of Teutonic race. Obs. exc. locally in
29
‘Waerom volght ghy den crijgh’, in Antwerp songbooks by Th. Sailly (1595)
and Carolus Scribani (1621); ‘Hoe steekt de werelt dus’ by J.B. Stalpart van der
Wiele (1631); ‘Wat strijdt de werelt doch’ by S. Theodotus (1638), all with
different tunes from those in the Dallis MS, although sometimes there is
rhythmical kinship. For details, see http://www.liederenbank.nl.
30
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Ms. Mus. 688 (Christopher Lowther lute book,
1637). RISM BVII, p. 68–9.
31
See Gwilym Beechey, ‘Christopher Lowther’s Lute Book’, The Galpin Society
Journal xxiv (1971), pp.51-59. See also John Robinson’s list of cognates at
http://w1.bnu.fr/smt/0180.htm.
U.S.’, and is attested with quotes from among others William Shakespeare,
in his Much Ado about Nothing (1600). I cannot but conclude that the
Lowther MS does not have a Dutch connection at all (in the modern sense
of the word), and that Lowther’s lute teacher in Hamburg was a German!
Genevan Psalms in Germany

The search for Dutch psalms in English manuscripts has unintentionally
brought us to Germany with its two Protestant confessions: Lutheranism
and Calvinism.
Although psalm texts inspired much of Martin Luther’s song writing,
psalms never took such a conspicuous place in Lutheran hymnody as they
did in the Reformed (that is Calvinist) church. Lutherans were proud of
their rich liturgical repertoire with a crucial place given to chorales sung
by the congregation, although their choral books had always included a
significant portion of metrical psalms. But they did not follow the
Calvinists’ exclusive interest in psalms. Robin Leaver even cites the front
of an organ in Nordhausen with a Lutheran warning against Calvinist
‘Geschrey’ (shouting, instead of singing). Nevertheless, a complete
metrical psalter in rhyme using the Genevan melodies was produced by
the Lutheran theologist Ambrosius Lobwasser (1515-85), and first
published in Leipzig in 1573. This became an enormous ‘hit’, with some
800 reprints down to 1800. Lobwasser’s very singable translation became
standard in the German Reformed Church, where it continued to be sung
well into the 18th century. Lobwasser’s psalm translations also found their
way into many a Lutheran chorale book.32
This simultaneous use of Lobwasser’s psalter in two confessions does
not make it easy to discern Genevan from Lutheran psalms in German
instrumental sources. Gary Beckman’s dissertation The Sacred Lute
(2007) is mainly devoted to German lute intabulations of sacred songs, and
deals with this problem in some detail. He states that from the beginning
of the Lutheran musical tradition, Luther paraphrased psalm texts to create
new musical works. These works, however, were not identified as psalms
by their psalm number, but by their text incipit. For example, Luther’s
‘Ein feste Burg’ is based on the text of psalm 46, but it does not appear in
the chorale books as ‘Psalm 46’. Luther made no distinction between
32
Concerning the influence of Lobwasser’s psalter using Genevan melodies on
Lutheran church music, see Robin A. Leaver, ‘Genevan Psalm Tunes in the
Lutheran Chorale Tradition’, in Der Genfer Psalter und seine Rezeption in
Deutschland, der Schweiz und den Niederlanden: 16.-18. Jahrhundert, ed. E.
Grunewald, H. P. Jürgens, J.R. Luth (Tübingen, 2004), pp.145-67.
sacred song with paraphrased psalm texts, contrafacta or newly composed

sacred poetry. He simply called this new sacred repertory either geistliche
or evangelische Lieder (‘religious’ or ‘evangelical songs’).33 At the end of
his book Beckman gives two extensive appendices that list all chorales and
psalms from German sources or with German text incipits for which he
could find a lute setting. These range from the beginnings of the
Reformation in the 1520s to 1678, the year in which Esaias Reusner
published his Hundert Geistliche Melodien Evangelischer Lieder, a
hundred chorale melodies set for the baroque lute.
Lute Psalms Printed in Germany

As far as Germany is concerned I will limit myself in this contribution to
some important German psalm collections. The most important is Matthias
Reymann’s Cythara sacra (1613), which has lute settings of all 150
psalms and some canticles. Though Polish-born, Matthias Reymann lived
and worked in Leipzig and his book was published by Gerhard
Grevenbruch in Cologne in 1613 (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Reymann 1613, f.A2v: Psalmus 2. A simple intabulation of Goudimel's

setting à 4, and the beginning of the Variatio.
33
Gary Dean Beckman, The Sacred Lute. Intabulated Chorales from Luther’s Age
to the beginnings of Pietism (diss. University of Texas at Austin, 2007), pp.27-8.
Cologne was a Catholic city, but Grevenbruch had made a name for
himself with prestigious lute editions such as Adrian Denss’s Florilegium
in 1594 and Jean Baptiste Besard’s Thesaurus harmonicus in 1603. The
only extant copy of Cythara sacra was lost after World War II, when all
we knew about it was from a short description given in R. Wustmann’s
music history of Leipzig, published in 1909.34 Then, more than 30 years
after the War, the copy was found again in Krakow.35
The Cythara sacra contains two settings for all 150 psalms, plus two
canticles (The Ten Commandments and the Canticle of Simeon). Each
psalm has a simple chordal setting followed by a more embellished
version. Both versions are based on Goudimel’s homophonic settings of
1564, or rather on an edition of Lobwasser’s German psalter; many of
these included the music of Goudimel’s four-part settings. Reymann
moved the psalm melody to the superius, whereas Goudimel had set it in
the tenor: an effective way of making the tune clearly audible without
losing Goudimel’s beautiful harmonies. In the ‘variatio’, as it is called,
Reymann divided the whole notes into smaller notes, up to sixteenths or
semiquavers, in a rather traditional way, maintaining Goudimel’s
harmonies. This somewhat mechanical procedure is followed throughout
the whole book. The psalms are only identified by their number.
Wustmann noted that a number of the settings are marked ‘M.H.L.’,
which monogram he identified as belonging to Moritz Landgraf von
Hessen (1572-1632), the famous patron of arts. In 1605 Moritz had
converted from Lutheranism to Calvinism. This caused a lot of trouble,
because Moritz’s subjects were required to follow their prince’s
conversion, according to the German principle Cuius regio eius religio
(whose realm, his religion) – although this principle constituted an accord
between Lutherans and Catholics, in which Calvinists were not involved.
Moritz was an incompetent Landgrave who ruined the economy of his
country, but he had much talent for and interest in music. He discovered
Heinrich Schütz’s talent at a very young age and offered John Dowland a
34
R. Wustmann, Musikgeschichte Leipzigs (Berlin, 1909), p.349, also showing
fragments of Reymann’s setting of psalm 46.
35
The only extant copy of Reymann’s Cythara sacra, which had disappeared from
the Preußischen Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, was located in the late 1980s at the
Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Krakow, call number Mus.ant.pract. R 400, as
mentioned in A. Patalas, Catalogue of early music prints from the collections of
the former Preußische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, kept at the Jagiellonian Library
in Cracow (Krakow, 1999), under no.1672. I am much indebted to John Robinson
and Tim Crawford, who kindly provided me with a set of photocopies of this
source.
position at his court, a position that Dowland refused. Moritz also

