Chargé de dueil plus que mon fais 3v ·
Anonymous
Appearance in the group of related chansonniers:
*Dijon ff. 95v-97 »Chargé de deul plus que mon fais« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
*Laborde ff. 70v-71 »Chargé de dueil plus que mon faiz« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
*Nivelle ff. 42v-44 »Chargé de dueil plus que mon fais« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
*Wolfenbüttel ff. 42v-43 »Chargé de dueil plus que mon faiz« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
Other sources:
Florence 176 ff. 125v-127 »Chargé de deul« 3v · Facsimile
Florence 2356 ff. 11v-12 »Non posso più tenere in tal tormento« 3v · Facsimile
Florence 2356 ff. 65v-66 »Sarge de duol plus que« 3v · Facsimile
Paris 15123 ff. 61v-62 »Chargé de deul plus que mon fais« 3v · Facsimile
This page with editions as a PDF
Use of material, see Fallows 1999, p. 114.
Editions: Perkins 1999 pp. 332-333 (Nivelle); Gutiérrez-Denhoff 1988 no. 34 (Wolfenbüttel).
Text: Bergerette layé; full text in Dijon, Laborde, Nivelle and Wolfenbüttel; also found in Berlin 78.B.17 f. 126v, ed.: Löpelmann 1923, p. 223; Jardin 1501 f. 78. After Dijon:
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Chargé de deul plus que mon fais, Ha, se mon ennemy mortel je prens sur mon ame estre tel 4) Helas, Leauté, tu meffais, 5) Chargé de deul plus que mon fais, |
Burdened by grief more than I deserve, Ha, if my mortal enemy I take it upon my soul to be such Alas, Loyalty, you are acting badly, Burdened by grief more than I deserve, |
1) Dijon, line 2, “m’envoyez et ...” (error)
2) Laborde, line 4, “le deplaisir …”
3) Laborde, line 5, “que piteux sont mes pauvrez faiz”
4) Nivelle, Laborde, Wolfenbüttel, line 8, “... sur ma foy …”
5) Laborde, line 10, “... tu me deffaiz” (error)
6) Laborde, line 11, “quant le tien propre tu deffaiz”; Wolfenbüttel, “quant le tien propre deffaiz” (error)
7) Laborde, line 13, “ou je pri”
Evaluation of the sources:
The bergerette “Chargé de dueil” was well known in France and in Florence during the 1470s and 1480s. The song appears without composer attribution in four of the ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers, and in the Florentine sources it is found in the MS Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. xix.176, which was created in the second half of the 1470s. In the contemporary MS 2356 in the Biblioteca Riccardiana the song occurs twice, ff. 11v-12 with Italian text and ff. 65v-66 with a garbled French incipit. In the slightly later Pixérecourt chansonnier (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. f.fr. 15123), also from Florence, it appears with its French text somewhat corrupted. Heinrich Isaac, who worked in Florence during the 1480s based his four-part Missa Chargé de deul on the song. This work opened Petrucci’s collection of Isaac’s masses printed in Venice in 1506. (1)
A study of these sources immediately reveals two things: That the song had been in circulation for some time before the 1470s, and that the different scribes tried different solutions in order to convey the song's sounding presence in musical notation – the choice of hexachordal signatures being one of the key points.
Basically Dijon and Nivelle transmit the same version of the song, although there are a number of differences. Nivelle does not apply any hexachordal signatures, while Dijon has a one flat signature in the tenor, Dijon uses many more ligatures than Nivelle and there are differences in some decorative details – the most important is in the contratenor bars 76-77.1 where Nivelle just has a dotted brevis f while the f in Dijon is embellished by a three minimae passage. This “contratenor ending” in Dijon reappears in the majority of the Florentine sources. What unites Dijon and Nivelle is that they agree on very clearly marking of the repetition in the couplets at bar 74, Dijon insists on placing its signa congruentiae inside or at the start of ligatures, an unusual procedure.
Nivelle exhibits a unique trait in bar 35 in the tenor, where an accidental flat shows up before e'. This appearance of a semitone dissonance against the upper voice certainly adds emotional flavour to the words “ma joie efface / qu’il me defface”, but we have to discuss this matter again below.
The copies in the Laborde and Wolfenbüttel chansonniers were made after the same or closely related exemplars. They are identical except for a couple of ligatures and some errors in the text, and they both make a quite obvious error in the music in bar 33.1 where they have a dissonant e' in the upper voice instead of f'. Their common exemplar agrees with Nivelle by not having decorative notes in the superius cadence bar 54 and not the Dijon “contratenor ending” in the couplets, the tenor uses very few ligatures, while the other voices are close to what we find in Dijon. It differed from both Dijon and Nivelle by splitting a brevis in ligature into two semibreves in the tenor's bar 59 – it produces a better distribution of the text in this passage – and it arranged the hexachordal signatures differently. The tenor is without signature in the refrain of the bergerette, but introduces a one flat signature in the couplets, while the contratenor has a one flat signature all the way through. Finally, it very clearly placed the marking of the repeat in bar 75 at the end of ligatures and on the finalis C.
