Public Styles and Printed Anthologies

The Musica nova preserved the only madrigal corpus Willaert published in his lifetime. His other madrigals, thirty in all over almost as many years, survive almost exclusively in anthologies and in prints devoted to other composers.^[11] As shown in Table 2, the bulk of these (four-fifths) came out between 1534 and 1549. Many went on being reprinted periodically, but only six new ones cropped up in prints issued between 1554 and 1563.

Through the year 1541 Willaert's madrigals appeared only in collections otherwise mainly devoted to Philippe Verdelot — Verdelot's — second books for four and five voices of 1534 and 1538, respectively, his only six-voice book of 1541, and a number of reprint editions (starting with RISM 1540²⁰ and 1540¹⁸ ).^[12] It was not until 1542 that Willaert's madrigals first appeared in non-Verdelot editions. The printer Girolamo Scotto's collection of his own madrigals, Madrigali a quatro voci . . . con alcuni a la misura breve, et altri a voce pari, included Willaert's two settings of canzone stanzas by Petrarch, Qual più diversa e nova cosa and Quante volte diss'io. And the first of Gardane's Madrigali . . . a misura di breve series included a single sonnet setting by Willaert. Both of these editions advertised themselves in connection with the fashionable new black-note madrigals.

In subsequent years, nine more new madrigals came out in five-voice editions of Rore: three in Rore's eclectic second book of 1544, five in Scotto's edition of Rore's third book of 1548, and in 1557, finally, one in his fourth book. These and the settings published in Verdelot prints account for all but five of the thirty anthologized

[11] The sole exception is Scotto's posthumous print of 1563, the Madrigali a quatro voci, a sentimental commemorative collection that unites the more accessibly scored four-voice madrigals with examples of Willaert's canzoni villanesche. The print has a number of what appear to be clear misattributions, but much of it consists simply of reprinted madrigals. It contains only a single unicum (discussed below).

[12] Much has been made of these joint appearances as an indication that the two composers may have been connected in some way, especially given Willaert's role in arranging madrigals of Verdelot for lute and voice, Intavolatura de li madrigali di Verdelotto da cantare et sonare nel lauto, intavolati per Messer Adriano, novamente stampata . . . (Venice, 1536). For Verdelot's possible influence on Willaert see Lowinsky, "The Vallicelliana Manuscript," p. 194, and Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 1:326; see also Wolfgang Osthoff, Theatergesang und darstellende Musik in der italienischen Renaissance, 2 vols. (Tutzing, 1969), 1:286 and 305, for an argument contradicting the latter's view that Willaert's style emerged from Verdelot. But Verdelot's biography after 1528-29 remains as mysterious as ever, and he could well have perished during the plague that hit Florence then. The best biography of Verdelot is that in Slim, A Gift of Madrigals and Motets 1:41-65; see also idem, "Verdelot, Philippe," in The New Grove 19:631-35. In lieu of more concrete information, the possibility remains a good one that the editions of Verdelot were in some sense commemorative and that Willaert's place in them was that of a first among various equals, brought together to embellish the works of an old master.

settings Willaert made of Italian literary verse that survive (omitting his secular Latin settings and lighter dialect settings); the remaining five were issued singly in sundry editions of 1549, 1554, 1559, 1562, and 1563.

This publication pattern corresponds to Willaert's general rate of productivity over his lifetime, which showed a steady decline from about the mid-1540s. A famous anecdote in Zarlino's Sopplimenti musicali of 1588 reveals through the mouth of Parabosco that even Willaert's pupils came to think of him as an immaculate but slow worker.^[13] Giulio Ongaro has corroborated this through a remarkable report he located, which relates that in 1547 the Procuratori of San Marco gave Willaert's young pupil Baldassare Donato the task of "keeping Willaert occupied in composing" (tenir solicitato esso maistro Adriano a tal composition).^[14] Willaert's slowness in composing may have been exacerbated by increasingly poor health, for by 1549 a series of wills and codicils begin to describe him as ill and confined to bed.^[15] In combination with such evidence, the anthologized madrigals provide a means to chronicle the evolving (and diminishing) pattern of Willaert's compositional production.

