Singing complaintes criminelles across Europe
- Traduction(s) :
- Les complaintes criminelles en Europe [fr]
Résumé
The complainte, a song about crime and punishment, is not simply a French phenomenon, but has been found all over Europe since the early modern period. This article compares the French complaintes of 1870-1940 with their counterparts in English, Italian, German and Dutch to reveal European similarities as well as regional differences. Beginning with a brief discussion of the term ‘complaint’ and its usage in the early modern era, we move into the nineteenth century. Everywhere we find that murder remains the most common subject, but that the numbers of victims are usually much higher in German songs. We find that there are variations in the use of melodies, and that the Italian songs do not use the tradition of contrafactum. The biggest difference is in the printing technologies: the size of the sheets or booklets varies a lot from region to region, and the use of images has seen great changes since the early modern era.
Plan
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1The French complainte tradition is rich enough to have its own database at Criminocorpus, but this tradition of singing about crimes and punishment did not exist in isolation, independent of European song traditions. This essay explores some of the other linguistic traditions in Europe from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries - English, German, Dutch and Italian - to permit comparison with French practice. It examines print format, subject matter, choice of music and language. We find many continuities in Europe - for example, murder is still the most common subject, sensational language was de rigueur everywhere, and the tradition of contrafactum (putting new words to familiar tunes) is widespread - which shows us that there were transnational influences. But there were also important differences. While nineteenth-century French songs indicate a tune for almost every complainte, this practice is much less common in English and German songs. There is also a surprising lack of technological sophistication in the printing of street songs in the nineteenth century, especially in German and Dutch songsheets, all the more surprising given the advanced expertise in woodcutting in those regions in the early modern era, and related technological advancements in the nineteenth century. Other technological innovations at the time, such as the telegraph, also allowed news to travel faster, so songs were no longer a primary source of information as they had been in the sixteenth century, for example. Instead, we find songs featuring social commentary on international news events, such as executions in the United States. But first, let's go back in time, to look at the origins of the term ‘complaint’ itself, as it could give songs and their performance a layer of meaning before a single word had been sung.
Discussion of the term 'complaint' in other languages
- 1 Kate van Orden, ‘Female “Complaintes”: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-C (...)
2Although this essay focuses on the period 1870-1940, a few moments should be spent first discussing the use of the word ‘lament’ and its meaning in other languages in the early modern period. Although it came to mean ‘crime song’ in nineteenth-century France, it is part of a long tradition originating in the classical era, where it tends to take two forms. The first is the classic genre of lament, in which the noble lady or goddess laments her lost love, usually in a pastoral scene. It is therefore a feminine genre, exclusively sung in the voices of women.1 The second is the complaint of people who demand justice for the unfair treatment they have suffered: the communal complaint. So how is the term used in crime and execution ballads in other languages in Europe?
Italian songs
- 2 Una McIlvenna, ‘The Power of Music: the Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads’, Past & (...)
- 3 Una McIlvenna, ‘Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy’ in Voice and Texts in Early Moder (...)
3Other languages such as English and Italian use the term ‘lamentation’ or ‘lamento’ in their execution songs rather than ‘complaint’. When you compare the Italian lamenti of the early modern era in female voices with those in male voices, something very interesting happens. The first thing to understand is that, unlike English, French and German execution songs, Italian ballads never provide a tune direction.2 Instead of using the contrafactum technique, Italian songs are divided into three metrical forms. The first is ottava rima, the poetic eight-line meter in which epic tales like Orlando Furioso (he of La Chanson du Roland) have been sung. The second form is the terza rima, the meter of Dante and Boccaccio; and the third form is barzelletta, a term that translates to ‘joke’ or ‘joke,’ a lighthearted strophic song with a refrain that encourages audience participation.3 The melody one uses for each metrical form depends on one’s region of origin in Italy: the citizens of Rome would have a repertoire of melodies for singing ottava that would be different from the citizens of Florence, for example.
4This metrical structure of Italian execution ballads is what dictates how the criminal is portrayed: in ottava, the facts of the crime are told in the third-person voice in a chronological linear narrative, ending with their execution. Surprisingly, there is often no warning or moral at the end of this category of songs as found in other languages. The ballads in terza, on the other hand, are exclusively composed about noble people, who sing in the first-person voice of their crimes and who appear very sympathetic. In the third category, the barzellette are songs that ridicule the fate of characters who were already seen as outsiders: Moors, Jews, and infamous bandits.