It appears that the Italian chansonnier Florence 176 was copied from an exemplar that was quite closely related to the one used for Nivelle, just with the use of many more ligatures. It sketches a flat signature at the start of the tenor, but omits it in the remaining systems, and the repetition is clearly marked in bar 75. In the tenor’s bar 31 an accidental flat (a fa sign) appears before f' reminding the singer to keep the following passage within the c'-hexachord. If this quite ‘superfluous’ sign appeared also in the exemplar for the Nivelle version, it could have been misread as an e'-flat indication.
The three other occurrences of the song in Florentine sources, on the other hand, appear to be based on a version that was very similar to the one in the Dijon chansonnier. The second, textless, version in Florence 2356 (ff. 65v-66) could be copied after the same exemplar as Dijon. It includes the one flat signature in the tenor, but has this signature in the contratenor also – like Laborde and Wolfenbüttel – and it has the Dijon “contratenor ending”. The repeat markings are interesting: In the superius the fermata is placed on the last note in the ligature, in bar 75, the tenor has none, while the fermata in the contratenor is positioned very clearly over the middle note in the ligature, in bar 74! The exemplar was evidently provided with repetition markings just like Dijon and Nivelle. The copyist moved the marking in the highest voice to the more logical location in bar 75, but forgot to do so in the contratenor.
The Florence 2356 version adds a small variant in the contratenor in bar 8, where the brevis note has been split into two semibreves. This detail reappears in the remaining two Florentine versions. The first is the Italian version in Florence 2356 (ff. 11v-12). Here, some notes have been split up or merged and details have been changed, the song is without hexachordal signatures, and with the changed text there is no need for repetition signs. The French song in the Pixérécourt chansonnier (Paris 15123) with the poem in an incomplete and slightly corrupted form shares some traits with the Italian song in Florence 2356; for example, the dotted maxima value in bars 37-42 has been replaced by three longae in both sources, and it is without any hexachordal signatures. The scribe has added extra embellishments (including fusae) in the upper voice, and marked the repetition in bar 75 in the upper voice only.
In reality, this amount of slightly confusing differences in details has no bearing on the song's effect when performed. Even the divergences in hexachordal signatures, from none to flat signatures in both lower voices, have a minimal impact on its sound – the traditional practice of performers would ensure nearly identical results regardless of the song's written default signatures. These differences probably arose because the song early in its career was notated in the usual way with the upper voice without a signature and one flat signatures in each of the lower voices. The cautionary fa-sign before f' in Florence 176 (and perhaps misinterpreted in Nivelle) only makes sense if both lower parts were provided with flat signatures. This version probably also had a slightly unusual design of the repetition in the couplets. Later copyists have then removed what they considered superfluous signatures or retained them, some have normalized the repetition, others have not, and as so often happens, decorative details have been added or changed.
As the song was evidently in high demand in the 1470s, it circulated widely in many copies. Therefore, three almost identical, yet distinctly different versions are found in the four ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers. One in Laborde and Wolfenbüttel and two related versions in Dijon and Nivelle, of which the latter two also circulated in Italy.
Comments on text and music:
The speaker in this downcast and slightly disturbed love complaint seems to be a woman. It is a bergerette layé in artful rimes equivoquées – the refrain is a quatrain with an interpolated half line. Its musical setting uses an upper voice in a high tessitura (c'-e'') accompanied by a tenor of a restricted range (g-g') and a contratenor (B-e'), which mostly lies below the tenor but occasionally crosses above it.
The song is dominated by the melodious upper voice composed with close attendance to the words of the poem. The setting is varied. Opening with an octave imitation between superius and tenor it proceeds in free polyphony – with an audible reference back to the start at the end of the second line (bb. 18-21) – and the short interpolated line is presented very exposed (bb. 23-29). The second half of the refrain starts with a much more compact text delivery, while the following words “tant que piteux / se mes semblans” are set out as a unison canon between superius and tenor over an organ point, before the last words is set to a drawn-out melisma.
The couplets are in the same mensuration as the refrain, tempus imperfectum diminutum, a disposition we find in several bergerettes, see for example Busnoys’ »M’a vostre cueur mis en oubli«. Here, the necessary contrast to the refrain is achieved by means of a more syllabic text delivery and a turn in the sound towards the flat side; the refrain is dominated by the bright sound of C- and G-hexachords. The restricted range of the tenor part demonstrates how effective and simple its “setting in sound” of the superius line is: For the first two lines (bb. 1-19) it presents the combined g- and c'-hexachords, in the next 23 bars it keeps entirely within the c'-hexachord before returning to the combined scale. In the couplets the tenor’s descend in bars 60-63 is forced by the surrounding voices into a short excursion to the f-hexachord – enough to create the needed tonal contrast. (2)
PWCH December 2025
1) Modern edition in Isaac 1974, vol. 6, no. 1.
2) In his chapter ‘Conflicting Attributions and Anonymous Chansons in the ‘Busnoys’ Sources of the Fifteenth Century’ Leeman L. Perkins considers the candidacy of this song for an attribution to Busnoys. Without reaching any conclusion, he lists the song's many common features with Busnoys’ style. However, the song's skilful use of the range-restricted tenor, which is foreign to Busnoys, is not mentioned (Perkins 1999, p. 331).