Orphans of Orpheus: Music Lost and Regained in Spanish Golden Age Poetry

Abstract:Early modern Spanish lyric's connections with music are manifold, and imagery of instruments and singing voices is virtually everywhere in the texts, often playing a part in the articulation of affect and providing a vocabulary for poets to reflect about their own verbal powers. And yet, as I argue in this article, the story of Golden Age lyric begins with tension and conflict at the center of the music–poetry relation. There is, I contend, a discrepancy between the Orphean tropes that equate writing verse with playing music, and the relative autonomy that poetry and music were developing in Renaissance Spain. In this context, I draw attention to a nostalgia that cuts across the texts: the sense that poets have only inherited one half of Orpheus's torrential and effective mixture of media, poetry, and song. To make these points, I draw from a collection of printed and manuscript sources from 1500 to 1700, by poets canonical and obscure.