​Eight Songs for Samuel Pepys: Light, Grave and Sacred

This anthology explores the musical life of the celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Music was important for Pepys, and he reflected this in his diary: ‘Music is the thing of the world that I love most, and all the pleasure almost that I can now take’. He sang and played several instruments, and he insisted that his wife, Elisabeth, take singing lessons and that she should learn to play the flageolet so they could play music together. Not long after Elisabeth’s death in 1669, Pepys started looking for someone with whom to share his musical passion. He hired the young lutenist and singer Cesare Morelli, who produced five music manuscripts for him, with compositions for voice and guitar. Morelli’s songs are written in the new style of the declamatory ayre, a genre that became popular in England in the seventeenth century. This is the English equivalent of the Italian ‘speech-song’ or recitar cantando, a type of accompanied recitation where the music closely follows the meaning of the words and whose main aim it to serve the text. This is an anthology of Eight Songs, Light, Grave and Sacred by Morelli for bass voice and Baroque guitar.