All of this suggests the existence of a counternarrative to the heroic tale of monumental production on which Willaert's posthumous reputation has always rested — an undercurrent of creative hesitation and generic fragmentation beneath the Musica nova 's exterior of extraordinary invention, conceptual unity, and generic consolidation. Aside from biographical data, the evidence of Willaert's anthologized madrigals provides many insights into the broader cultural economies of Venetian madrigal production. Unlike those of the Musica nova, the anthologized madrigals contain a great thematic diversity and formal variety. Poetic madrigals and hybrid forms of ballata-madrigal and canzone-madrigal predominate early on, but after 1540 they appear in equal numbers with sonnets, canzone stanzas, ballatas, and even a variant of terza rima. The settings range between nearly Musica nova — like gravity in a few to numerous others that are light, with passages of homorhythm, triple time, and the like. The majority use standard cut time, but a few use black notes. Some are in one part, others have some sort of formal division into two. Many, like Mentre al bel letto, written to celebrate the creation of Parma's dukedom in 1545, were obviously occasional. Others were encomiastic — the tributes to Polissena Pecorina, Qual dolcezza giamai, and Elena Barozza Zantani, Ne le amar'e

[13] The Sopplimenti musicali were published in Venice. The story relates Parabosco's conversation with a self-important, little-known "maestro," who claims he can write a mass in an evening like one he has just heard by Willaert — one that Willaert had allegedly worked on for two months. Parabosco trumps him by replying, "I believe you and I am surprised that you did not write ten of the sort in that time," then goes on to explain Willaert's method of composing: "Adriano quando compone metto ogni suo studio et ogni sua industria, e pensa e studia molto bene quello che abbia da fare avanti che dia fine, et mandi alla luce una sua compositione; il perche, non per altro che per questo, è riputato il primo de' nostri tempi" (Adriano when he composes puts all his learning and all his industry and thinks and studies very well what he must do before he considers a piece finished and sends his composition out into the world; for no other reason than that is he reputed to be the best in our time); p. 326.

[14] See "The Chapel of St. Mark's at the Time of Adrian Willaert (1527-1562): A Documentary Study" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986), pp. 88-90 and Document 170.

[15] See those reproduced in Vander Straeten, La musique aux Pays-Bas 6:227-46.

fredd'onde, discussed in earlier chapters.^[16] They may have been used for particular events or simply satisfied the more general wishes of interested fans and patrons.

These particulars begin to elaborate the striking bifurcation within Venetian repertory that must have governed the creation and dissemination of the many different madrigal types to which I pointed above. On one side stood the monolithic repertory of the Musica nova, representing so implacably a musical embodiment of the classic, "authentic" Petrarchism prized by the literary elite. On the other stood the heterogeneous repertory of anthologized works that were mostly more immediate in their appeal, with no obvious claims for a transcendent musical poetics. Unlike the "hidden" state in which the Musica nova was cultivated and preserved in manuscript, many of Willaert's madrigals for printed anthologies probably entered the commercial marketplace without much delay. By contrast with those of the Musica nova, they display Willaert at his most accessible.

In the genre's earliest Florentine and Roman forms, of course, accessibility — if not public accessibility — was part of madrigal's temper, and it was within this frame of reference that Willaert started out. His first group of four-voice madrigals, published in Verdelot's Secondo libro in 1534 and reprinted in 1536 and 1537, adapted the chansonesque style identified with Verdelot and Jacques Arcadelt. Each of these madrigals arranges its poetic lines as a series of elegant, charming melodies. Sometimes the lower voices assume autonomous roles, expressively or contrapuntally (particularly in imitative passages), but most of the time musical prominence is ceded to the cantus. All five of Willaert's madrigals from the 1534 group set either the new cinquecento form of poetic madrigal or the most common hybrid variety derived from the ballata.^[17]