composed himself, not only polyphonic works but also his own melodies
for the Lobwasser psalter.
Now that we have the (nearly) complete Cythara once again, we can
better judge Moritz’s contribution to the book. It appears to be of an
indirect nature. Moritz had limited his contribution to the Lobwasser
psalter to those melodies that were used twice or more within the Genevan
psalter. For instance, the melody for psalm 36 (‘Du maling le meschant
vouloir / Aus des gottlosen thun und werck’) is normally also used for
psalm 68 (‘Que Dieu se monstre seulement / Gott mach sich auf, bezeig
gewalt’). In this case, Moritz composed a new melody for psalm 68,
arranged for four voices in a homophonic style, reminiscent of Goudimel.
His new melodies were included in a special edition of Lobwasser’s
psalter (Kassel, 1607), published by order of the Landgrave himself who
resided in Kassel.36
It is this edition that Reymann must have used for his Cythara sacra.
He arranged them following a similar process as for the Goudimel settings:
one simple chordal setting with the melody in the superius, 37 using
Moritz’s harmonies in this case, followed by an embellished version.
According to this reading of the sources, Moritz, who played the lute
himself and composed music for it, did not write the lute arrangements of
the ‘M.L.H.’ psalms marked in Cythara. 38 Moritz’s name is mentioned
nowhere in the Cythara, except in the monograms.
Four years after Reymann’s complete psalter for the lute another one
was published: Testudo spiritualis, continens Psalmos Davidis, juxta
melodias Gallicas sive Lobwasseri ad testudinis usum non ineleganti
36
Full title according to DKL I = RISM/B/VIII/1: Psalmen Davids / Nach
Frantzösischer Melodey und Reymen art in Teut- / sche reymen artig gebracht /
Durch / Ambrosium Lobwasser / J.U.D. / Auff befehl / Des Durchleuchti- / gen
Hochgebornen Fürsten and Her- / ren, Herrn Moritzen, Landgrafen zu Hessen, etc.
/ itzo auffs newe gedruckt: / Und haben ihre F. Gn. die übrige Psalmen so nicht
eigene Melodias gehabt, / mit andern lieblichen Melodiis per otium / gezieret, und
mit vier stimmen componiret, wel- / che in der Christlichen Kirchen beyds zu
singen und auff allerley Instrumenten / zugebrauchen. / W / P / Gedruckt zu Cassel
durch Wilhelm Wessel, Anno M. DC. VII.
37
Reymann used Moritz’s superius for the upper voice in his lute settings.
38
Not having access to the printed Psalmen Davids of 1607, described in footnote
36, I base this conclusion on comparison of the ‘M.L.H.’ pieces in Cythara with the
incipits of a handwritten collection of Moritz’s psalms in four partbooks, described as
4o Ms. Mus. 95 in C. Gottwald, Die Handschriften der Gesamthochschulbibliothek
Kassel, Landesbibliothek und Murhardische Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel, Band 6:
Manuscripta musica (Wiesbaden, 1967), pp.604-18.
modo accommodatos per Danielem Laelium (The spiritual lute, containing

the Psalms of David, set to the French or Lobwasser’s melodies arranged
for the lute in a not inelegant way by Daniel Laelius). Like Reymann,
Laelius had studied law; he took his doctoral degree in Basel in 1606.39
Laelius had been working as a lawyer in Bremen and wrote the dedication
of his psalm book in Neumarkt in der Ober-Pfalz (Upper Palatinate), near
Nuremberg. In the early modern period the Electoral Palatinate was one of
the major centres of Calvinism in Europe. However, Laelius had his book
published in 1617 in the Netherlands, in the city of Arnhem. According to
his own statement, he had already started work on his psalm book when he
learnt about Reymann’s book.
Laelius wrote one setting of each psalm melody, using rapid figuration
in which divisions of the whole notes can be divided, up to thirty-second
notes. Like Reymann he used the harmonies of Goudimel, but confined
himself to just one ornamented setting per psalm, without a preceding
chordal statement. This must have made his book less accessible to
amateur lutenists. In the cases where one tune is used for several psalm
texts, he gives a reference to the other psalm number rather than arranging
it anew. For instance, Laelius skips psalm 68, referring to his setting of
psalm 36, which is sung to the same tune.
At the beginning of each psalm Laelius gives the text incipit in four
languages: Latin, French, German and Dutch. This strategy may have been
intended to widen the market beyond German-speaking areas. But at the
end of the book it turns out to be only a half-hearted attempt, as there is
only a complete alphabetical index only in German. The French index
breaks off halfway through the letter D and the Index Belgicus consists of
only five incipits for the letter A. There is no trace of a Latin index. Yet
the idea of psalm titles in four languages would be taken over by Nicolas
Vallet in his Regia Pietas (1620).
The publisher of Laelius’s book in Arnhem was Joannes Janssonius. It
may be significant that this Janssonius was the father of a publisher with
the same name. Joannes Janssonius the son set up his own publishing
house in Amsterdam and sold Vallet’s Secretum Musarum from 1618
under a new title, Paradisus musicus testudinis, thus one year after
Laelius’s book appeared. It is not clear if there is any connection between
these facts.
39
Die Matrikel der Universität Basel, ed. Hans Georg Wackernagel, iii: 1601/02-
1665/66, (Basel, 1962), p.59, no.83. I am grateful to Andreas Schlegel for this
reference.
German Manuscripts with Psalm Settings

