Variazioni su una donna abbandonata: “Fors seulement” alla corte dei Paesi Bassi

Johannes Ockeghem’s rondeau Fors seulement and its reworkings have been discussed by musicologists since the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have focused mainly on the music of the original composition and on its relationship to its reworkings, however, marginalising the sources that transmit them and their material and medial characteristics, and thus not addressing the significance of these reworkings and the reasons for their success and diffusion. The present article returns to Fors seulement and its reworkings but, unlike previous studies, it concentrates on the anthologies of reworkings of Ockeghem’s rondeau produced at the Habsburg court in the Netherlands, in particular that of the set of part-books A-Wn, Mus.Hs. 18746, one of the most interesting yet least studied collections. This study focuses on the musical and at the same time material and medial characteristics of these anthologies, on the relationships between the pieces they contain, on their context of compilation and use, on their patronage, and on some technical-compositional aspects of the reworkings in relation to these elements. The article concludes by advancing some hypotheses regarding the interest surrounding the Fors-seulement reworkings at the Habsburg court of the Low Countries and their possible significance in the context of the culture and politics of this court in the early decades of the sixteenth century.