The early madrigalists' preference for ballatalike structures forms a useful point of musical departure, for it reveals their continuing attachment to the balanced formal return offered by song forms. Rounded ballata-madrigals yielded rounded musical madrigals. In setting Dragonetto Bonifazio's ballata-madrigal Amor mi fa morire (see Ex. 9), Willaert capitalized on the text's vestigial resemblance to the repetitive, sectionalized structure of the ballata: the poem has a brief ripresa (vv. 1-2), an irregular passage of mutazioni (vv. 3-9 — normally two piedi equaling two verbal periods, but here three), and a quasi-volta (vv. 10-12) that elides midway into a ripresa.^[18] As shown below in my schematization of melodies carried (characteristically) by the cantus, Willaert mirrors — even outstrips — the text's elision into the ripresa, postponing it musically beyond the poetic return — that is, until the end of v. II (cf. mm. 3-5 with mm. 59-60).

[16] See above Chap. 2 n. 49, and Chap. 3 nn. 38-39.

[17] On these hybrid forms see Don Harrán, "Verse Types in the Early Madrigal," JAMS 22 (1969): 27-53.

[18] On this poem see ibid., p. 32 n. 20. The rhyme of v. 10 matches that of v. 9, as the beginning of a volta should do. On the poet Bonifazio (Bonifacio) see Erasmo Percopo, "Dragonetto Bonifacio, marchese d'Orio: rimatore napoletano del sec. XVI," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 10(1887): 197-233, with Amor mi fa morire on p. 219.

Ex. 9.
Willaert, Amor mi fa morire  (Dragonetto Bonifazio), incl.; in Verdelot,  Secondo
libro a 4  (Venice, 1536) (RISM 1536⁷ ), no. 1.

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Ex. 9
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Ex. 9
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Ex. 9

Willaert's setting adheres to the phraseology of French and Italian song styles that binds each poetic line to a single musical phrase. His rendition favors a reading based on versification, so much so that even the enjambment of lines 5 and 6 produces two distinct musical phrases.^[20] Yet it still practices a northern art of imitation.

At a higher level the setting divides the twelve poetic lines into structural groups formed around five verbal periods:

Each of these poetic divisions in turn finds support in an interwoven system of melodies and cadences (see Table 3), still wholly based in the traditional tenor-

[19] Note that the prime sign (') below indicates varied repeat of a phrase.

[20] Although sixteenth-century madrigals were often performed with instruments taking at least some of the parts or doubling voices, my critical discussions in Chapters 7-10 treat all voices as if they were sung. Since all of the madrigals I discuss in Part 3 were conceived in such a way that all parts would provide viable poetic readings when performed by voices, this seems reasonable analytically but it should not be taken to dismiss or minimize the historical existence of other kinds of performances.

Readers wishing fuller access to the madrigals under discussion should consult modern editions of them, as listed below. My identifications of poets come from Il nuovo Vogel except where otherwise noted. I have added poetic sources wherever possible. I am grateful to Lorenzo Bianconi and Antonio Vassalli for use of their handwritten catalogue of sixteenth-century poetic incipits and to Michael Keller, Anthony Newcomb, and Shuli Roth for use of the computer database of cinquecento poetry at the University of California at Berkeley.

superius framework.^[21] The madrigal proceeds from a d-mollis tonality strongly polarized with A. Its first important cadence, between the cantus on aa and tenor on a over D in the bass (m. 10), rounds off the opening two settenari. As the poetic refrain that will close the piece, these lines need to be firmly anchored, and Willaert does so by treating line 1 as an antecedent, brought to a half cadence (m. 4), and line 2 as a consequent. By letting line 2 cadence fleetingly on f/F (altus-bassus, m. 7) and then, more strongly, on the D-major chord (m. 10), Willaert's setting makes the whole into a tiny, but balanced, bar form aimed toward the final. F retains its status as a secondary

[21] The designation of pitches in Table 3 and elsewhere follows Renaissance practice, with each octave conceived as proceeding upward from pitch G and c designating our "middle c."When speaking of pitch class generally, without reference to particular register, I simply use upper-case letters.

cadential degree and D as a primary degree as the quasi-mutazioni first cadence in a decorative suspension to f/F at mm. 17-18 and then in a hollow open-fifth at m. 23. The last resounds with D in no fewer than three voices (cantus, altus, bassus), while the tenor lingers on the a it had sung in the penultimate cadential sonority. It might seem surprising that this otherwise traditional tenor should retire contrapuntally at a moment of such clear structural definition. But doing so enables it to leap dramatically to center stage, its unexpected high f-sharp attack at m. 24 beaconing the tonal reorientation to come with the "bitter fate" of the third period.