- 4 Il piatoso lamento che fece M. Prudentia prima che fusse condotta alla Giustitia. Con la nuova giun (...)
5If we compare the songs which have ‘lamento’ in the title and which are about women, we see, unsurprisingly, that they are in terza rima, exclusively in the voices of noble women who command our sympathy. The lament of Prudentia Anconitana, who murdered her husband in 1557, presents her as a very compassionate figure.4 This song was so popular that at least five different versions were produced until 1823. So when Italian lamentations are voiced by women, they conform to the expectations of the classical genre: sympathetic and distressed women who seek our compassion by conforming to traditional gender roles. However, the pattern is very different when looking at the lamenti in the men's voices: these are often in the barzelletta form which, by its structure and language, ridicules men awaiting their imminent executions. Thus, in the Italian tradition, to sing about a man in the form of a lament seems to be a means of effeminising him, of reducing him, of emasculating him.
English songs
- 5 The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent, who for the loue of one Mosb (...)
- 6 www.ebba.english.ucsb.edu Cherche pour: ‘lament*’ + death + punishment
6In English execution ballads, one sees instead the word ‘lamentation’ used instead of ‘complaint’, although The Complaint and Lamentation of Mistress Arden of Feversham in Kent of 1663 uses both terms.5 A search of the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), an online database that has digitized nearly 10,000 English ballads from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for the term ‘lamentation’ in the titles found thirty different songs that use this term.6 This gives us an indication of how this narrative lament device has been framed since its very early days. A qualitative analysis of these ballads provides some interesting results:
71. These songs are not gendered. We find the term ‘lamentation’ used in songs about men and women, without the emasculating connotations for men as in Italian.
2. Many of the songs - ten out of thirty - are about noble people, such as the Earl of Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh, but this fact is not necessarily remarkable: executions of noble people were always newsworthy and produced multiple ballads.
3. The word ‘lamentation’ is closely associated with the last words of the criminal in the moments before his death. The criminal does not lament his crime, but instead his punishment.
8We see many of the same characteristics that we find in French complaintes from the same era: usually a first-person voice who admits his crimes and is remorseful for his transgressions and, while justice is (almost) never challenged, the song nonetheless seeks our compassion for the repentant sinner.
German songs
- 7 Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (...)
- 8 McIlvenna, ‘The Power of Music’, 63-65.
9The most striking exception to all of these examples, however, is the German execution ballads which never use the first person voice, prosopopeia, seen in execution ballads in other languages. The term for complaint we would look for is ‘klage’ or ‘klagelied’, which never appears in the title of an execution ballad (at least none that I have found) and rarely appears in a song.7 To understand why the Germans did not choose the first-person narrative device, it should be noted that early modern German execution ballads only used four recognized melodies, all of which are chorales, or simple hymns, which have as theme the punishment of sinners and compassion for them.8 So it seems that, from its origins, the perspective of German songs was at a remove from the subject, without wanting to encourage a close identification with the sinner which is so common in other languages.
Dutch songs
10Like German songs, it is rare to find the term ‘klag’ in the titles of Dutch execution songs, and it is not found until after 1700. The only songs in which I found the term ‘klag’ in the lyrics relate to fictional examples involving noble people, where the verb ‘klagen’ refers to a person who thirsts for a lost love, rather than bemoaning his sins or crimes. Thus, one can see a similarity to the German songs, in which there is little identification with the repentant sinner who is executed.
Execution ballads in the years 1870-1940
English
11The search for historical English songs in recent years has been profoundly aided by two major digitization projects: the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA: www.ebba.english.uscb.edu ) which focuses on so-called 'broadside' ballads (because of their printed format) from the sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century; and the Bodleian Library Database in Oxford (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/), which has digitized more than 30,000 ballads, most of which date from the nineteenth century. If we search the Bodleian website, we find that between 1900 and 1950, there are only forty ballads in total, on any subject. Somewhat surprisingly, the most common theme for these early years of the twentieth century is the Crimean War (1853-1856), which had been over for almost fifty years in 1900, but the fact that the most popular themes are soldiers, drunkenness, and unemployment meant that the consequences of this war lasted a long time in Great Britain. It also reveals that the English printed ballad was disappearing at the start of the twentieth century.
