The organist crowned with laurel, celebrated poet and instrument-maker whose sweet two- and three-voice ballate gave the fourteenth century one of its most tender sounds — and lent his name to a cadence that would charm all Europe.
History of Early Music · No. 05 — The Trecento
Francesco Landini (c. 1325–1397) was the greatest composer of the Italian Trecento — the fourteenth-century flowering of secular art-song that is Italy's answer to the French Ars Nova. Blinded by smallpox in childhood, he became the most admired musician in Florence: a virtuoso organist, poet, and maker of instruments, publicly crowned with the laurel wreath of a poet.
Around 150 surviving works — the largest secular output of any Trecento musician, almost all of it song.
Famed for the organetto, the small portable organ he played on his knee; also builder and tuner of organs.
Wrote much of his own verse; crowned with laurel, in the manner of Petrarch, for his artistry.
Lived his life in Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance, admired by the city's humanist circles.
Blind from early childhood, Landini never read or wrote a note on the page as we do; he composed, played and dictated entirely by ear and memory.
Landini's years span the fraught, brilliant middle of the fourteenth century — plague, upheaval, and the first stirrings of Renaissance humanism — all lived out within the walls of one city.
Much of what we know comes from the humanist chronicler Filippo Villani, who wrote an admiring biography of Landini among the "famous citizens" of Florence.
Trecento — literally "three hundred", the Italian shorthand for the 1300s — names both a century and a musical golden age. While France pursued the intricate rhythms of the Ars Nova, Italy grew its own refined, lyrical polyphony: graceful, singable, and unmistakably Italian in its sweetness.
Flowing melody in the top voice, warm and vocal; long ornamental runs; a taste for consonant thirds and sixths that would soon sound "sweet" all over Europe.
More abstract and cerebral — isorhythm, complex proportional rhythms, the great motets of Machaut. Late in the century its notation would absorb Italy's.
The Trecento repertory is overwhelmingly secular — love songs and dances in the vernacular, not liturgical Latin. Landini stands at its very summit.
Landini's fame rested first on his playing. His instrument was the organetto (portative organ): a small keyboard organ held on the lap, the left hand working the bellows while the right hand played the melody. It is the instrument shown beside him in his manuscript portrait and carved on his tomb.
A famous scene in Giovanni da Prato's Il Paradiso degli Alberti (written c. 1425) recalls Landini playing his organetto in a Florentine garden on a summer's day — and the company falling silent, spellbound, as if the very birds gathered to listen. For his artistry he was crowned, like a poet, with laurel.
His manuscript portrait appears at the head of his section in the great Squarcialupi Codex, organetto in hand — the image by which we still picture him.
Trecento composers worked in three great secular forms. Landini touched all of them, but poured his genius above all into the last.
The earlier Trecento form: two or three stanzas set to the same music, capped by a contrasting ritornello. Often pastoral verse.
A "chase": two voices in strict canon over a slower tenor, the words painting hunts, fishing or bustling markets — music as lively picture.
Descended from a sung dance. By Landini's day the leading form of Italian love-song — and the heart of his art.
Of Landini's roughly 150 surviving pieces, the overwhelming majority are ballate, alongside a smaller group of madrigals.
The ballata began as music for dancing (from ballare, "to dance") and grew into a refined song of courtly love, for two or three voices. Its shape is a neat rounded scheme built on a refrain, the ripresa, that returns to frame each verse.
The volta reuses the music of the ripresa, so the tune circles back on itself — a satisfying rounded shape that made the ballata perfect for song.
Landini's best-loved ballata, Ecco la primavera ("Here comes the spring, that makes the heart rejoice"), bubbles with a bright, lilting dance rhythm. Below is a short tune written in its spirit: a bouncy triple-time melody of the kind that opens such a ballata.
Synthesised plucked strings · a lively triple lilt in the manner of an opening ballata phrase
The swinging triple pulse recalls the ballata's origin as music to dance and clap to.
