Johannes de Sarto

Johannes de Sarto is a Franco-Flemish composer known for five authenticated works and two others that are questionable; he was active at Liège in the first half of the fifteenth-century. At one time de Sarto was confused with his Liège-based colleague <a href="spotify:artist:0L4r7W66gfDWtYC2AwsxYD">Johannes Brassart</a>, mainly as in one manuscript <a href="spotify:artist:0L4r7W66gfDWtYC2AwsxYD">Brassart</a>'s name is crossed out and de Sarto's substituted in two introits. These are the disputed works in de Sarto's canon, but a third, the three-voice Repleatur os meum, is unambiguously attributed to de Sarto. Among the four motets remaining, the four-voice isorhythmic motet Romanorum rex inclite, written to commemorate the death of Holy Roman Emperor Albrecht II in 1439, is de Sarto's masterwork and also once believed the work of <a href="spotify:artist:0L4r7W66gfDWtYC2AwsxYD">Brassart</a>; two of the remaining motets, Ave mater, O Maria and O quam mirabilis, are somewhat imitative of <a href="spotify:artist:0L4r7W66gfDWtYC2AwsxYD">Brassart</a>'s motet O flos flagrans, itself modeled after <a href="spotify:artist:0kLNgrvMXHTm4yWGrfMuLc">Dufay</a>, and the first of these was the most widely copied of de Sarto's works.

While absolutely conclusive evidence remains wanting, it appears that Johannes de Sarto was a cleric at Liège by the name of Johannes Doussart, who was still living in 1457, though it is doubtful he could have survived Charles the Bold's pacification of the region -- and the mass murder of its clerics -- in 1465-1466. Sources that place the birth of de Sarto before 1400 may be confusing him with Jean du Sart, an earlier musician based at Cambrai. By the time Romanorum rex inclite was composed, the isorhythmic motet was already getting kind of old hat, though the occasion for which it was written is indisputable. The text contains the names of the members of his choir, which perhaps not coincidentally includes <a href="spotify:artist:0L4r7W66gfDWtYC2AwsxYD">Brassart</a>, suggesting that the two were colleagues and knew one another well.

What is certain is that, despite his small surviving output, Johannes de Sarto was one of the finest talents of the 1430s and the quality of his work ranks with other early Renaissance composers such as <a href="spotify:artist:0kLNgrvMXHTm4yWGrfMuLc">Dufay</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:3DL7TTcfjDAJiDrhBl3q2H">Dunstaple</a>.