Deconstructing Daniel Speer's Philomela Angelica (1688) to reconstruct Chiara Margarita Cozzolani's Scherzi di sacra melodia (1648)

Starting from the case of six motets for solo voice and basso continuo by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, originally printed in a collection that has come down to us without the basso continuo part (Scherzi di sacra melodia, 1648) and later reworked and published in a collection (Philomela angelica, 1688) attributed to Daniel Speer, the present article will focus on the problems that emerge when the editor of a musical edition must intervene with the criteria of destructive restoration, which consists in the deconstruction of later reworkings, in an attempt to recover one or more previous musical layers of a work. The main questions that arise are the following: is it possible to reconstruct the six motets of Chiara Margarita starting from the subsequent reworkings of Daniel Speer? Is this a philologically legitimate operation? And, if so, how can we present the results of this operation in a critical edition? After dealing with some interdisciplinary and methodological issues, the paper will show how Cozzolani's compositions have informed Speer's subsequent reworkings and how, through the de-construction of the latter, it is now possible to reconstruct a convincing hypothesis of the basso continuo line and to re-propose to modern audiences the compositions of Cozzolani that have not been performed for centuries due to the lack of the basso continuo.