The most conspicuous German lute source from the viewpoint of psalm
research is the Königsberg manuscript, written in the early 17th century at
the cultured Brandenburg court in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) on the
Baltic coast. 40 It had been in this city that Lobwasser completed his
metrical translation of the Genevan psalter. In the period the lute
manuscript was written Elector Johann Sigismund converted to Calvinism,
in 1613, though the city and court were still deeply Lutheran. Like the
conversion of Moritz von Hessen, this caused much trouble. The
Königsberg lute manuscript with its German, English, French and Dutch
pieces bears, in the words of its editors Arthur Ness and John Ward, the
cosmopolitan stamp of music surrounding the Brandenburg court; here the
cultures of western Europe met those of Prussia, Poland and Lithuania.
In the manuscript, nearly 50 Genevan psalms are notated in numerical
order in a series from f.43r to f.51r, written by one scribe, called ‘F’ by the
editors. The psalms are F’s main contribution to the manuscript, and are
presented in simple chordal settings, each one with its text incipit from
Lobwasser. Ness and Ward recognised the pieces as arrangements of
Goudimel’s four-part settings, with the tenor (bearing the melody) placed
in the upper voice. Now that Reymann’s Cythara sacra has been found
again, we can compare the two sources, which are from the same period.
The psalm settings appear to be very similar, but the Königsberg scribe
sometimes used different accidentals from Reymann, and often made the
chords fuller, by adding extra notes, including sometimes the third in an
imperfect chord. It is hard to decide whether these are adaptions from
Reymann’s settings or whether the Königsberg psalms are new
arrangements from the same Lobwasser/Goudimel songbook (or from one
of the many other editions of that collection), following the same, rather
obvious principles as Reymann. The additional psalms by Moritz
Landgrave von Hessen, which are a feature of Reymann’s edition, could
have thrown light on this question, but none of these are in the Königsberg
lute book.
Another probably German lute manuscript containing Genevan psalms
is Vienna 19259, dated ‘after 1564 (between 1570 and 1580?)’.41 Apart
from dances and intabulations of vocal music it contains lute settings in
40
Vilnius, Central Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, MS 285-MF-
LXXIX. Olim Königsberg, Preussisches Staatsarchiv, Ms. A 116. fol. Facsimile
ed. A.J. Ness, J.M. Ward (Columbus, 1989), p.8.
41
Dates according to Christian Meyer in SMT iii/1, p.135. Boetticher dates it to the
‘end of 16th century’ (RISM BVII, p.355).
French tablature of psalms 129 and 130 and the untitled psalms 1 and 2.
Moreover, there are some psalm settings à 4 in mensural notation with
French text incipits. There are no German chorales in this book. All in all
the manuscript gives the impression of having a Calvinist provenance.
Berlin 40143, written in Cologne around 1600, is discussed above with
reference to its Dutch characteristics; the Dutch Canticle of Mary and the
psalm settings by the Frenchman Besard do not make this manuscript a
representative of the German hymnological tradition.
More German is the lute book of Virginia Renata von Gehema, 42
which contains an international repertoire written in French tablature and
dates from around 1650. Little is known about Virginia.43 She was born as
Virginia Keckerbart, daughter of the Syndikus (city secretary) of Danzig
(now Gdánsk), and married to Abraham Gehema Jacobssohn, who in the
middle of the 17th century owned land near Thorn in West-Preussen (now
ToruĔ, halfway between Gdánsk and Warsaw). In 1651 a poem was
dedicated to Abraham, according to which he lived in Groß and Klein-
Lesen (now Wielkie and Maáe LeĪno in Poland, two neighbouring villages
less than 100 km north west of ToruĔ). There is also a wedding poem
written by Martin Opitz, in which Virginia is compared to Sappho because
of her literary activities in Latin and Greek. Abraham’s father, Jacob
Jacobssohn von Gehema, was Master of the Mint in Danzig. According to
a later source, the family, probably Frisian, from which Gehema originated
came to the Spanish Netherlands, but then left because of their Reformed
religion. From this heterogeneous and not always reliable information we
may conclude that Virginia Renata von Gehema was a well-educated,
artistically inclined German woman from the Danzig aristocracy, who
lived on an estate in the beautiful countryside of what was then West
Prussia (now northern central Poland). I could not ascertain if she was of
the Reformed confession, like the ancestors of her husband. In 17th
century Danzig Lutherans and Calvinists lived together, though not always
in peace.44
42
Berlin SPK, Mus. Ms. 40264.
43
For this tentative biography I have combined information from the introduction
of the facimile edition Das Lautenbuch der Virginia Renata von Gehema, ed.
Gerhard Otremba (Leipzig, 1984), pp.1-2, and a footnote in D. van Stekelenburg,
Michael Albinus ‘Dantiscanus’ (1610-1653): eine Fallstudie zum Danziger
Literaturbarock (Amsterdam, 1988), p.86.
44
Maria Bogucka, ‘Religiöse Koexistenz – Ausdruck von Toleranz oder von
politischer Berechnung?’, in ed. Joachim Bahlcke et al, Konfessionelle Pluralität
als Herausforderung. Koexistenz und Konflikt in Spätmittelalter und Früher
Neuzeit (Leipzig, 2006), p.522.
Virginia’s lute book contains mainly ‘international’ dances such as

sarabandes and courantes, interspersed with some Polish dances. There are
also six textless Genevan psalms (84, 6, 9, 42, 19 and 25), the tunes of
which have been set as the upper voice, slightly embellished. Two of the
settings are written in ‘new bemol’ tuning (A d f a d’ f’), four in another
‘new’ tuning (A d g b-flat d’ f’).45 Nine settings of Lutheran chorales blur
the confessional identity of the manuscript.
Manuscripts with Psalm Settings from Other Countries

The harvest of Genevan psalms in Swiss lute manuscripts is meagre. I
could only find two psalm settings at the very end of the vast lute
manuscript written by Emanuel Wurstisen.46 He started work on his book
in 1591 as a student in Basel, where he studied from 1586 to 1594. Later,
Wurstisen became a medical doctor in the Swiss town of Biel, where he
may have continued adding pieces to the manuscript.47 Emanuel was a son
of the famous theologist, mathematician and historian Christian Wurstisen
(1544-88), Rector of Basel University. A typical student’s lute book,
Emanuel Wurstisen’s manuscript has separate sections for genres such as
preludes, motets, fantasies, madrigals, German and French pieces,
passamezzi, dances and galliards, chi passas, and finally a section for
sacred songs and psalms (‘Geistlicher Lieder unndt Psalmenn’). After
some 14 German chorales, the section (and the book) closes with the
Genevan psalm 23 (entitled ‘Mon Dieu me paist’) and psalm 8 (‘O nostre
dieu’), notated in German tablature (as is the whole manuscript). The
settings are basically homophonic with the melody on top and some
modest figuration or breaking of chords.48
A country with a lesser-known Calvinist tradition is Hungary. In 1567
a Reformed Constitutional Synod was held in Debrecen in Eastern
Hungary, where the Second Helvetic Confession was adopted as the
45
I followed the inventory of François-Pierre Goy in SMT II, pp.42-47 and
consulted the incipits at http://mss.slweiss.de.
46
Basel, UB F.IX.70. See Appendix for further information.
47
K.-P. Koch, ‘Studentische Lauten- und Claviertabulaturen im Ostseeraum des
16. und 17. Jahrhunderts un ihre Bedeutung für die Vermittlung eines europäischen
Repertoires’, Universität und Musik im Ostseeraum, ed. E. Ochs et al. (Berlin,
2009), pp.117-31, at p.117.
48
According to Beckman, The Sacred Lute, p.69, these settings are based on
Goudimel’s, but this turns out to be plausible only for psalm 23, which does not
have much figuration. The slightly more embellished psalm 8 is definitely not
based on Goudimel’s homophonic setting à 4 .
official confession of Hungarian Calvinists. In 1607 the first Hungarian

translation of the Genevan psalter by Albert Szenci Molnár was published.
As late as 1743 a Hungarian translation of this psalter appeared with the
four-part settings Goudimel had written nearly two centuries before. In
this period, in Debrecen and the surrounding region Calvinist schools
(‘colleges’) existed, whose students participated in the city’s musical life.
Their songs have been preserved in so-called Melodiarum books,
including sacred and secular music and folk music, in an idiosyncratic
notation system in which four voices can be written on one staff.
A small manuscript for the eleven-course baroque lute (tuned A d f a d’
f’) originates from this region of Eastern Hungary. It is probably from the
second half of the 18th century and thus from the time of the Melodiarum
practice.49 Indeed, the five psalms of the book are notated in a style that
matches this practice: the settings are simple, and the Genevan melodies
are clearly recognizable in the top voice. This is unlike the Melodiarum
settings in which the melody is in the tenor, as it is in Goudimel’s settings;
but in the lute tablature, the top voice is set low, in the tenor range. The
rhythm is simple, although somewhat different from the French models,
both in the Melodiarum books and in the tablature. The incipits of the
psalms are mentioned in Hungarian, for instance ‘XXXVIII. Sóltár. /
Haragodnak nagy vóltában’ (psalm 38, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in your
anger’). All in all, this small tablature book is evidence that the lute was
used in 18th-century Hungary to accompany the singing of students of the
Calvinist colleges.
Vallet’s Psalm Publications

