The Greek Songs of Niccolò Tommaseo: Musical Parallels in Contemporary Greece

Description

Niccolò Tommaseo‘s Greek Songs, published in Venice in 1842, constitute the third volume of a broader work, Popular Songs of Tuscany, Corsica, Illyria, and Greece. This collection features hundreds of traditional songs, carefully gathered, translated, and enriched with fascinating linguistic, historical, and anthropological notes.

Tommaseo does not provide the Greek text for the songs he translated from already published sources, only for the unpublished ones. However, even during my first reading of his translations, I noticed numerous similarities with Greek songs I had previously studied. Almost as a game, I began searching for the original Greek verses and was amazed to discover that, in many cases, these “similarities” extended to entire lines, couplets, and sometimes even entire songs that are still sung and danced in Greece today.

From there, the step to comparing Tommaseo‘s entire collection with my own bibliographic and discographic archive was a short one—indeed, a very short one. And so, this book was born, with the aim of highlighting the centuries-old continuity of the Greek people’s traditional culture, rather than that of poets and scholars. Nearly two hundred years later, we can still hear from the lips and instruments of the Greeks the very sounds that both Fauriel and Tommaseo—who had never been to Greece before publishing their works—had only read about on paper.

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