12If we look in the Bodleian for the term ‘lament’ and limit this search to 1850-1900, we see that murder is the subject most often associated with this term (42 songs), followed by shipwrecks (15), then 'Fenians' (Irish rebels who were very topical in this era, 9), then songs about Irish emigration (8). Given the Great Famine, one of the causes of the large Irish population in London, it is likely that most of these Irish-themed laments are about homesickness or the severity of the treatment inflicted on the Irish in England.
13Since murder is the most common subject in these complaints, we therefore find many men lamenting the terrible crimes they have committed. The ballad about Hubert Lingley, who shot and killed his uncle in Norwich in 1867, is not in the first-person, but presents Lingley as a remorseful and somewhat sympathetic character who regrets his violent actions:
Within a dungeon in Norwich gaol,
One Hubbard Lingley in grief bewails
His own kind uncle he did kill and slay,
On a Friday morning in the month of May.
For that cruel murder he’s doomed to die
- 9 Lamentation of H. Lingley (London: Disley, 1867) http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/9575(...)
On Norwich fatal sad gallows high.9
14Oddly enough, twice in the song, the lyrics compare Lingley to ‘Rush’; this is a reference to James Blomfield Rush, who committed a sensational double murder in 1848 which captured the imagination of the general public and inspired many songs and pamphlets, as well as pottery, wax figures, and a novel.10 Execution ballads about Rush were incredibly popular: one street singer recalled that
- 11 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1861), 223-224.
Since Dan'el Good there had been little or nothing doing in the murder line -- no one could cap him -- till Rush turned up a regular trump for us. Why I went down to Norwich expressly to work the execution. I worked my way down there with `a sorrowful lamentation' of his own composing, which I'd got written by the blind man expressly for the occasion. On the morning of the execution we beat all the regular newspapers out of the field; for we had the full, true, and particular account down, you see, by our own express, and that can beat anything that ever they can publish; for we gets it printed several days afore it comes off, and goes and stands with it right under the drop; and many's the penny I've turned away when I've been asked for an account of the whole business before it happened.11
- 12 Donna Loftus, ‘Work, Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 19:4 ( (...)
- 13 Charles Hindley, The History of the Catnach Press (London: Hindley, 1886), 92.
15One can see here how it was clear that a lamentation was expected to be in the voice of the repentant criminal (‘of his own composition’), but that it was clearly written in advance by paid ballad composers, and printed well in advance of the actual execution. The mention of the song's composition by the ‘blind man’ is also evidence of the ancient connection of disability with street singing. This anecdote provides one of the few pieces of evidence for ballad sellers singing while at the execution itself, but it is somewhat unreliable: Henry Mayhew, from whom this quote is taken, was somewhat notorious in his inventions of London life and its citizens.12 Although Mayhew tended to exaggerate, Charles Lindley's estimate of the number of ballads printed and sold about the executions of high profile criminals by Jemmy Catnach, the leading printer of street literature in London, gives some idea of the enormous volume of ballads in the streets of London in the nineteenth century:13
Name of criminal |
Number of ballads |
Rush (1849) |
2,500,000 |
The Mannings (1849) |
2,500,000 |
Courvoisier (1840) |
1,666,000 |
Good (1842) |
1,650,000 |
Corder (murder of Maria Marten) (1828) |
1,650,000 |
Greenacre (1837) |
1,666,000 |
- 14 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 224.
16There are several extant examples of different ballads about each of these executions. There were ten songs composed in total about Rush, some of which are positioned on the broadside alongside another unrelated ballad. It was very common in British broadsides to have two or more unrelated ballads on the same sheet. It is not certain how the street singers sold these songsheets on heterogeneous subjects, but one of those singers recalled the lucrative nature of Rush's execution: ‘Irish Jem, The Ambassador, never goes to bed but he blesses Rush the farmer; and many’s the time he’s told me that we should never have such another windfall as that’.14
- 15 R. Nagle, ‘ “A Singular Case” and Dr. Smethurst’, Medico-Legal Journal 38 (2), 51–53. DOI: 10.1177/ (...)
17The biggest change for execution ballads in the nineteenth century were developments in the justice system that introduced delays between judgment, trial, conviction, and execution. For printers of news songs, who wanted to deliver the news as quickly as possible, these transformations resulted in ballads that did not end in the execution of the criminal. One can see an example of these developments in an execution ballad about the murderer, Dr Smethurst, who poisoned his wife in 1859.15 Although almost everyone was convinced of his guilt and he was duly convicted, the evidence was not very strong and he was eventually pardoned. What is interesting is that the song is written between his conviction and his pardon; it is a nineteenth-century phenomenon that occurs in all languages, due to the transformation of the justice system that has slowed down considerably compared with its early modern version.