In Amsterdam, 1620, the French immigrant Nicolas Vallet published
Regia pietas (‘Royal Piety’), an ambitious work dedicated to none other
than King James I of England and VI of Scotland). The very frontispiece
suggests ambition, showing King David playing together with Vallet
himself and three temple musicians.50 It appears that Vallet has combined
some of Reymann’s and Laelius’s ideas. Like Reymann, Vallet presents
each psalm in a simple harmonisation first, followed by a variation, here
called ‘secunda pars’. Like Laelius, he gives the incipits of the Latin,
49
I. Ferenczi: ‘Genfer Psalmsätze für Laute aus dem 18. Jahrhundert: eine neu
entdeckte Quelle in Budapest’, Jahrbuch Die Laute ii (1999), pp.60-71. This
article, with facsimiles and transcriptions in modern staff notation, is a translation
of an article in Hungarian by the same author, published in Budapest, 1994. I am
greatly indebted to Peter Király for providing me with this information.
50
See Simon Groot, ‘Cultural entrepreneurship, Fig. 2, on p.44 in this book.
Another random document with
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The morning of the 14th found the flotilla lying in the wake of the
flag-ship. The transports had arrived, and the troops, with the
artillery, were landed about two miles from the fort. The arrival of
the fleet, and the thousands of determined soldiers, inspired the
troops already at the scene of action with new vigor; long and
tumultuous cheers came down the hills from the army under General
Grant, which could be seen in the distance, watching the movements
of the fleet. General Grant and his staff had gone on board the St.
Louis, before daylight, and an attack by the land forces was agreed
upon, to be made as soon as the signal gun should be given from the
river. Accordingly, at two o’clock, P. M., all the vessels comprising the
flotilla, the iron-clad boats St. Louis, Carondelet, Pittsburg, and
Louisville, and the two wooden boats, Conestoga and Tyler, got
under way. They were then about two miles from the fort. The line of
battle was immediately formed, the flag-ship taking the extreme
right, with the Louisville, Pittsburg, and Carondelet at the left, four
abreast; the Conestoga and Tyler, not being iron clad, remained in
the rear, about a quarter of a mile. The fleet proceeded at a speed of
about three miles an hour, up the river. At twenty-five minutes to
three o’clock they reached the termination of a long range of woods
to the right, and came in full view of the fort.
The fortifications were distinctly visible, consisting of three tiers of
frowning batteries, on the slope of a steep hill, one hundred and fifty
feet in height. About half-past two o’clock, the enemy opened fire
from a battery about twenty feet above water level, by discharging a
32-pounder, but the shot fell far short. This was followed by another
ball of larger dimensions, which also fell short. The Union men were
anxious to show the enemy a specimen of their fighting power, but
the Commodore would not permit them to fire a gun for fifteen
minutes, until they got within certain range of the fort. At a few
minutes before three o’clock, the St. Louis opened the battle on the
national side, and the other boats quickly followed. For a while all
the shot fell short of the mark.
The boats kept advancing slowly and steadily for about half an
hour, when the order was given to slack the engines, so as to prevent
them from coming in too close range. The firing then increased to a
terrific rate on both sides. The enemy poured 32 and 64-pound balls
into the vessels with great effect, and the gunners returned their 8-
inch shell and 64-pound rifle balls with unusual skill. In the heat of
the action, a shot from the enemy’s water battery carried away the
flagstaff of the St. Louis; almost the next shot took the chimney guys
of the same boat. A well sent ball from the St. Louis soon struck the
flagstaff of the enemy, which was on the top of the hill behind the
batteries. This terrible fire lasted about half an hour, when a 64-
pound ball from the middle battery cut the tiller ropes of the gunboat
Louisville, rendering her steering apparatus unmanageable. About
the same time a shot entered one of the windows of the pilot-house
of the Carondelet, mortally wounding the pilot. Thus the control of
two Union boats was in a great degree lost. Shortly after this, a 32-
pound ball penetrated the pilot-house of the St. Louis, mortally
wounding one of the pilots, injuring two other pilots, and severely
wounding Flag-officer Foote. There were five men in the pilot-house
at the time, only one of whom escaped injury. The room was filled
with pieces of the broken wheel, chains, room furniture and rubbish
of every sort; there was no one there to take the helm save the
Commodore—no chance to call another to his aid—so, equal to the
emergency, the gallant old Commodore seized the remaining handles
of the wheel, and for a quarter of an hour acted the double part of
commander and pilot, and at last, when compelled to fall back, he
kept bow to the foe, and gave his orders as calmly and coolly as when
first entering the action.
At about the middle of the engagement, a 32-pound rifle shot took
away the flagstaff and Commodore’s pennant. In a moment half a
dozen men sprang out of the ports, caught the mutilated staff upon
their shoulders, hoisted the “blue flag” to its place, where they stood
and held it for several minutes, in the face of a most murderous fire.
Thus three powerful vessels were disabled by accidents that do not
happen twice in a hundred times. The men on board were unwilling
to give up the fight. The enemy had been driven from the lower
battery, and their fire had slackened perceptibly. What remained to
be done? To fight in such a current, with unmanageable boats,
would, the Commodore knew, be worse than folly. Reluctantly,
therefore, he ordered them to fall back.
The vessels then stopped their engines and floated slowly from
their positions. They had been within two hundred yards of the fort.
The enemy soon saw the condition of the fleet, and redoubled their
fire. They ran to the lower batteries and opened them on the retiring
vessels with terrific force. One of the guns of the Carondelet had
burst in the middle of the action, and the Pittsburg had received two
balls below water mark, causing her to leak rapidly. But they replied
well to the reinvigorated foe, and fired the last shot.
The fleet retired in good order, and anchored two miles below the
fort. The injuries to the gunboats were not very great. The principal
damage to the St. Louis was that sustained by the shot entering her
pilot-house. She was struck 61 times; the Pittsburg 47; the
Carondelet 54; and the Louisville about 40. The enemy fired about
500 shots.
The fleet fired a little more than 300, about 75 of which were 8-
inch shells.
The demeanor of Commodore Foote during the engagement was
the subject of admiration with every man in the fleet. His
countenance was as placid and his voice as mild in the heat of the
action as if he had been engaged in social conversation. He stood in
the pilot-house for a long time, watching the effect of every shot.
When he saw a shell burst inside of the fort, he instantly commended
the deliberate aim of the marksman, by a message through his
speaking tube. When the balls fell short, he expressed his
dissatisfaction in such words as “A little further, man; you are falling
too short.” During a part of the action he was on the gun-deck,
superintending the care of the wounded. In the end, nothing but the
pilot’s assurance that his vessel could not be managed with her
broken wheel, induced him to consent to a withdrawal.
Incidents on board the Louisville were not wanting. Captain Dove
had just complimented one of the gunners on a splendid shot, when
the shot that played such havoc entered his port, and completely
severed the gunner in twain, scattering his blood and brains over
Captain Dove’s person. But the Captain never blanched; he only
wiped his face, and in an instant was superintending the replacement
of another gun as if nothing had happened. Cool, brave and
determined, he was throughout the action a support to his men and
an honor to his country.
THE LAND ATTACK.
In addition to the two water batteries already described, a third
had been commenced, but was not at the time completed. The fort
stood on a hill, and within its ample lines nearly a hundred large and
substantial log-houses had been erected for quarters. In order to
prevent any lodgment of an opposing force on the hills back of the
fort, it was necessary to construct a line of defenses around the fort,
at the distance of a mile, and in some places more than a mile, from
the principal work. These outworks extended from a creek on the
north side of the works to another which entered a quarter of a mile
below. Both of these streams were filled with backwater from the
swollen river, for the distance of three-quarters of a mile from their
mouths. This chain of breastworks and the miry bed of the creeks
formed a most complete impediment to the marching of an artillery
force within sight of the main fort. This line of works was not less
than three miles in length, breast high, and formed from a ditch on
either side, so as to answer the purpose of rifle-pits and parapets. At
intervals on every elevation platforms had been constructed and
mounted with howitzers and light field pieces. Such were the works,
defended by from 20,000 to 25,000 men, that the national troops
were determined to take by assault.
Early on the morning of the 12th of February, the national troops
left Fort Henry with two days’ rations in their haversacks, without
tents or wagons, except such as were necessary to convey a surplus of
commissary stores and ammunition, and ambulances for the sick.
The expedition under the command of Brigadier-General U. S.
Grant, was divided into three columns—the division under Brigadier-
General McClernand, taking the road from Fort Henry to Dover,
running to the south of the enemy’s position; the second division,
under command of Brigadier-General C. F. Smith, taking the direct
or telegraph road to the fort; the third division, subsequently placed
under the lead of Brigadier-General L. Wallace, being sent round by
Paducah and Smithland, ascending the Cumberland, under the
escort of the gunboats. Each of these divisions consisted of about ten
regiments of infantry, batteries, and cavalry.
First Division, Brigadier-General McClernand.—1st Brigade, Col.
Oglesby, acting.—8th Illinois, Lieut. Col. Rhodes; 18th Illinois, Col.
Lawler; 29th Illinois, Col. Reardon; 13th Illinois, Col. Dennis; 31st
Illinois, Col. J. A. Logan; Schwartz’s battery; Dresser’s battery; 4
battalions Illinois cavalry. 2d Brigade, Col. W. H. L. Wallace, acting.
—11th Illinois, Lieut. Col. Hart; 20th Illinois, Col. Marsh; 48th
Illinois, Col. Smith; 49th Illinois, Col. Hainey; Taylor’s battery;
McAllister’s battery; 4th and 7th Illinois cavalry, Cols. Kellogg and
Dickey.
Second Division, Brigadier-General C. F. Smith.—1st Brigade,
Col. Cook, acting.—7th Illinois, 50th Illinois, 12th Iowa; 13th
Missouri, Col. Wright; 52d Indiana; 3 batteries Missouri 1st artillery,
Maj. Cavender commanding; Capts. Richardson, Stone, and Walker.
2d Brigade, Col. Lauman, acting.—7th Iowa, Lieut.-Col. Parrott; 2d
Iowa, Col. Tuttle; 14th Iowa, Col. Shaw; 25th Indiana, Col. Veatch;
56th Indiana.
Third Division, Brigadier-General Lewis Wallace.—1st Brigade,
