Editing Renaissance plagiarism: Manfredo Barbarino’s Symphoniae (1558) revisited

Manfredo Lupo Barbarino, an obscure composer who was active in Switzerland in the mid-16th century, received very bad press: he was charged and convicted of plagiarism and thrown into the purgatory of music history. Perhaps the fact that modern editors either ignored or dismissed his Symphoniae issued by Heinrich Petri in Basel 1558 is one of the collateral damages of this judgment. In fact, as Martin Ham brilliantly demonstrated, the complete music in this collection was stolen from a collection by Vincenzo Ruffo. In this paper, we want to revisit these works taking into consideration the context of their publication and the historical perception of plagiarism to make them readable again under the circumstances of their creation and not under the general condemnation musicology has submitted the reuse of music. Barbarino’s Symphoniae is an extravagant and hermetic testimony to humanistic culture in a time that was disruptive and complicated for the German-speaking areas of Central Europe. He reworked Ruffo’s motets using 13 Latin poems of praise, which Heinrich Glarean had dedicated to 13 Cantons of Switzerland. The humanist printer Heinrich Petri used this collection as an appendix to the second edition of his Epitome of Glareans Dodecachordon, which he published in 1559 for the Latin schools. They thus belong in the context of the popularization of Glarean's revolutionary and influential works on music theory. We will present the general plan of a digital network edition, in which addressing the Symphoniae from the perspective of its cultural context contributes to making sense about a work that has successfully offered resistance against its interpretation and edition since 1558