18Like many ballads performed in the nineteenth century, the song contains no indication of a tune. However, the metrical structure indicates that this melody could be ‘Just Before the Battle, Mother,’ a very poignant song from the American Civil War, which had become extremely popular in Britain. In the original, a young man sings a farewell song to his mother the night before the battle, in which he is certain that he and all of his friends will die. To call it ‘sentimental’ is an understatement! While it is surprising to find this melody used in a song that describes a murderer, it was also used a few years later for the song about Richard Coates, a military schoolmaster from Purfleet who in 1875 raped and murdered Alice Boughen, his six-year-old pupil:
Richard Coates, that cruel murderer,
Now is cold within his grave,
None could show him any pity,
None stretch forth a hand to save
His horrid crime was so unmanly,
I’m sure we no excuse could give.
He did disgrace our gallant soldiers,
And he was not fit to live.
Richard Coates, the Purfleet murderer
On Easter Monday met his doom;
He killed the soldier’s little daughter.
Now he’s dead and in his tomb.
19Although the common pattern of nineteenth-century British ballads was that the two songs on the same sheet were about different subjects, there are exceptions. A broadside from 1849 contains two songs which relate to the same event: the multiple murders by Irishman Gleeson Wilson of a mother, her two children and her maid in Liverpool. Since both songs use the same image, one would assume that the sheet was supposed to be cut in half and sold separately, but that doesn't seem to have happened very often. Most of the ballads still remain intact, with two ballads side by side.
20Reprints of popular songs were common: murderer Thomas Hocker, who beat James de la Rue to death in April 1845 for sleeping with his girlfriend, was hanged outside Newgate Prison in front of a crowd of 10,000 people. The crime and its punishment have inspired many representations in verse and prose. Two versions of the same song exist, each reprinted with a different image and a slightly different title, a fairly common practice. Many nineteenth-century British execution ballads carry an image of the exterior of the prison outside which the criminal was executed. What is fascinating is that the wooden block containing the image of the prison and the crowd of spectators has a hole in the middle, into which printers could insert as many hanged bodies as they needed for a particular case.
German
21The new VD Lied project has digitised thousands of German songs from libraries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This was done in addition to the pre-existing projects VD16 and VD17 which have digitised the collections of German pamphlets (Flugblätter) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries found in libraries in these countries. This new database has revealed that by the end of the nineteenth century most songs were in chapbook format, usually in eight-page pamphlets, with a prose account of the crimes followed by a song. Sometimes the title page has a woodcut image, but not always. The images tend to be simple, almost primitive, surprising when one considers how very sophisticated German woodcutting had been even in the sixteenth century. In terms of font, German printers continued to print in Gothic letter throughout the nineteenth century.
22Crime songs featuring death were called ‘Moritäten’ at the time. The Moritat Sechsfacher Mord und Selbstmord geschehen in Karlsberg (‘The six-fold murder and the suicide in Karlsberg’) illustrates the typical print layout of this period, of two folios folded in quarto format to form eight pages in total, with the song at the end. This continues a common theme that we find in German songs since the sixteenth century, that of multiple murders and suicide. Whenever they murdered, even in the early modern period, the Germans always seemed to kill a considerable number of people. Whether this was the truth or a marketing ploy by providing a shocking story is still to be determined. In this instance, it appears to be just marketing: neither the prose nor the song offers details that could identify the characters - there are no names or dates, and the pamphlet is printed in Trier, a hundred kilometres from Karlsberg, a distance that would prevent any verification in person. Another similar song, Der furchtbare Touloner Mord (‘The terrible murder in Toulon’), about a mother who murdered her children, provides her name, Maria Sportni, but not the date, and the distance from the events is this time even more extreme. The song in this example resembles the printed layout of much older songs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in that each line of verse is not given its own line, but instead each stanza has its own paragraph. Because of this arrangement, there are a number of German historians who did not realize that they were looking at songs - the stanzas look like prose. Sometimes German crime songs have pictures on the title page: Der furchtbare Mord, welchen der Sohn an seiner Mutter und seinen vier Geschwistern verübt hat (‘The terrible murder, which a son committed on his mother and four sisters’ ) bears a fairly primitive wood engraving, but this time we have specific dates: the murder was committed on June 17, 1874 in Mulhouse in Alsace by a young man named Joseph Most, and was a genuine event to which the song corresponded exactly.