Col. Croft, acting.—17th Kentucky, 25th Kentucky, 31st Indiana, 44th
Indiana, Col. Hugh B. Reed. 2d Brigade, Col. Thayer, acting.—1st
Nebraska, Lieut. Col. McCord; 13th Missouri, Col. Wright; 48th
Ohio, Col. Sullivan; 58th Ohio, Col. Bausenwein; Willett’s Chicago
battery.
By nine o’clock all the forces were on the march. The division of
General McClernand took the upper or southern road to Dover. The
division of General Smith proceeded by the northern or telegraph
road, running directly to the fort. The route lay through broken and
undulating lands. Small streams of the purest water were crossed at
every ravine. The hills were in places covered with green pines and
tall, heavy timber. The weather was mild and spring-like; the men in
admirable spirits, marching in regular order, and the surrounding
scenery almost tropical in its luxuriance. At about two o’clock in the
afternoon the advanced skirmishers of McClernand’s division came
in sight of the enemy’s tents stretching between the hill upon which
the fort was situated, and the next, on Dover ledge.
Word was passed back to General Grant that the enemy and his
camp had been sighted. General Grant at once ordered up the rear of
the column. Dresser’s battery was posted on an eminence
overlooking the tents, and a few shells sent into the camp. There was
a general and promiscuous scattering of men from the camps into
the earthworks to right and left. General Grant immediately ordered
the division of General Smith into line of battle on the ravine back of
the main elevation. A column of men was pushed up on the left of the
fort. Scouts returned saying that the breastworks could be discovered
on the extreme left. An hour or two was then spent in reconnoitering
along the various hills surrounding the enemy’s position.
This preliminary skirmish was soon over, and the enemy had fallen
back within his intrenchments, when the shades of night fell upon
the two armies. Many of the Federal soldiers, in anticipation of an
engagement, had relieved themselves of their overcoats, blankets,
and haversacks, and were altogether unprepared for the experience
of the night. But cheerfully kindling their camp-fires, under a mild
and genial temperature, they gathered around the cheerful blaze and
gradually fell into slumberous dreams of home, of conquest, or of
love.
During the night the enemy made a sortie on the extreme right of
the Federal lines, which by its suddenness created some confusion
for the time, but he was repulsed and compelled to retire.
On Thursday, the 13th, the attack commenced. The morning sun
rose brightly on the scene. The men were soon engaged in cooking
what provisions could be obtained. Several hogs running at large in
the woods had been shot for breakfast, and a sumptuous meal was
made from their flesh. At sunrise the firing of riflemen commenced.
The enemy could be descried behind his breastworks. The most
available positions were selected for batteries, and by eight o’clock a
regular exchange of shot and shell had commenced across the ravine
which separated the combatants. Taylor’s battery was on the extreme
right, next came Schwartz’s, further to the left. Further still was a
section of an Illinois battery. Across a deep ravine and in the centre
of the position was Captain Richardson’s First Missouri Light
Artillery, on the point of a ridge provokingly near the enemy’s lines.
Higher upon the same rise was McAlister’s battery of twenty-four
pound howitzers, and on the left could be heard at intervals an Iowa
battery.
The long established form of opening the fight by a contest of
sharpshooters and artillery was observed. For two hours nothing was
to be heard but the loud thuds of cannon, with the relief of a sharp
crack of rifles, and an occasional report of a musket, which in the
distance could hardly be distinguished from a field piece. Major
Cavender, of the Missouri First, sighted his twenty-pound Parrott
rifle guns. Two or three shots had been sent whizzing through the
trees, when “clash” came a shot in front of the piece. Without moving
a muscle the major completed his task, and bang! went a response.
Bang went another from the sister-piece under the intrepid captain.
A second was received from the fort, passing over the hill, exploding
just in the rear, a third burst directly over head, and the combat was
kept up with spirit. Dresser’s battery poured out shell from his large
howitzers in splendid style. The enemy held a slight advantage in
position, and had the range with accuracy. The shells were falling
fast around the batteries, doing however but little injury. A few
minutes and a round shot passed over the gun, and carried away the
shoulder and part of the breast of artilleryman Bernhard of
Richardson’s battery, killing him almost instantly. The captain
shifted his position three times during the morning, whenever the
enemy got his range with too much accuracy.
On the extreme right Schwartz and Taylor were blazing away
fearlessly. The ground between them and the intrenchments was
nearly cleared of trees, and they could observe by the smoke the
position of each other with accuracy. The firing from the batteries in
McClernand’s division was continuous. An attempt had been made
by the enemy to capture Taylor’s battery, which had been gallantly
repulsed. The rebels had reached close upon the battery, and only an
incessant shower of canister saved it from capture, the infantry not
being formed in position to support it effectually. The Twentieth
Illinois came up in time to drive the enemy into their works.
In the afternoon General McClernand determined to make a
formidable assault of a redoubt of the enemy, fronting the centre of
his right. The redoubt was the only one which could be distinctly
seen, owing to timber and undergrowth. At this point the ground was
for the most part void of large timber, the barren extending even
beyond the road on the ridge which the Union troops passed. The
batteries of this redoubt had a very perfect range, and gave the
troops considerable uneasiness, by blazing away at them whenever
they passed over the brow of the hill. Three regiments were detailed
for the work—the Forty-eighth, Seventeenth and Forty-ninth Illinois.
They advanced in line of battle order, the Forty-ninth, Colonel
Morrison, on the right, the Seventeenth, under command of Major
Smith, in the centre, and the Forty-eighth, Colonel Hainley, on the
left. Colonel Morrison, as senior Colonel, led the attack. The advance
was a most beautiful one. With skirmishers arrayed in front, the
three regiments swept down the hill, over a knoll, down a ravine, and
up the high hill on which the redoubt was situated, some two
hundred and fifty or three hundred feet in height, covered with brush
and stumps, all the time receiving a galling fire of grape, shell and
musketry, with a precision which would have done them credit on
the parade ground. The breastworks were nearly reached, when
Colonel Morrison, while gallantly leading his men, was struck by a
musket ball. The captain of the company on his right was also killed,
while the Forty-ninth fell into some confusion; but unappalled the
Seventeenth still gallantly pressed forward and penetrated even to
the very foot of the works. But it was not in the power of man to scale
the abattis before them. Brush piled upon brush, with sharp points,
fronted them wherever they turned; so, after a few interchanges of
musketry with the swarming regiments concentrated there, the word
for retiring was given. It was done in good order, by filing off to the
left and obliqueing into the woods below; but many a gallant soldier
was left behind underneath the intrenchments he had vainly sought
to mount. They were not, however, destined to die unavenged.
Scarcely, had their retiring columns got out of range, ere Taylor’s
Chicago battery opened on the swarming rebel masses with shell and
shrapnell. The effect was fearful. Each gun was aimed by the captain
himself, and when its black mouth belched out sudden thunder,
winrows of dead men fell in its track.
While this heavy firing had been heard on the right, General
Smith, had ordered the enemy to be engaged on the left. The Twenty-
fifth Indiana, at the head of a brigade, led the way. They had reached
a position on the brow of a hill where the successful assault was
afterwards made, and were met by the enemy in force, who swarmed
behind the works, pouring a deadly hail of bullets and grape into
them. The leading regiment broke in disorder after sustaining a hot
fire, and the whole line fell back out of range. The object of the sortie
had been accomplished, and the enemy’s forces drawn from the
other side, but the advantage did not result, as might have been
anticipated, in the occupation of the fort on the right by General
McClernand.
Six companies of the famous regiment of riflemen, raised by
Colonel Birge, accompanied the expedition from Fort Henry, and two
companies afterwards arrived by the transports. This was a corps of
picked men skilled in the use of the rifle, drawn from the North-west.
These hardy pioneers started out in the morning, with a hard
biscuit in their pocket and a rifle on their shoulder, for the rebel
earthworks, where they remained until relieved by a fresh gang. So
adventurous were they, that many of them crept within fifty yards of
the rifle-pits and exchanged words as well as shots with the enemy.
One piece in front of Dresser’s battery was kept in silence during
the morning by the sharpshooters picking off their gunners. At last a
shell from a Union battery, falling short, drove them away. One
valiant southerner, to prove his bravery, jumped into the rampart to
take aim; in an instant he was pierced by three balls, and fell out of
the intrenchment, where he lay till nightfall.
The firing for the rest of the day was slow, and appeared by general
consent to be abandoned. The Unionists seemed to have failed in
every attempt on the fort. Wounded men were being brought in on
stretchers; some limped along, supported by comrades, others
staggered forward with bleeding hands and battered heads tied in
handkerchiefs. The ambulances had brought in the maimed and
seriously wounded. In the gray dusk of evening men came forth with
spades to dig the graves of their fellow-soldiers, whose remains,
stiffened in death, were lying under the pale stars.
Hardly had the camp-fires been kindled for the night when a
drizzling shower set in, which soon turned into a steady fall of rain.
The wind grew suddenly colder. The weather, hitherto so pleasant,
was chilled in an hour to a wintry blast. Snow began to fall, and the
mercury sank below freezing point.
Many of the soldiers had lost their overcoats and blankets during
the day. Not a tent, except hospital tents, in the command.
Provisions growing very scarce—the muddy, wet clothing freezing
upon the chilled limbs of the hungry soldiers. It was a most
comfortless night. Not five houses could be found within as many
miles, and these were used as hospitals. Various expedients were
devised to ward off the cold. Saplings were bent down and twigs
interwoven into a shelter; leaves piled up made a kind of roof to keep
off the snow. Large fires were kindled, and the men lay with their feet
to the fire. The victims who perished of cold, exposure, hunger and
neglect, on this night, will fill up a long page in the mortality record
of that eventful siege.
On Friday, the conflict was maintained only by the pickets and
