J’ars de desir si enflamé d’amer 3v · Agricola, Alexander
Appearance in the group of related chansonniers:
*Dijon ff. 137v-138 »J’ars du desir si enflamé d’amer« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
*Nivelle ff. 74v-75 »J’ars de desir si enflamé d’amer« 3v · Edition · Facsimile
Other musical sources:
*Florence 178 ff. 22v-23 »Mom pere« 3v Alexander · Edition · Facsimile
Florence 229 ff. 80v-81 »[Without text]« 3v · Facsimile
This page with editions as a PDF
Edition: : Agricola 1970, vol. 5, p. 118 (Dijon).
Text: Rondeau quatrain; full text in Dijon and Nivelle; also found in Berlin 78.B.17 f. 159v, ed.: Löpelmann 1923, p. 300.
After Nivelle:
J’ars de desir, si enflamé d’amer 1) En ce point suis souvent jusqu’a pasmer j’ars de desir, si enflamé d’amer. Fort je me dueil, et ne m’en puis blasmer, j’ars de desir, si enflamé d’amer |
I burn with desire, so inflamed with love At this point I am often near passing away I burn with desire, so inflamed with love. I lament strongly, and I cannot blame myself, I burn with desire, so inflamed with love |
1) line 1; Dijon, “J’ars du desir ...”
2) line 2, Dijon starts “enflamé que l’eaue ...”
line 2, Nivelle, “jeulx” is missing (error)
3) line 3, Dijon, “ne peut estaindre veul qui tant” (error)
Evaluation of the sources:
This song was entered into the Dijon chansonnier by its main scribe, and it was added to the Nivelle chansonnier by a second scribe who entered a series of songs at the end of the manuscript. They apparently worked from the same or closely related exemplars. The differences in the music are very few; the only important ones are the appearance of two semibreves in the tenor’s bar 4 in Nivelle, where Dijon has a single brevis, and further on, a semibrevis (b. 26.2) is in Nivelle split into a minima note and rest. Both sources notate the song in tempus imperfectum and with a one-flat signature in the tenor only – a flat is in fact needed also in the contratenor all the way through. For both of the scribes, a problem has been that the words under the refrain's music must have been difficult to decipher. Both scribes have inadvertently omitted words, the Dijon scribe has repeated a word, and both just copied the end of the third line as “.. qui tant”, which is without meaning before the words are spoken.
The song is also preserved in two Florentine chansonniers of the early 1490s without its rather overblown French text. In both sources the mensuration is indicated as tempus imperfectum diminutum and both lower parts have one-flat signatures. Apart from some details the version in MS Banco Rari 229 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, is very like the one in Dijon. (1) In MS Magl.xix.178 in the same library “J’ars de desir” appears with the title/text incipit “Mom pere”. In this version many long note values have been broken up into shorter values, maybe in order to fit a different text; and for example the ascending sequence in bars 35 ff has been made more regular – see further the appended edition. It is by the first scribe in MS Florence 178 ascribed to “Alexander”.
One difference between Dijon and Nivelle a has an impact on the distribution of the words in the first line. It is in bar 4 where Dijon in the superius has two semibreves a' against breves in tenor and contratenor, while bar 4 in Nivelle has two semibreves f' in the tenor. It looks as if the Nivelle scribe has let the superius win over the lower voices and thus comes to control the joint text distribution. A performance following Dijon could ignore the tone repetition in bar 4 and sing it as a brevis and thus produce a different viable text presentation (see the edition). An interesting thing is that bar 4 in the two late Florentine sources have breves in all three parts supporting this interpretation.
Another interesting point concerns the notation of rhythm: After letting the contratenor plunge down an octave in bar 10, the composer needed a long note of the odd value of five semibreves (bb. 10.2-12). It is impossible to notate such a value with a single sign under tempus imperfectum (just as it is in our modern binary system), so he had to write a longa followed by a single semibrevis. Dijon, Nivelle and Florence 229 all agree on that; only Florence 178 simplified the matter by writing the long note as a brevis followed by three repeated semibreves; in bars 21-23.1 the scribe tried to indicate the value of five semibreves by writing it as a dotted longa – it did not work.
Comments on text and music:
The text is a rather strained essay in describing burning love in artful poetry. In the refrain the poet starts in rimes equivoques (“yst tant / itant”), but cannot keep it up. The music displays a slightly old-fashioned layout. A duo of voices a fifth a part (a-d'', d-g') is combined with a somewhat lower contratenor (Bb-d'), which is below the tenor mostly, but crosses above it and goes up an octave at endings (bb. 20 and 40). It is as if it cannot really decide whether it is a bass voice or an old-fashioned contratenor.
When one look at the song as it appears on the openings in Dijon and Nivelle, it seems old-fashioned – in undiminished tempus imperfectum and with octave leaps in its lowest voice. But it does not sound like that. In sound it is up-to-date for the early 1470s, euphonic and with a strong reliance on standard hexachordal figures. It starts very calmly in long note values and accelerates its activity in the second section and ends with a veritable rush to the cadence. This “rush” is remarkable. Here the texture changes from the core duet between superius and tenor to a contrapuntal setting of an ascending hexachord on Bb presented in the contratenor (bb. 31-33) in dotted semibreves, which disrupts the steady double rhythm and emphasizes the second section’s slide towards the flat side, and at the same time it sets the scene for the final cadence’s lively display of triads on F.
The song does not have a marked middle cadence; it just rests on the fifth f-c' in bar 21. This works fine for the first short couplet, but a repeat of the two first lines of the refrain does not make any sense. In performance it would be better just to repeat the first line, which comes to rest on a C-triad, before going on with the tierce.
The general impression of the song is that is a composition by a very young musician who tries his hand on recently learned stock phrases and contrapuntal gimmicks, and who found lots of possibilities to explore in a song layout, which was becoming slightly out-dated, combining it with new ideas and inspiration from older composers like Caron and Tinctoris. It belongs with songs by the young Basiron and others around 1470, which I have discussed in my article ‘Music, competition and the Art de seconde rhétorique: The youthful chansons of Gilles Mureau and Philippe Basiron’. (2)
The first scribe of MS Florence 178 ascribed the song to “Alexander”. The composer Alexander Agricola must have been very young, if he was the composer of the song, but in 1476 he was skilled and mature enough to be hired for a period as a member of the petits vicaires at the cathedral of Cambrai. (3) Surely, the Florentine scribe must have been better informed than us about the music of Agricola who in the 1490s had become a famous singer and composer and who visited and worked in Florence during the 1490s. On the other hand, it is obvious that this scribe wished to provide every song with a composer name, so this song starting a series ascribed to “Alexander” may just have been bundled with some mature songs by Agricola. That the song really is a work by a young composer displaying tendencies in the secular music in the period around 1470 supports the Florentine ascription to Alexander Agricola.
PWCH September 2025
1) Cf. the edition in Brown 1983 no. 79.
2) Danish Yearbook of Musicology 41:1 (2017), pp. 3–31, at p. 26-27.
3) Cf. Rob C. Wegman, ‘Pater meus agricola est: the early years of Alexander Agricola’, Early Music 34 (2006) pp. 375-89, and Joshua Rifkin, ‘Alexander Agricola and Cambrai: A Postscript’, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 54 (2004), pp. 23-30.