23Most of these songs would have been sold in chansonniers, small booklets with a number of different songs. A song, Der gerächte Sohn, oder: fünffacher Mord (‘The Avenged Son, or: Five Murders’) is similar to the examples already given, with the title page, the prose narrative, and a song, but it is then followed by another sheet containing a multitude of songs. On the next page of the song it says ‘drei lieder’ - three songs, with the title of each one. Der gerächte Sohn itself follows five songs, indicated by the words ‘Das fünfte’ (The Fifth) on the previous page, and the six-stanza song thereafter. This resembles the much older practice of printed songbooks in sixteenth and seventeenth century France and Germany, in which multiple songs, often on very different subjects, were sold in the same booklet. The title page of the song about highwayman Fabio Turandino reveals another song on the previous page. And another song of multiple murders, Der fünffache Mord bei Regensburg, (‘Five Murders in Regensburg’), shows the same kind of primitive woodcut on the title page and a song that precedes it, taken from the previous brochure.
24Like their French and English counterparts, all German songs employ sensational language to make the products appealing to customers. The events are ‘furchtbare’, ‘grausam’, ‘gefürchtete’, [‘terrible’, ‘cruel’, ‘dreadful’] although pamphlets from this later period usually have much shorter titles than their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts, which included many details about the event: date, place, punishment, names of victims and attackers, etc. It is probable that in the earlier period the street singer would have sung or called out these long titles because their illiterate clients would not have been able to read this information on the pamphlet. One aspect that is notable for its absence is the use of the words ‘neu’ and ‘wahrhafftig’ (‘new’ and ‘true’) which are ubiquitous in German criminal ballads of the early modern period. It seems that nineteenth-century printers were not so concerned with proving their songs to be recent and reliable, perhaps because, since the arrival of newspapers, songs were no longer the primary source of information for ordinary people.
25Another aspect that is noticeable in these examples is the lack of musical direction. As mentioned above, early modern German execution ballads used only five chorales as musical basis. But the metrical forms of the nineteenth-century songs mentioned here do not resemble any of these chorales. This same lack of tune direction is found in about half of the English songs during this period. It is possible that the melody would have been immediately recognisable by clues in the opening lyrics or refrains (as in the example of Dr Smethurst's song, mentioned above), or by the metrical form. Potentially there was a tune like Fualdès that was used repeatedly and so it would have been obvious for a consumer as to how it should have sounded.
26But sometimes there was an indication of melody, as in the song about Hugo Schenk, an Austrian serial killer and impostor who in 1883 murdered four chambermaids with the help of his accomplice, Karl Schlossarek. Schenk and Schlossarek were sentenced to death by hanging and executed on April 22, 1884. The song is to the tune ‘Karl am Grabe seiner Wilhelmine’ (‘Charles on the grave of his Wilhelmine’), a popular folk song. It is not clear whether this tune was chosen because of the name of accomplice Karl and therefore was a joke; this was not an uncommon practice when choosing a tune.