sharpshooters, General Grant having concluded to await the arrival
of additional forces, before assaulting the works.
Hitherto the investment had been made by the divisions of
Generals McClernand and Smith, about ten thousand men each,
including the cavalry and artillery. A third division had been sent up
the Cumberland, and should, by reasonable calculation, have been
opposite Fort Henry on Wednesday night. Here was Friday morning
and no transports arrived. What could have befallen them? General
L. Wallace, who had been left in command at Fort Henry, was
summoned over, and arrived on Friday evening with two regiments
of his brigade. Couriers were seen dashing along from the
headquarters to the point where the boats were expected to land.
About ten o’clock came the joyful intelligence that the gunboat fleet,
with fifteen transports, had landed five miles below the fort. The
troops from Fort Henry were pouring in, and close upon them came
the troops from the boats. The men had heard something of the
fighting, and moved up in splendid order, expecting to be marched
directly into battle.
At about half-past two o’clock the sound as of thunder, with long
reverberations in the distance, told that the river guns had at last
opened their mouths, and were paying their compliments grandly to
the rebel batteries. Now and then could be seen in the distance, high
up in the air, a sudden puff of white smoke, which sprang as if from
nothing, slowly curling in graceful folds, and melting away in a snow-
white cloud; it was a bursting shell, instantly followed by the rumble
of the gun from which it had been sent. The loud roar of the cannon
kept growing thicker and faster. The heavy columbiads and
Dahlgrens in the fort were returning the fire. One, two, three, and
then half a dozen at once! The terrible game of death becomes wildly
exciting!
The gunboats were advancing—the bombardment had fairly
begun. The cheers went up in ten thousand voices. The death-dealing
bolts of Fort Henry were falling thick and fast into Fort Donelson.
But little did the besiegers know what protection and defence nature
had laid against the ingenuity of art, which the insurgents had seized
upon to accomplish their purpose! No one considered the
importance of those great natural traverses and curtains of rock
which had been thrown up by the primeval subterranean fires, nor
what bomb-proofs and lunettes the waters of a thousand years had
worn into the sides of those hills. The area of the place was so large
that nearly the whole force could be removed from the water front,
and thus leave the shells to explode against the bleak hill sides, or
crush through the deserted huts of the enemy.
Meantime an occasional shot from the batteries surrounding the
outer lines of defence must have told upon the enemy on the other
side. The enemy replied but feebly. The entire morning had been in
anxious expectancy, neither party being willing to risk the chances of
another trial of valor. The weather was keen and frosty, the roads
slippery and clogged with stiff mud.
Saturday, which was destined to witness the grand denouement of
the painful tragedies enacted about Donelson, was cold, damp and
cheerless. The enemy, during the night, had transferred several of
their batteries to portions of their works, within a few hundred feet
of which the extreme right wing of the Federals was resting. Upon
the first coming of dawn, these batteries suddenly opened on the
Ninth, Eighteenth, Twenty-ninth, Thirtieth and Thirty-first
regiments, comprising Oglesby’s brigade, which had the advance.
Simultaneously with the opening of the batteries, a force of about
twelve thousand infantry and a regiment of cavalry was hurled
against the brigade with a vigor which, made against less steady and
well-disciplined troops, must surely have resulted in their entire
demolition.
Sudden and unexpected as was this sally on the part of the enemy,
it did not find the gallant Illinoisans unprepared to meet them. The
attack was made in columns of regiments, which poured in upon the
little band from no less than three different directions. Every
regiment of the brigade found itself opposed to two, and in many
cases to no less than four different regiments. Undismayed, however,
by the greatly superior force of the enemy, and unsupported by
adequate artillery, the brigade not only held their own, but upon two
occasions actually drove the rebels fairly into their intrenchments,
but only to be pressed back again into their former position. At last
having expended every round of their ammunition, they were obliged
to retire and give way to advancing regiments of Colonel W. H. L.
Wallace’s brigade, the Eleventh, Twentieth, Seventeenth, Forty-fifth,
Forty-eighth Illinois, and Forty-ninth Indiana regiments.
By rapid firing from the two batteries of Taylor and Schwartz, the
enemy was driven back. The Union regiments which had suffered so
much were withdrawn. The enemy had by this time concentrated
their broken troops for another attack. General McClernand had
already prepared for the emergency. Anticipating that an attempt
would be made to force a passage through, he ordered a brigade to
the rear and extreme right to form behind the regiments then in
front.
An hour had elapsed when the enemy returned in a dense mass,
renewing the fight. The battery of Captain Schwartz seemed to be the
object of their attack. On they came, pell mell, with deafening volleys
of fire. The Union batteries, well nigh exhausted of canister, poured a
storm of shell into their ranks. Ammunition caissons were sent back
in haste to get a fresh supply of canister. The Ninth, Eighteenth,
Thirtieth and Forty-first were the next regiments to be brought up.
The crest of the hill was contested with variable success for a full
hour, when the enemy was finally driven back. The line of battle was
so much confused that no connected account of the movements can
be detailed. The utmost bravery was displayed on both sides, until
the struggle degenerated into a wild fierce skirmish. The rebels
finally retired a third time.
The Union men had expended their ammunition. It was during
this lull, and before the men could realize the fact that they had
driven the enemy before them, that the fourth and last attempt was
made to seize the battery. The horses being shot, the enemy
succeeded in gaining possession of the battery of Captain Schwartz,
and were on the point of turning the guns on the Federal troops,
when Captain Willett’s Chicago battery, which had just toiled up
fresh from Fort Henry, arrived on the ground and poured in a perfect
storm of canister, just in time to save the day. The rebels fell back in
disorder, dragging the guns of Schwartz with them down the hill, and
gained entrance to the fort before the Federals could overtake them.
Some eager regiments followed them to the embankments, a few
men climbing over, who were driven back for want of support.
The regiments which suffered most in this morning’s engagement
were the Eighteenth and Eleventh Illinois; next them, the Thirty-first
and Eighth. The expenditure of ammunition must have been
excessive, on the hypothesis that each man had his cartridge-box full
on going into action. Forty rounds of the standard cartridge is
enough to fight with, and more than enough to carry with other
accoutrements of battle.
There were many instances of men who displayed the utmost
heroism in this action—some refused to be called off the field,
fighting to the last moment; others returned after having their
wounds dressed. One of the artillerymen, who received a wound,
walked to the hospital, a mile or more, had the ball extracted, and
then insisted on going back to his battery. The surgeon refused, when
he quaintly said: “Come, come, put on some of your glue and let me
go back.”
General McClernand, who had been a conspicuous mark during
the whole of this fight, bore himself with firmness, exhibiting great
decision and calmness in the most arduous situation. The tumult on
the left having subsided, he sent a messenger back to General Grant
to know if the left wing of General Smith was secure; if so he was
ready to advance. As the day waned, an occasional shot was to be
heard from the gunboats, but no satisfactory account could be
received of their operations. A lull followed the storm. Both armies
were preparing for the grand coup de main, by which Fort Donelson
was to be taken.
It was resolved to storm the fort. The honor of accomplishing this
difficult and perilous exploit on the left wing was given to General
Smith. When Colonel Lauman led his brigade in solid columns up
the steep sides of the hill, he drove the enemy from his
entrenchments, pouring a fearful volley into their disorganized and
broken ranks. The national ensign was immediately flung out from
the earthworks, and greeted with deafening cheers from ten
thousand loyal voices.
The shades of night cast their canopy over the contending hosts,
and compelled the Federal commander to delay the completion of his
victory till morning. Soon after daylight, the Federal columns
advanced in battle array, prepared to storm the works at all points,
when their eyes were greeted with innumerable white flags, thrown
out by the enemy at every threatened position.
What followed may be told in few words. The enemy seeing that
the Unionists had gained one of his strongest positions, and
successfully repulsed him in his most daring attempts to raise the
siege, took advantage of the darkness, and called a council of war, in
which it was determined to surrender. With all possible haste some
7,000 troops were dispatched up the river by night. The rebel
Generals Floyd and Pillow made their escape. The fort, with all its
contents, fell into the conquerors’ hands. More than 13,000
prisoners, Brigadier-General Buckner, with twenty Colonels and
other officers in proportion; sixty-five cannon, forty-eight field and
seventeen siege guns, a million and a half dollars in stores,
provisions, and equipage, twenty thousand stand of arms—was
glorious result, purchased at comparatively small loss. The Federal
loss in killed and wounded was 2,200; that of the rebels 1,275.
At the storming of Fort Donelson many acts of personal valor
might be recorded. An instance of reckless gallantry, and fortitude
under a most painful surgical operation, that of Hamilton, a son of
Professor Leiber, is worthy of record. This young man was twice
wounded in the battle of Fort Donelson. The first was a flesh wound,
of which he made nothing. Presently, however, he was struck by a
Minie ball in the same arm; this shattered his elbow, with the bones
above and below, and he sank to the ground, fainting with loss of
blood. He was picked up towards night, carried to a house, and
thence, over a rough road, in an army wagon, to the river bank, a
distance of three miles, which necessarily caused the greatest
suffering. Arrived at the river bank, he was put on board a boat and
conveyed with other wounded to an hospital, where his arm was
amputated. When the operation was over, the brave young fellow’s
first words were, “How long will it be before I can rejoin my
company?” At that time young Leiber was a Lieutenant of the Ninth
Illinois regiment. He was appointed aid-de-camp by General Halleck
soon after the battle of Donelson as a reward for his great bravery.
THE OCCUPATION OF NASHVILLE.
February 25, 1862.
After the surrender of Fort Donelson, on the 16th of February, it