The text is Tuscan Italian, not Latin — a springtime love-lyric, worldly and warm.
The tune sits high and clear over its supporting voices, the Italian hallmark.
At a cadence, medieval melody usually pushed the leading tone (7) straight up to the octave (8). Landini's signature is a graceful detour: the top voice first dips down to the sixth (6), then leaps up a third to the octave — the sweet 7–6–8 "under-third" turn that bears his name.
How to read it: follow the top voice left to right. After the leading tone (7, amber) it does not resolve straight up; it drops to the 6th (6, blue), then springs up a third to the octave (8, green) as the lower voice settles onto the final. That little dip-and-leap is the Landini cadence.
Compare the two endings below. First the plain cadence — the leading tone climbing straight up. Then the Landini cadence, with its extra dip to the sixth before the leap. Listen for that gentle turn at the very end: it is the sound that gave the fourteenth century its sweetness.
Two voices, reed timbre, pure Pythagorean fifths · the difference is only the top voice's final turn
The figure so charmed musicians that it spread far beyond Italy: you meet "Landini cadences" throughout the songs of Du Fay, Binchois and the early fifteenth century.
Almost everything we have of Landini reaches us through one magnificent book. The Squarcialupi Codex — a lavish, gold-illuminated Florentine anthology of Trecento song, copied in the early 1400s — is the single greatest source of Italian fourteenth-century music. It is named for the later Florentine organist Antonio Squarcialupi, who once owned it.
Its largest section by far is devoted to Landini — around 145 of his works, more than any other composer in the manuscript.
An illuminated miniature heads his section, depicting Landini seated with his portative organ — a rare medieval "author portrait".
It preserves many Trecento composers, each with a portrait — a visual roll-call of Italy's musical golden age.
Without this book, Landini's name would survive but most of his music would be lost — a reminder how thin the thread of medieval survival can be.
Italy wrote its rhythm differently from France. In the system set out by the theorist Marchetto da Padova (c. 1318), a breve was split into groups of smaller notes called divisiones — and a letter marked how many notes each group held. Dots kept the groups apart, in place of bar-lines.
How to read it: find the little letter marking the divisione — it says how many notes fill one breve. Read each dot-bounded group as a single beat's worth of notes. Late in the century Italian scribes increasingly borrowed the French mensural signs, and the two systems merged.
Landini's ballate range from sunlit and dancing to grave and grieving — always with that singing top line and the sweet cadences that are his fingerprint. A few have become the best-known music of the whole Trecento.
"Here comes the spring" — a joyful two-voice ballata, his most famous song and a byword for Trecento freshness.
"Great weeping to the eyes" — a tender, sorrowing love-ballata showing his more inward, expressive vein.
"She will never have pity" — a much-admired ballata of courtly longing, elegant and finely wrought.
These are worldly love-songs in Tuscan Italian for two or three voices — chamber music for the cultured circles of late-Trecento Florence.
Ensembles vary the scoring freely — all voices sung, or the lower voices played on vielle, lute or organetto as they may well have been in Landini's day.
Landini gathered the Italian Trecento into its finest achievement and left it a lasting gift. His cadence travelled north into the songs of the next generation; his ballate remain the best-loved music of the century; and his portrait, organetto in hand, has become the very face of the age. When Florence buried him at San Lorenzo in 1397, an era of song went with him.
The 7–6–8 "Landini cadence" outlived him by generations, sweetening cadences across all of fifteenth-century Europe.
He brought the two- and three-voice ballata to its peak; his songs are the summit of Trecento secular art.
Blind organist crowned with laurel, he embodies the meeting of music, poetry and the new humanism of Florence.
"Ecco la primavera, che 'l cor fa rallegrare" — Here comes the spring, that makes the heart rejoice.
— Francesco Landini, opening of the ballata Ecco la primaverac. 1325 – 1397 · Florence's blind master, and the sweetest voice of the Italian Trecento.