Dutch
27Early modern Dutch printers preferred a landscape orientation for their songbooks, a format unique in Europe, but by the nineteenth century printers had largely conformed to the portrait orientation so common elsewhere. It seems that the Dutch, unlike the English, had a fairly strong culture of printed songs until the second half of the twentieth century, well documented in the Dutch Song Database, the Liederenbank. However, unlike France, which continued to publicly execute criminals until 1939, the last execution in the Netherlands was in 1860, and the last execution ballad that refers to a genuine Dutch execution appears to be the song about George Michel, executed in Rotterdam in 1858 for the murder of his mother. This comparatively early abolition of execution is perhaps why they seem very interested in executions abroad: there are songs about Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted of the kidnap and murder of the Lindbergh baby in New Jersey, USA, in 1936, as well as the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were convicted of the murder of a guard in an armed robbery in Massachusetts, USA, in 1920 (both of which were however widely regarded as miscarriages of justice). These two are also the only execution ballads that I know of that feature the electric chair. These songs are also atypical in that they question the justice of the verdict, a perspective that is almost never found in execution ballads in other languages since their origins in the sixteenth century. As both of these cases were controversial at the time, this viewpoint is perhaps less surprising. Both songs portray the United States as a strange country, where justice is susceptible to abuse: Hauptmann's song implies that he is innocent, and that a witness has been tortured for giving incriminating testimony, a situation the song implies is typical in the United States:
- 16 Frans Rombouts, Hauptman ter dood gebracht (Roosendaal, 1936)
Zoo gaat het in Amerika, In alle soort misdrijt 't Gerecht stelt men in ongenå, Door allantlei gekijf. De laatste 'krach' nog was een man, Te dwingen onder pijn, Dat Hauptman het niet had gedaan, Maar hij er meer wist van.16 |
That is how it goes in America, In all sorts of crime The justice puts people in displeasure Because of all kinds of disputes. The last ‘crack’ was always a man To force under pain That Hauptman had not done it, But he knew more on this subject. |
28The same issues of cruelty and lack of justice appear in Sacco and Vanzetti's song. Seven years passed between their convictions and their executions, during which their case had become a famous global cause:
Wie schuwt en walgt n'et van zoo'n leven Zooals Amerika deed Om twee mannen te doen sneven Na zeven jaar van leed. Twee menschen daar opgesloten Verdacht van moord in roof Een bankier dood geschoten Dat niemand gelooft En op hun vrijheid gehoopt. |
Who shuns and is not disgusted with such a life As America did To make two men sniff After seven years of suffering. Two people locked up there Suspected of murder and robbery A banker shot dead That no one believes And hoped for their freedom |
29There are also nostalgic ballads about historical executions of the Dutch hero-martyrs of the past: Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the seventeenth-century Dutch statesman; the brave rebels who fought against the Duke of Alba during the Dutch uprising in the sixteenth century; and martyrs during the Wars of Religion. French events were also covered: there is even a song about the Troppmann case in 1870. Yet, compared to the extraordinary material produced about this criminal in France, the Dutch song about Troppmann is relatively plain, without a picture.
Ik zal u heden zingen In melden in mijn lied, Wat vreeselijke dingen In Frankrijk zijn geschied; Zij geven ons te aanschouwen Wat kwaad er wordt bereid, Wat droefheid in wat rouwe, Door of begeerlijkheid. |
I will sing to you today Reporting in my song, What terrible things Happened in France; They give us to behold What evil is being prepared, Some sadness and some mourning, By lust. |
30The use of contrafactum is still very common in Dutch songs, where we see the term ‘op de wijse’ (‘in the way’) or sometimes just ‘wijse’. The song on Hauptmann is set to the tune 'Het Plekje bij den Molen' (The place near the mill), a folk song very fashionable at the time; that of Sacco and Vanzetti is to the tune 'Drink en Vergeet '(Drink and Forget). As in all other languages, these Dutch songs use sensational and moving language, reserved, as in other languages, for the lyrics instead of the title, as had been the tradition in the early modern period.
Italian
31Italian libraries have begun to digitise their nineteenth-century holdings of fogli volanti, the earliest from 1849, among which songs about crime and punishment figure prominently. Most of these digitised sources are held by the Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, although other libraries hold some and all are searchable via the OPAC SBN search engine. Of the 1461 digitised sheets in that collection (which cover all kinds of topics including a large proportion of religious songs), I have identified over 140 songs about crimes, which sit alongside, as in other regions, an array of printed prose material about crime. Of these crime songs, the earliest is dated to 1878 and the latest is 1914; in other words, they were all printed after executions had ceased in practice. But they regularly relate information about capital crimes, death sentences and executions, many of which are reprinted from an earlier period, or which are nostalgic re-imaginings of much earlier crimes. Clearly, there was clearly still a strong appetite in Italy for songs about executions long after they had ended. Italy is the outlier in terms of its production of execution ballads: while in other countries the appetite for execution songs seems to have waned once executions were no longer public, in Italy the market for these songs appears to have increased after the disappearance of executions.
32Italian sheets are either in prose or in song form; nineteenth-century Italian printers did not combine prose and verse on a sheet as was the case abroad. Italians did, however, seem to prefer song; by far most news sheets that cover crime and punishment are in song format. Most (51 songs) are situated after the arrest of the suspected criminal who is described as in prison awaiting their trial. Of those that mention a specific punishment, 23 mention the death penalty while approximately 20 mention life imprisonment (‘la galera a vita’). The most striking development in form is the predominance of ottava rima, the ancient metrical form associated with the recounting of events in a chronological narrative. 71 songs, or nearly half, are in ottava rima, and maintain the highly judgmental, moralising tone of their predecessors in this form. Terza rima, the form used for the crimes of the nobility, is no longer used – an unsurprising development post-1848.