became evident to the Confederate leaders that the cities of Nashville
and Memphis, and other important positions must soon fall into the
hands of the victorious Federal army. Public meetings were held at
both these cities, in which it was recommended to defend them to the
last extremity, and if necessary to prevent their occupancy by the
Union troops, many of the more violent and reckless of the military
determined that they should be burned, and every description of
property destroyed. At Nashville, the Governor, Isham G. Harris,
pledged himself to “shed his blood, fight like a lion, and die like a
martyr,” rather than submit to the enemy; and at the same time
efforts were made, but with little success, to organize additional
forces for defence.
During the progress of the siege at Fort Donelson, dispatches were
sent to Nashville, announcing a series of rebel successes, and on
Saturday night information was conveyed that the Federals had
again been defeated both on land and water, but they had been
reinforced and might renew the attack in the morning. With these
hopeful and exulting assurances, the city rested in peace, confident
that the light of the morning would open upon a glorious victory for
the rebel arms.
Early on the morning of Sunday the first rumors of this heavy
calamity to the rebel cause had been conveyed to the leaders in
Nashville. At first, suppressed whispers and grave countenances
indicated that something important had transpired. But the people
generally were confident and hopeful as on the evening before, and
anticipated that any hour of the day would give the signal for a grand
jubilee and rejoicing. The time for public service in the churches
drew near, and the people repaired to their several places of worship.
The churches were partly filled and the streets crowded with the
passing multitude, when a startling rumor broke the peaceful
stillness of the day. The Federals were victorious! Fort Donelson had
surrendered! Fifteen thousand Confederate prisoners had laid down
their arms to the invaders! Fear, added to imagination, ran riot in the
town.
It was said that the Federal troops had already reached Robertson,
a place about twenty-five miles from Nashville, connected by
railroad, and that the gunboats were at Clarksville, on the river, on
their way to the city. Governor Harris, taking advantage of his early
information, had hastily convened the members of the Legislature,
then in session at Nashville, which had met, and adjourned to
convene at Memphis. These circumstances becoming known, gave
plausibility to the exciting rumors of the celerity of the Federal
movements, and the people were panic stricken.
Before nightfall hundreds of citizens, singly and in families, were
making their way South, many of them having no idea why they were
thus recklessly abandoning comfortable homes, or where they were
going. Toward night it was announced that the military authorities
would throw open the public stores to all who would carry the
property away.
This excitement continued throughout Sunday night, constantly
gaining strength, aided by the destruction of two gunboats which
were in process of construction—two fine New Orleans packets, the
James Woods and James Johnson, having been taken for that
purpose. The army of General Johnston commenced its retreat,
encamping by regiments at convenient points outside of the city. On
Monday morning, great excitement prevailed; the public stores were
distributed to some extent among the people, while the army and
hospitals were making heavy requisitions, and pressing all the
vehicles and men that could be obtained to carry supplies to their
camp. At the same time, considerable quantities of stores were
removed to the depots for transportation south. Evening came, and
no gunboats—no Federal army from Kentucky. General Johnston left
for the South, placing General Floyd in command, assisted by
Generals Pillow and Hardee. The apprehensions of the near
approach of the enemy having been found groundless, it was
determined by General Floyd that the distribution of the stores was
premature. An order was sent to close the warehouses, and a force
detailed to collect what had been given out. This was done, so far as
practicable—but on Tuesday the distribution commenced again, and
continued with slight restrictions, under the eyes of the most
judicious citizens, until Saturday morning. Tuesday night the iron
and railroad bridges across the Cumberland were destroyed, in spite
of the most earnest and persistent remonstrances of leading citizens.
The iron-bridge cost about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
and the railroad bridge two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It
was one of the finest drawbridges in the country.
The scenes which were enacted during the following days, up to
Monday morning the 24th, were still more exciting. The untiring
energy of the Mayor and city authorities, who throughout this whole
affair acted with prudence and zeal, was inadequate to keep the
excited people under control.
On Sunday morning, twenty-five Federal pickets breakfasted in
Edgefield, opposite the city, and during the morning eight of them
seized a little stern-wheeled steamer that had been used as a ferry,
and refused to permit it to continue its trips. Mayor Cheatham
immediately crossed in a skiff, but found no officer with whom he
could negotiate. In the evening, Colonel Emmet, of the Fourth Ohio
Cavalry arrived, and sent a message to the Mayor, requesting his
presence. The interview was satisfactory on both sides, though the
formal surrender of the city was deferred until the arrival of General
Mitchell, who was expected on Sunday night or Monday morning.
On Monday morning the city became comparatively quiet. In the
evening Generals Buell and Mitchell arrived in Edgefield, and
understanding that the authorities had appointed a committee,
consisting of the Mayor and several of the leading citizens, he sent a
message requesting an interview. The hour of the interview was fixed
at eleven o’clock, A. M. on Tuesday. In the mean time General Nelson
arrived in the city about eight o’clock, A. M., in command of a fleet,
consisting of one gunboat, the Cairo, and eight transports.
Transports continued to arrive during the day, and at night the
number reached eighteen or twenty. A large portion of this army

