Una musa plebea - Lucidarium - poets from Tuscany and Corsica

Una musa plebea
Everyday Music from Renaissance Italy
Répertoires « mineurs » de la Renaissance italienne


Ensemble Lucidarium (Italien) & Traditional poets from Tuscany and Corsica
Poètes traditionnels de Toscane et de Corse



Who is this mysterious “musa plebia” – Raffael’s beautiful mistress, the daughter of a baker? Or does the famous beauty not stand for the power of the poetry of the people, Arcadian source, and inspiration for the poets of the Renaissance?

On this new release on the Raumklang label, the Italian musician Francis Biggi and his ensemble Lucidarium have succeeded in saving a musical treasure from oblivion: the centuries-old tradition of the sung recitation of verses that the poet-singer “invents” spontaneously exists to the present day in the folk music in several parts of Central Italy, on Sardinia and Corsica. This tradition demands flawless technique, solid knowledge of poetic meters and rhythms, musicality, a good ear, and a good voice – but above all: the singers, people from all walks of life, sing from the bottom of the heart about the muse who touches the heart, the tongue, and the mind. They improvise and sing their feelings, their outrage, their tenderness, and their dreams on the spur of the moment; they know how to share feelings and opinions with their audience; they analyze and comment upon the world with the wonderful weapon of poetry.

Biggi frames these unique specimens of a waning culture with the most beautiful and the justifiably most famous songs and instrumental pieces of the Italian Renaissance. The North Italian courts of the fifteenth century were the fruitful soil in which a musical style could blossom, a style that blended the refined polyphony of the Franco-Flemish school with the Italian love of beautiful melody and clear counterpoint, and that in this way influenced the aesthetics of music throughout Europe way beyond the following century.