Archipoeta, Confessio goliae - Modo Antiquo live

Archipoeta, "Estuans intrinsecus" (Confessio Goliae) with its original medieval tune
Cagliari, Festival Echi Lontani, 2011

Modo Antiquo | direzione Bettina Hoffmann

Alberto Allegrezza, voce
Ugo Galasso, flauti diritti, ciaramelle
Bettina Hoffmann, viella
Marina Bonetti, arpa
Giovanni Bellini, liuto


Estuans intrinsecus, or the Confessio Goliae by the Archipoeta, written in Pavia in 1163, was and is one of the most famous secular poems of the Middle Ages. Proof of this lies in the many imitators and forgers who took the Confessio Goliae as their formal and ideal model, and the 37 manuscripts through which it has come down to us. Today, it is the poem that most emblematically has shaped our collective image of the goliards as exactly that, goliardic, scoffing, sharp-tongued and pleasure seeing, serf to no one except Bacchus and Venus. The Archipoeta himself, who scoffs heartily at those solitary poets who chastise themselves in the hope of writing immortal works, has succeeded, with a light touch and a belly full of good food and wine, in sending us a message that has travelled over 800 years of history.
But the sources hand down the ode in mutilated form: neither in the Carmina Burana manuscript that contains all of its 25 verses, nor in the other shorter sources is its melody ever transcribed, a fate that was quite common at the time: despite the intense research work that has been performed it has so far been impossible to reconstruct the melodies for more than a fifth of Carmina Burana , most of it remains mute written text.
Thanks to the research by Johann Friedrich Hoffmann (University of Cologne, Department of Medieval Latin) in 2006 it has been possible to trace the Archipoeta’s melody. The starting point for this reconstruction is a contemporary anonymous poem, that in peripheral source we find preceded, for no obvious logical reason, by the first verses of the Confessio. These are the so called Ansingestrophen, a rather common way of indicating that metre and music are identical; we could translate as “With the melody of…” And luck would have it that in a third, slightly later source, we have come across this poem complete with melody, written furthermore in a notation that is still decipherable and playable to this day: the link between the Archipoeta’s words and his music is – finally – complete and secure.