In the two weeks spent there, each afternoon (save for Friday and Saturday, these days being given over to religious observance) was spent in telling stories for their mutual entertainment. The work tells of how ten aristocratic young people (three men and seven women) – and, naturally, their servants – supposedly took refuge from the plague in the hills outside the city. The starting point of the work is the outbreak of the Black Death which struck Florence in 1348. Its stories have provided the source for several operas, such as Vivaldi’s Griselda (1751) and Carlos Chavez’s The Visitors (1957).
The Decameron ( Il Decameron) is one of the great works of medieval European literature – great in terms both of its own intrinsic merits and the influence it has had on later writers, composers and artists (so, to mention just a few English examples, Boccaccio’s collection of stories influenced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the chief source of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well is Boccaccio’s story of Gilette of Narbonne (the 9 th story of Day Three in The Decameron) Keats’s poem ‘Isabella or, The Pot of Basil’ is based on Boccaccio’s narrative of Lisabetta (the 5 th story of Day Four). For some readers of MusicWeb, some background may, I hope, be useful: I have long been a lover of The Decameron in the days when I was a postgraduate literature student it fascinated me and when, later, I was fortunate enough to be able to visit Italy regularly it was the book I always took with me to read (usually in the Penguin Classics translation by G.H. I’ vivo amando / Io son sì vaga dell amia bellezza. So, for example, where Day 1 is concerned, the name and dates of the original composer are given, followed by the title (most often the opening words) of his composition, this being followed (after an oblique line) by the opening words of the ballata from The Decameron which is here sung to that music, thus: So, for example, given that no period settings of the ballate from the Decameron areextant,O’Learyhas, in her own words,“plunged into the surviving codices, looking for ballate that most closely matched the syllable count and, after carefully following the underlay of the original borrowed songs (exquisitely florid phrases, funkily syncopated hockets, rest-broken words and all) took them to my bandmates for us to use as the starting point in our (often very quick) journey to somewhere else entirely.” I have, in the track list at the end of this review, sought to list both the musical source and the text from The Decameron with which it is here conjoined. So much so that it is well-nigh impossible to fit the discs into the conventions of this website. This project, under the direction of singer Catríona O’Leary, involves a number of choices, unexpected combinations, omissions and juxtapositions. One of the things that standing apart from such ‘conventions’ means is expressed succinctly on the back of the box containing this two-CD set: “Medieval Music meets Jazz, Rock and Other to revivify the songs from Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14 th century masterpiece The Decameron”. We shouldn’t therefore, expect a group which chooses to call itself Anakronos to feel confined by conventional temporal and stylistic boundaries. The Greek prefix ana has a range of meanings, which include against, wrong and apart from the noun chronos means, of course, ‘time’. The clue is in the name of the ensemble performing this music: ‘Anakronos’. Given the name of the label on which the disc is released, one might replace the words “bold and inauthentic” by a single word “heretical” – but what a thoroughly enjoyable disc it is. This is a splendidly bold and ‘inauthentic’ treatment of some words and music from fourteenth-century Tuscany. Citadel Of Song: Ballate from Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’
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