Some Observations Regarding Parody in the Early Fifteenth-Century Italian Mass: An Introductory Study of Zacara’s D’amor Languire.

The oeuvre of Magister Antonius Zachara da Teramo stands out among the works of ars nova Italian composers not because of its size—his seventeen secular compositions are dwarfed in number by the 30 or more of Andrea da Firenze’s, to say nothing of the scores of ballate by Francesco Landini—nor for its immediate beauty and accessibility, for which Ciconia’s works seem to reign, if late twentieth century CD sales are any indication. Rather it is the mysterious and the unusual which Zacara conveys in his works that seem so intriguing: he hides the name of Florence in an anagram in a rare bitextual ballata,1 he posses a riddle to the singer in the text of the rhythmically complex Sumite karissimi, only through solving which can he or she discover the last line. In a motion surely accompanied by an ironic wink to the listener, Zacara submits a Credo, the mass section where Christians express their believe in one true God, based on material from a ballata he composed earlier: Deus Deorum, Pluto: Pluto, God of Gods. Zacara composed at least three more of these song-mass movement pairs, a study of which forms the bulk of this paper. I shall particularly focus on the model for the Credo Scabroso, Zacara’s D’amor languire, suspirare e piangere and in the end analyze the connections between the two works. Although a secular model for the credo had been sought for most of this century, it was not until 1988 when John Nádas and Agostino Ziino discovered two new bifolios of the Lucca codex that such a source was found.