Musik af William Byrd, John Bull, Orlando Gibbons.

Parthenia, or the Maydenhead of the first musicke that was ever printed for the Virginalls is perhaps the most important early publication of English keyboard music. It was first published either late 1612 or early 1613 and, as its title indicates, was the first printed collection of keyboard music to appear in England. The “mastermind” behind Parthenia was the engraver William Hole, who conceived it as a wedding gift to Princess Elizabeth Stuart (the second child and eldest daughter of James VI and I) and Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The extravagant wedding, whose costs almost bankrupted King James, took place on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1613; stage plays, musical performances, mock naval battles on the Thames, and fireworks were included in the festivities accompanying the ceremony.

Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick only stayed in London for two months after the wedding, thereafter leaving for Frederick’s court in Heidelberg (with the wedding celebrations continuing along the way). After their departure, William Hole apparently decided to offer Parthenia to a wider public: while the first issue bears a dedication specifically addressed to the royal couple, in subsequent printings the original dedication was removed and the volume re-dedicated “to all the Maisters and Louers of Musicke.” Of the fifteen surviving copies of Parthenia, there is only one of the first print containing the original dedication; all the remaining copies are from subsequent prints published between 1613 (issued later in the year than the first print, after Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick had left England) and 1659. The popularity of Parthenia is reflected both in its multiple reprints and the fact that it made its way in other parts of Europe and several pieces were copied into other continental manuscripts.

The title Parthenia, originating from the Greek word for “virgin,” has multiple connotations. First, it highlights the groundbreaking nature of the publication itself, as, in addition to being the first printed keyboard collection in England (and, indeed, anywhere else in Europe), it was also the first music publication in England to be printed from copper plates. Second, it reflects the name of the instruments upon which the pieces were meant to be played (“virginalls” is also derived from the word “virgin”). Third, it pays tribute to the fascination of that time with antiquity, and possibly alludes to the character of Parthenia in Sir Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia. Finally, it refers to Elizabeth Stuart herself, named in honor of the “the Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I, who may be regarded as the true recipient of this collection—the dedication clearly states that the pieces had been especially selected for her to play for her soon-to-be husband Frederick.

Parthenia consists of twenty-one pieces by three different composers (referred to as “three famous Masters” on the title page): William Byrd (c. 1540-1623), John Bull (c. 1562-1628), and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). It is divided into three sections, with each section presenting the music of a single composer. There are eight pieces by William Byrd, seven by John Bull, and six by Orlando Gibbons. John Bull’s inclusion was doubly significant, since, in addition to “a famous Master,” he was also Elizabeth Stuart’s teacher. In terms of choosing an appropriate instrument for performance, “virginalls” at the time was a generic term that referred to any plucked keyboard instrument.

The pieces represent a rich variety of genres and compositional styles. The collection begins, appropriately enough, with a prelude; rather surprisingly, it also ends with a prelude—a symbolic tribute, perhaps, to the royal dedicatees’ beginning of married life. The majority of the intervening movements belong to dance genres, and more specifically the pavane and the galliard. Historically, pavane-galliard pairs provide one of the first instances of dance movements consistently grouped together. While formally both dances contain three repeated phrases (AABBCC), they have contrasting characters: the pavane is a stately processional dance in duple meter, while the galliard is a lively, athletic dance in triple meter (and it is said that Queen Elizabeth I practiced galliards for her morning exercise). When the two dances were grouped together, it was common for the galliard to be based on musical ideas belonging to the preceding pavane. In Parthenia, all five pavanes are indeed followed by one or two galliards, but there are five additional galliards that appear independently. Another genre prevalent at the time, variations based on popular tunes and grounds, appears in three pieces: Orlando Gibbons’s The Queenes Command, and John Bull’s pavane and galliard pair St. Thomas Wake (where variation technique is wedded to the tripartite dance form). Finally, the imitative contrapuntal style of Gibbons’s Fantazia of foure parts provides the perfect counterbalance to the improvisatory nature of the preludes.

The variety of genres in Parthenia is matched by the presence of different compositional styles. The early seventeenth century was a transitional time when the stile antico of the Renaissance coexisted alongside more modern idioms. Gibbons’s Fantazia of foure parts provides an excellent example of the “old-fashioned” musical language of academic, strict counterpoint, while the preludes and some of the dance movements contain elements that point towards the emerging Baroque aesthetic. The performer must also traverse a considerable range of technical demands that encompass digital dexterity, rhythmic complexities, and the ability to elucidate the polyphonic strands inherent in several pieces. Judging from Parthenia’s contents, Elizabeth Stuart must have been a highly accomplished performer.

The original dedication to Parthenia contains a somewhat cryptic passage that singles out the “neighbour letters E and F, the vowell that makes so sweet a Consonãt, Her notes so linkt and wedded together seeme liuely Hierogliphicks of the harmony of mariage…” The author has linked these two letters together because they represent the royal couple: “E” refers to Elizabeth Stuart, and “F” to Frederick. This symbolic association musically comes to life in Gibbons’s The Queenes Command, where the two “liuely Hierogliphicks” take on the guise of the pitches E and F. These two pitches play a central role in the piece: they are the two opening notes, and each section begins alternately on either E or F. After this musical reenactment of the union of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick, the final prelude bursts in joyous celebration through a stream of exuberant figurations and cascading scalar passages.

John Moraitis, 21 January 2016

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Alina Rotaru studied piano and choral conducting at the music academy in her hometown of Bucharest. After moving to Germany, she studied harpsichord with Siegbert Rampe and Wolfgang Kostujak at the Folkwang University of the Arts Essen, with Bob van Asperen at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and with Carsten Lohff and Detlef Bratschke at the University of the Arts Bremen. She is an active soloist and ensemble player, and also in charge of various orchestral, opera, and sacred music projects of the German Early and Late Baroque as an artistic director. As a soloist, she has performed across most of Europe, as well as in Japan, South America and USA. She teaches at the University of the Arts in Bremen. Her solo recordings of harpsichord works by J.P. Sweelinck, J.J. Froberger, and English virginalists have earned excellent reviews in the music press and amongst her peers. Together with viol player Darius Stabinskas, Alina is the co-founder of the ensemble MORGAINE, which focuses on the music of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For the research of organ manuscripts from the Polish-Lithuanian-Commonwealth, Alina Rotaru received in 2019 a scholarship from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture. In 2020 she initiated the “Sigismundus Lauxmin International Harpsichord Contest”, so far the only contest of its kind in the Baltic States, which focuses on early repertoire and especially on music Polish and Lithuanian heritage.

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