F-sharp is an outsider in the D/A tonal world of the ripresa. The diminished-fourth cross relation it forms with the alto's bb-flat — and that bb-flat's augmented-fourth cross relation with the cantus's ee (m. 25) — subverts the tonal calm that had prevailed in the ripresa . Ultimately the tonality is riveted to a new axis of pitches, F and C, which dominate the medial third and fourth poetic periods, approached through a detour past G at line 7(m. 42).^[22] The shift amounts to a change of modal orientation from Hypoaeolian to Hypolydian that first emerges in a series of evaded cadences at midverse, with falling fourths, ff to c, in the cantus (mm. 31, 33, etc.). Eventually the cadences take up more clear-cut positions at verse endings (mm. 35, 47, 51), reinforcing the shift of modality. Only after D is summoned back with phrase B2 and the start of the last period, "Non è miracol questo," does the madrigal meld seamlessly into a return of the opening.

In Amor mi fa morire, then, Willaert put northern contrapuntal skills to novel expressive use. Pitch emphases, voice leading, and modal relationships all quietly shape prosodic structures at the two levels of verses and periods. The madrigal's new coloristic expressivity — the cross relation between ee-flat and e at the very opening (m. 3) and cross relations highlighting the "bitter fate" in mm. 24-25 noted earlier — introduces a refined dramatic tension into the handling of the verse structure. Some of the madrigal's rhetorical gestures, like the abrupt pause and textural shift to near-homorhythm at the exclamatory "Deh, voi ch'udite 'l mio grave lamento" in the midst of otherwise staggered declamation, are boldly new. Its imaginative transitions between verses call to mind the formal subtlety often heard in Arcadelt's madrigals of the 1530s, most famously Il bianco e dolce cigno from the Primo libro of 1539. And yet with all this, musical accents are allied to words in melodies free enough to allow a virtually infallible diction.

Despite these novelties, Willaert's Amor mi fa morire is closer to Verdelot's style than to anything Willaert composed in later years. The music remains syllabic with many short phrases, cadences (including many Landini cadences) at the end of nearly every verse, minimal text repetition, frequent four-square metric patterns,

[22] This sort of medial modal contrast parallels that undertaken in contemporary chansons, as Howard Mayer Brown pointed out with respect to Willaert and Verdelot; see "Words and Music: Willaert, the Chanson, and the Madrigal about 1540," in Florence and Venice, Comparisons and Relations: Acts of Two Conferences at Villa I Tatti in 1976-1977, vol. 2, Il cinquecento, ed. Christine Smith with Salvatore I. Camporeale (Florence, 1980), pp. 217-66. Comparable events in chansons are generally managed within a much more controllable verbal space — four or five lines of equal length and rhythmic character.

enlivened chordal textures built mainly around tenor and cantus, and a rounded formal structure. The musical treatment of vv. 1-2 as a single bipartite unit — the latter part essentially a variation of the former with a "half cadence" separating the two (m. 4) — recalls the handling of seven-syllable couplets typical in the repertories of both frottola and early madrigal. These qualities serve as a reminder that Willaert largely preserved the formalistic approach that Howard Mayer Brown identified in likening one of his chansons to a madrigal of Verdelot's.^[23] What is more, the novelties I have noted in Amor mi fa morire move it farther from Verdelot's style than any of the other madrigals in the 1534 collection do. A typically Verdelot-styled setting of a ballata-madrigal is Willaert's Madonna, il bel desire, whose melodic repetitions are far more schematic:^[24]

Like many early-sixteenth-century song settings, Madonna, il bel desire assembles jigsaw fashion four distinct melodic strains. Each of these strains plays a discrete rhythmic-harmonic role: phrase A that of an initiating gesture for settenari; phrase B a more elaborated melody for endecasillabi, tracing a falling-ff-to-final-g curve; phrase C a short open-ended melody for paired settenari, supported frottola-like by

[23] Ibid.

