Per Brahe’s lutebook

The primary source and inspiration for this recording is a collection of lute tablatures, collated and written down by Per Brahe the Younger (1602–1680), known as Brahe’s lute book and which is held at the library in Skokloster Castle, Sweden.

Brahe studied at several universities abroad and travelled extensively throughout Europe. Containing around fifty lute compositions, the manuscript bears an inscription with the date of 1620 and the location of Giessen, Germany, where Brahe spent two years studying at the university. There his studies included a grounding in French, Hebrew, law – and the lute. For the most part, the lute book contains works that Brahe seemingly noted down himself. Some of the works are so advanced that one must assume he had already studied the lute as a child in Sweden. In the 16th and 17th centuries, lute playing was a common pastime among the Swedish aristocracies, right the way up to the royal household.

At this time, there were very few printed books of lute music in existence. A great deal of music was kept in handwritten manuscripts collated by enthusiastic amateurs or students. Often, these sources are plagued by an unclear hand, small mistakes and a lack of attention to detail. In this regard, Brahe’s lute book is no exception. For this reason, the present recording includes pieces as they appear in the source alongside more ornamented versions of the same pieces. These pieces too doubtless formed an integral part of Brahe’s musical landscape.

The majority of the works in this collection are dances, such as ballets, galliards, pavanes and courants. The music is typical of much 17th-century Central-European lute repertoire. French, English and German works are particularly well represented. Of all the composers featured, John Dowland has the most individual works in the lute book, five in total. Dowland worked at the Danish court at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, and his music was still popular some twenty years later. English musical and theatrical groups travelled through northern Germany and Poland in the early 17th century, a fact that may partly explain the preponderance of English music in Brahe’s lute book. Curiously, there are no examples of Swedish or other Nordic music in the collection.

The manuscript contains several lute arrangements of well-known chorale melodies, here presented in lute tablature. Brahe was a Lutheran, and Giessen was a key site of Lutheran instruction. As such, it is not surprising that among these chorale melodies we find A Mighty Fortress is Our God (25, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’), the so-called ‘battle hymn of the Reformation’, and From Heaven Above to Earth I Come (29, ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her’). The present intabulations of these chorale melodies are very decorative and, as such, quite unique in the extant lute literature. The collection also contains a number of works for which there are no known concordances in other sources. Such works include Charles Boquet’s ‘Lamentatio’ and the anonymous ‘Phantasia’, in which the lute is tuned, quite exceptionally, to a Bb-major chord.