La Trobe University - Library: Medieval Music Database - Annual cycle of feasts of liturgical chant, liturgical polyphony and secular music of the late middle ages.

Vago et benigno Amor, fammi contento

ballata by Paolo da Firenze

Sources

Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds italien 568, fol. 77v-78 (3/2).

Editions

1. Italian Secular Music: Bartolino da Padova, Egidius de Francia, Giulielmus de Francia, Don Paolo da Firenze, edited by W. Thomas Marrocco, Monaco: Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1975. Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century IX, p. 186.
2. The Music of Fourteenth-Century Italy, edited by Nino Pirrotta and Ursula Günther, Rome: American Institute of Musicology. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 8/VI. [forthcoming]

Text Editions

CORSI, Giuseppe. Poesie musicali del Trecento, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1970, p. 284.

Literature

NADAS, John. 'The structure of MS Panciatichi 26 and the transmission of Trecento polyphony', Journal of the American Musicological Society, XXXIV (1981), p. 423.

Text

Vago et benigno Amor, fammi contento,
po' che la tuo catena
di libertà mi priva, ed i' consento.

Tu cominciasti Amor, soavemente,
ché sempre a l'alb'i' era
da' mie sospir amari per te desto,
sentendo al core el tuo foco cocente,
ben che dolceza m'era
ed è e fia, sanza essermi molesto,
per una dea a cui l'ha manifesto,
donna di pietà piena,
che trova i'llei el tuo valore spento

Translation

Gentle and benign Love, give me happiness,
given that your chain
deprives me, not unwilling, of freedom.

You, Love, began sweetly:
I was always awakened at dawn,
because of you, by my bitter sighs,
feeling your burning fire in my heart;
it was nevertheless a sweet fire,
and is, and will be, and it does not upset me.
My love is for a goddess, who knows about it,
a woman full of compassion
who finds in her the power to extinguish it.
Text revision and translation © Giovanni Carsaniga