Published
Mort, Tu a Navré De Ton Dart (In Memoriam Gilles Binchois)
Mort, Tu a Navré De Ton Dart (In Memoriam Gilles Binchois) also known as “Déploration sur la mort de Binchois,” this vocal work was written on the occasion of the death of Ockeghem’s fellow Flemish composer Gilles Binchois.
Johannes Ockeghem (1420-96) was the most important composer of his generation in the Flemish school that dominated Renaissance music.
Possibly a pupil of the eminent composer Gilles Binchois (1400-1460), Ockeghem served as composer and choirmaster to three French kings: Charles VII, Louis XI, and Charles VIII.
At his death, a Déploration (lament) was composed by his pupil (according to tradition), the French composer Josquin Desprez, and a lament by the philosopher Erasmus was set to music by the French composer Johannes Lupi (c. 1506-39). Ockeghem’s masses, motets, and chansons (secular part-songs) show great skill at counterpoint based on melodic imitation.
Death, you have wounded with your dart
the father of joy
in unfurling your standard
over Binchois, that paragon of goodness.
Rhetoric, God be my witness,
has lamented her servant.
Music, with a piteous expression,
mourns and has dressed herself in black.
In his youth he was a soldier
of honourable estate.
Then he chose the better part,
serving God with humility.His body is mourned and lamented,
which lies beneath his tombstone.
Alas, may it please you, in mercy,
to pray for his soul.
Weep, whoever is of good will,
weep for your university,
pray for his soul.
He was such a Christian
that his name lives in fame
and Fame willingly attends him.
Pray for his soul!Lower voices:
Have mercy, kind Lord Jesus, give him rest.
Kind Lord Jesus, give rest to him
whom you redeemed with your precious blood.
The lament, understood in its broadest sense as a funerary composition in memory of a musician or public figure, has its earliest examples in Renaissance polyphony, as found in works by Johannes Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, Jacob Arcadelt and William Byrd, among others. The lament as a monodic song of sorrowful and melancholy character, composed as an expression of mourning, reached its golden age during the seventeenth century, particularly in Italy. The emergence of accompanied melody as the preferred texture in the early years of that century—in contrast to the polyphonic and contrapuntal textures dominant in the previous one—gave the lament a central role as an ideal genre for expressing emotionally intense and dramatic moments.