La Lyre Chrestienne (Lyon, 1560) enfin retrouvée

Published in Lyons by Simon Gorlier in 1560, the Lyre chrestienne is the latest sixteenth-century musical print from that city to resurface, having vanished for nearly a century. It is held by the Bibliothèque de Genève under the shelfmark PFS 642(1). Dedicated to Marguerite de Savoie by Guillaume Guéroult, the Lyre chrestienne is a collection of poems from Joachim Du Bellay, Guéroult, Theodore Beza, and Marguerite de Navarre, set to music by Antoine de Hauville and Didier Lupi Second. This volume can be considered a collection of spiritual poems with music added, as a sequel to Guéroult’s Premier livre de chansons spirituelles published in 1548. It represents Guéroult’s tribute to Du Bellay, who died in 1560, and includes La Complainte de Judith, a poem written by Guéroult as a counterpart to his poem Suzanne un jour, which enjoyed considerable success on both the poetic and musical levels. The music by Hauville rather wisely adopts the style of Protestant spiritual songs, based on a homophonic structure.