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The Lute in the Netherlands in the

Seventeenth Century Proceedings of

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Proceedings of the International

Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford

Edited by Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford and Matthew Spring

This book first published 2016

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2016 by Jan W.J. Burgers, Tim Crawford, Matthew Spring

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9075-8

I. The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age:

Cultural Entrepreneurship in the Dutch Republic of the Early

Leiden, an International Lute Centre in the Golden Age ........................... 53

The Lute in the Dutch Golden Age:

II. Constantijn Huygens and the Lute

‘A goose among swans’: The Connections and Correspondence

Un Bon Nombre d’Illustres: Constantijn Huygens and the World

Constantijn Huygens’s Lost Instrumental Compositions:

III. Lute Sources from the Netherlands

Unknown Pieces for Lyra-viol in Joachim van den Hove’s Autograph

Adriaen Valerius’s Nederlandtsche Gedenck-clanck (1626):

Johannes Fresneau, a New ‘Dutch’ Lutenist

‘Make long-forgotten musical heritage resound anew’:

A Newly Discovered Dutch Lute Book: MS Enkhuizen 1667-1 ............. 301

THE LUTE IN THE NETHERLANDS

JAN W.J. BURGERS, TIM CRAWFORD

This book contains the proceedings of the International Lute Symposium

by Jan Burgers, Louis Grijp and John Robinson of a recently discovered

(1648) tensions subsided somewhat, but the two countries continued to

the accuracy of the depictions of lutes. Combining his iconographic

THE LUTE IN THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE:

LOUIS PETER GRIJP †

such as Claude Goudimel, Claude le Jeune and Sweelinck based their

The Dutch Context

The International Context

The Monophonic Tradition

translated 50 psalms and the work was completed by the theologist

The Polyphonic Tradition11

five parts, comparable to those by Goudimel. These simple settings

The Lute Settings: French Publications

Les Pseaumes de David, composez en musique à quatre parties, par Cl.

Apart from Le Roy’s lute arrangements, the instrumental exploration

French and Dutch Manuscripts

Genevan psalter (published in 1580),19 which was regarded as superior to

This Canticle is immediately followed by a simple homophonic ‘Our

as ‘Den mey staet vrolijck in sinen tijt’, to which Souterliedeken 73 was

Cur mund[us] militat sub vanae gloria?

waero[m] dient daertsen o mensch de weerelt eeuwelick

Genevan Psalms in Germany

sacred song with paraphrased psalm texts, contrafacta or newly composed