Makaris: The Galant David Rizzio

William Thomson (c.1684–c.1762) published Orpheus Caledonius in London on January 1, 1726. This was the first printed collection of traditional Scottish song arrangements, and it consisted of fifty settings by Thomson for solo voice over an unfigured bass. No composer was listed for forty-three of the melodies, and Thomson plagiarized most of his texts from Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany, a popular 1724 collection of Scottish poetry. Orpheus Caledonius might therefore appear to demonstrate an early paradigm of folk musicians freely borrowing each others’ words and music without attribution, except that its index specifically ascribes the seven remaining melodies to David Rizzio, who more than 150 years earlier had been the victim of one of history’s most infamous and gruesome murders.
David Rizzio (sometimes Riccio, Rizo, Rezzi, or similar) was born near Turin in approximately 1533, and he traveled to Scotland in 1561 in the service of the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador. He entered the employ of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, as a valet and bass singer, and he was soon promoted to the position of her private secretary. Members of Mary’s court—many already conspiring against her—grew concerned that this Catholic foreigner had such a high level of access, and Mary’s jealous husband became suspicious that their unborn child might be Rizzio’s. On March 9, 1566, a large group of courtiers burst into the palace dining room, held the six-months pregnant queen at gunpoint, grabbed Rizzio from where he was cowering behind her, and stabbed him fifty-seven times before hurling his body down a stairwell.

Thomson’s 1726 ascriptions to Rizzio have no known source, and there is no prior extant reference to Rizzio ever having composed any music at all. It is possible that there was an oral tradition of Rizzio as songwriter which slightly predated Orpheus Caledonius, and Thomson was simply repeating attributions he had heard elsewhere. However, the Italian school of composition then held sway in London, and it is likely that Thomson simply hoped to sell more copies of his publication by adding to it the name of a notorious Italian (Rizzio being a plausible choice, given that he was widely known to have been a musician who was murdered in Scotland). There could also have been a political element to the Rizzio ascriptions; the Treaty of Union had only recently united England and Scotland, and an Englishman affixing a foreigner’s name to some of the most enduring and beloved Scottish tunes might have been a response to heightened Scottish nationalism.

– Kivie Cahn-Lipman (from the liner notes)

Engineering and mastering: Ryan Streber, oktavenaudio.com
Editing: Kivie Cahn-Lipman and Ryan Streber
Program notes: Kivie Cahn-Lipman
Song annotations: Kivie Cahn-Lipman and Fiona Gillespie
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Special thanks to Linda Cahn and Paul Marshall