Some Notes on the Two-voice Ballatas by Francesco Landini in the San Lorenzo Palimpsest

Gatherings reconstructed as xi and xiii of the San Lorenzo Palimpsest (Firenze, Archivio del Capitolo di San Lorenzo, 2211) contain seventeen ballatas by Francesco Landini. The legibility of some of these works increased considerably following publication of the multispectral images of SL, permitting a new assessment. My particular focus is the manuscript tradition of Francesco Landini’s two-voice ballatas in SL: i provide a synoptic transcription of the ballata De sospirar sovente – which appears in SL in an unpublished redaction – and the first edition of C[…] (tempo fugge), a recently discovered two-voice ballata by Landini, also unpublished. The two case studies epitomize SL’s importance in the transmission of works by the most famous composer of the italian Trecento, as well as the manuscript’s contribution to our understanding of fourteenth-century music