- 17 Picchianti Tito, Fatto accaduto a Montenero messo in ottava rima dall’Improvvisatore Picchianti Tit (...)
33The other continuity from the early modern period is the presence, unrivalled in any other language, of the author of the verses; almost all of the songs surveyed mention the author’s name, often prominently in the title. Moreover, this author is often presented as a ‘poet’ who ‘improvises’; in other words, they present themselves as the celebrated cantastorie of the past. While the improvised nature of printed verses is clearly a fiction, it seems that this conceit of the barely literate, sometimes disabled (some songs explicitly mention that the author is ‘cieco’ – blind) poet who improvises upon what he has managed to hear about a specific case was obviously a lucrative selling point of the songs. Thus Picchianti Tito described himself, in the title of his song about an 1886 murder in Montenero, as ‘l’Improvvisatore Picchianti Tito (Illetterato)’.17 Rather than the ‘come-all-ye’ incipit so common to street songs in other languages, these songs regularly open with an appeal to the Muses for inspiration, linking their performance with an ancient bardic tradition.
34Occasionally the cantastorie-author will explain in the song how he has found out about the events depicted, even occasionally mentioning that he has read the information in a newspaper. In his song about two German soldiers who were executed by firing squad in 1892 for the murder of an Italian girl, Luigi Bisconti backed up his claims by referencing the newspapers that had already covered the story:
- 18 Luigi Bisconti, Due soldati tedeschi che uccisero una fanciulla italiana - fatto atroce seguito in (...)
Ne han parlato i giornali e i bullettini E tanto più il Carlino di Bologna, Di due Gendarmi perfidi e assassini, Che a chiamarli così non fo menzogna18 |
Newspapers and bulletins talked about it And all the more the Carlino of Bologna, Of two perfidious and murderous Gendarmes, That to thus call them is not a lie |
35One feature that can often be found in Italian songs is the presence of a ‘crowd’ (‘il popolo’), usually of local people or villagers screaming (‘gridando’) for a death sentence. In a song printed in 1878, a baker threw a child into an oven in order to steal his lottery winnings; upon the discovery of the burned corpse of the boy, the song claimed that ‘Dàgli! morte all’ assassino!/Tutto il popol grida allor.’ (‘Give it to him! Death to the murderer!/All the people shout then’). On this occasion, the crowd was satisfied:
- 19 Anon, Fatto inumano di un fornajo che per derubare un fanciullo della vincita di un terno al lotto (...)
Il malandrino Sulla piazza, a capo chino, La sua pena sopportò. Prima fu ben ben frustato, Poi tagliata ebbe una mano; Alla fin fu strangolato E all' inferno se n'andò.19 |
The rogue On the square, with bowed head, His pain endured. First he was well whipped, Then his hand was cut off; Eventually he was strangled And to hell he went away. |
36However, no such punishments existed in post-unification Italy. Evidently the song is either a reprinting or a nostalgic imagining of a ‘distant past’. While death sentences were still handed down by the courts, all had been commuted since 1876, but songs never reveal the commutation, giving the impression that murderers everywhere were going to their deaths.
37As in other languages, the titles of Italian punishment ballads are in general much more concise than their early modern equivalents, but the language of the ballads remains constant in its emotional and sensationalistic vocabulary. The criminal is a traditore (traitor), belva (beast), snaturato (unnatural), barbara (barbarous), and they have either no pity or no heart (non ebbera pieta/cuore). Their crimes are atroce, orribile, scellerato, and brutale. Songs in the first-person voice are extremely rare for nineteenth-century Italian songs; in the sample of over 140 songs surveyed there are only ten that are in first-person voice. They all unsurprisingly take the form of a lament (lamento) or repentance (pentimento) by the criminal, and render them highly sympathetic.
Conclusions
38A comparative study of criminal songs allows us to understand what the pan-European trends and the regional differences were, and how these shifted over the centuries. For example, the dominance of the Fualdès melody in French criminal songs is something that I do not find in other languages, except for the German execution ballads of the sixteenth century which used a repertoire of melodies strictly limited to four melodies. One has to wonder what consequences such a small musical repertoire would have on the emotional impact of these songs on their listeners and their singers.
