«Po’ che veder non posso la mie donna»: una ballata adespota tra Francesco Landini e Paolo da Firenze?

Many pieces from the mediaeval musical repertoire are handed down anonymously by the manuscript sources. To date scholars have only rarely sought to discover the authors, not least because it is often a far from easy task, especially in the absence of certain evidence and a consensus among specialists regarding analytic methods. One of the pieces that has remained anonymous is the ballade for three voices Po’ che veder non posso la mie donna, which has come down to us in a single copy in the Codex Reina (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds nouv. acq. frç. 6771). Recently Alessandra Fiori has proposed its attribution to a “modest” epigone of Francesco Landini, whereas Jeannie Ma. Guerrero has suggested that the author could be one of Landini’s followers, Paolo da Firenze. In an attempt to verify the plausibility of these attributions, this article considers various significant aspects and parameters. These include the musical structures, the poetic text, the compositional processes, the treatment of dissonances, the “sonorities”, the position of the ballade within the Codex Reina, the cadences, the musical repetitions, the function of the countertenor, the parallel consonances and the treatment of the melody.

Keywords: Landini; Paolo da Firenze; Mediaeval music; Ballade; Ars nova; Trecento; Attributionism.