Boethius : Songs of Consolation

Album review

Imprisoned at the start of the 520s, Boethius (real name Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, born around 477) couldn't have imagined that his final work would become one of the most-read books of the Middle Ages. Born into a noble Roman family in the days of the abdication of the last Western Emperor, Boethius undertook a fine career as a statesman, as a translator of Greek works into Latin, and as a poet. But the West was govern by an Ostrogothic King, Theoderic the Great, and Boethius's loyalty to the Senate of Rome made him suspect: accused of treason, he was imprisoned and then condemned to death in 524. In his Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, he describes his battle with himself, to accept his fate, concentrating on the great questions of good and evil. And we know that in the Middle Ages these texts were sung, as we have found musical notation in around thirty manuscripts dating from the 9th to early 12th centuries. The neumes used in this notation describe the overall contour of the melodies, a kind of aide-mémoire for singers who would know the precise notes already. As this oral tradition has since been lost, it long seemed impossible to reconstitute these melodies, but recent research has made it possible to identify the models of song hidden behind this notation: medieval musicians associated certain metric schemes used in the Consolation with particular styles of song. The singers and instrumentalists of Sequentia, veteran performers of songs from this period, have put these discoveries to good use, bringing us a collection of two dozen 11th-century songs; several of Boethius's poems are set to this notation, and in particular the most dramatic part of the text, where Boethius laments his fall. Some fifteen centuries separate us from these singular sounds which seem at once to surge from the depths of the ages, and at the same time to be so close to us, thanks to the clarity of their writing. © SM/Qobuz