39Throughout Europe, it is murder that dominates the content of criminal ballads, usually because in most regions the list of capital felonies had been dramatically reduced from its early modern counterpart. In France and Great Britain, the sensationalism of these tales seems to have been supplemented by detailed images aided by technological advances in printing and design. However, German and Dutch songs do not appear to have used this printing technology to increase their emotional power, a surprising change from the early modern period, when German and Dutch woodcut technique was the most sophisticated in Europe. What is interesting, however, is that although Britain and France have sensational newspapers like L’Oeil de la Police and the Illustrated Police News, I do not find the same use of graphic and colored images found in French complaintes in British ballads. What has not disappeared is the sensationalist language used to sell the news of crime and punishment. However, the loquacious early modern titles become rare in the nineteenth century, and the details are reserved for the lyrics of the songs themselves. In most areas, execution ballads tend to die out as a popular genre once executions are no longer conducted in public, but Italy proves to be an exception: Italian execution songs were printed in large numbers long after executions there had ceased in practice, evidence of a nostalgia for a time of more draconian justice.
Databases of historical European songs:
English |
English Broadside Ballad Archive: www.ebba.english.ucsb.edu Bodleian Ballads Online: www.ballads.bodleian.ac.uk |
German |
VDLied: https://gso.gbv.de/ |
Dutch |
Liederenbank: www.liederenbank.nl |
Italian (not limited to songs) |
EDIT16: www.edit16.it OPAC SBN: https://opac.sbn.it (search for ‘fogli volanti’ |
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Notes
1 Kate van Orden, ‘Female “Complaintes”: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, 3 (Autumn, 2001): 801-845.
2 Una McIlvenna, ‘The Power of Music: the Significance of Contrafactum in Execution Ballads’, Past & Present 229/1 (November 2015): 47-89
3 Una McIlvenna, ‘Singing Songs of Execution in Early Modern Italy’ in Voice and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society, eds. Stefano Dall'Aglio, Brian Richardson and Massimo Rospocher (New York: Routledge, 2017), 52-68.
4 Il piatoso lamento che fece M. Prudentia prima che fusse condotta alla Giustitia. Con la nuova giunta di tutto il caso successo di quanto disse & scrisse di man propria (Florence, 1557).
5 The complaint and lamentation of Mistresse Arden of Feversham in Kent, who for the loue of one Mosbie, hired certaine Ruffians and Villaines most cruelly to murder her Husband; with the fatall end of her and her Associats. To the tune of, Fortune my Foe. (London: C. W., n.d.)
6 www.ebba.english.ucsb.edu Cherche pour: ‘lament*’ + death + punishment
7 Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 211.
8 McIlvenna, ‘The Power of Music’, 63-65.
9 Lamentation of H. Lingley (London: Disley, 1867) http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/view/edition/9575 Another song about this case is found in Harvard Library’s ‘English Crime and Execution Broadsides Collection’
https://curiosity.lib.harvard.edu/crime-broadsides/catalog/46-990081188560203941
10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_at_Stanfield_Hall
11 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1861), 223-224.
12 Donna Loftus, ‘Work, Poverty and Modernity in Mayhew's London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 19:4 (2014): 507-519, DOI: 10.1080/13555502.2014.967547
13 Charles Hindley, The History of the Catnach Press (London: Hindley, 1886), 92.
14 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 224.
15 R. Nagle, ‘ “A Singular Case” and Dr. Smethurst’, Medico-Legal Journal 38 (2), 51–53. DOI: 10.1177/002581727003800203
16 Frans Rombouts, Hauptman ter dood gebracht (Roosendaal, 1936)
17 Picchianti Tito, Fatto accaduto a Montenero messo in ottava rima dall’Improvvisatore Picchianti Tito (Illetterato) (Portoferraio: Isola d’Elba, 1886)
18 Luigi Bisconti, Due soldati tedeschi che uccisero una fanciulla italiana - fatto atroce seguito in Saievo sul confine d'Italia (Firenze: Salani, 1892).
19 Anon, Fatto inumano di un fornajo che per derubare un fanciullo della vincita di un terno al lotto lo buttò barbaramente a bruciare in un forno (Firenze: Salani, 1878).
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Una McIlvenna, « Singing complaintes criminelles across Europe », Criminocorpus [En ligne], 17 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2021, consulté le 04 novembre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/criminocorpus/8608 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/criminocorpus.8608
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