[24] The madrigal has a mixed attribution history. In RISM 1534¹⁶, 1536⁷, and 1537¹⁰, it is assigned to Willaert. In 1540²⁰, Scotto's combined edition of Verdelot's first and second books for four voices, it appears to be attributed to Verdelot, as Gardane apparently believed in assigning it to Verdelot in 1541 . As Stanley Boorman has argued, however, this is probably only a result of the fact that the madrigal begins in the middle of a recto with Verdelot's name in the header and with a madrigal of Verdelot's immediately preceding Madonna, il bel desire. In 1540 Willaert's name does not appear until the header of the verso on which Madonna is completed. See Boorman, "Some Non-Conflicting Attributions, and Some Newly Anonymous Compositions, from the Early Sixteenth Century," Early Music History 6 (1986): 125-27 and 157.

For scores of Madonna and other madrigals by Willaert not published in the Musica nova see Willaert, Opera omnia, Corpus mensurabilis musicae, no. 3, AIM, vol. 14, ed. Helga Meier (NeuhausenStuttgart, 1977).

Ex. 10.
Willaert,  Signora dolce, io te vorrei parlare,  cantus, mm. 1-11; in Verdelot,
Secondo libro a 4 (Venice, 1536) (RISM 1536⁷ ), no. 2.

a homorhythmic minim chain with a weak-beat ending; and phrase D a medial endecasillabo melody arching from bb-flat up to dd and down to d below.

There is even more archaism, albeit of an eclectic sort, in other madrigals from 1534. Quando gionse per gli occhi al cor, madonna recalls the old Florentine ballate of Heinrich Isaac, Alessandro Coppini, and Bartolomeo degli Organi: strong metrical rhythms and syncopations, triple-meter shifts, and passages of homorhythm (mm. 31ff.). And the quasi-medieval floating lines and fragile melismas of Signora dolce, io te vorrei parlare, a chivalric offer of secret servitude to a "sweet lady," harken back to the chansons of the fifteenth-century rhétoriqueurs.^[25] (See the opening bars of the cantus in Ex. 10.)

By 1540 Willaert's anthologized madrigals, even the ones for four voices, had already grown distant from Verdelot's balanced songlike conception. The difference is striking in Già mi godea felice ogni mio bene,^[26] one of Willaert's contributions to Scotto's reprint edition Di Verdelotto tutti li madrigali del primo, et secondo libro a quatro voci (1540²⁰ ). This piece sets a little eight-line madrigal, disposed in the near-symmetrical scheme ABbA CddC.

  Già mi godea felice ogni mio bene,            Once I gladly enjoyed all my good fortune,
Hor, sì longo al mio ben, tal doglio           Now, so far from my loved one, I feel such
  sento,                                                       grief
Che più crudel tormento                          That I have never had a more cruel torment,
Non hebbi hormai, nè sì gravose pene.     Nor such a grave pain as now.
  Felic'era'l mio amor, felic'ero io;                Happy was my love, happy was I;
Hor, benchè sia'l mio core                        Now, though my heart is
Sì lontan dal suo amore,                           So far from its love,
Fie volendo felice l'amor mio.                   Let my love be happy if it wishes.^[27]

The poem is a study in simple symmetries, yet Willaert's setting counteracts nearly all of them: the anaphora, repetitions of rhymes, and evenly deployed paradoxes. Its melodies wind out motet-style in a formidable 99 breves (not much shy of the 120

[25] This funny little text does not even scan as proper seven- and eleven-syllable lyric verse.

[26] Willaert may have gotten the text from Constanzo Festa's setting in the latter's Primo libro of 1538. No poetic source is known.

[27] I am grateful to Elissa Weaver for help in translating several poems in this chapter, including this one.

or so typical of his sonnet settings), with little regard for the length or overall rhythmic character of each verse. The declamatory pacing varies widely, from the opening, dominated by breve and semibreve declamation, to subsequent passages declaimed continuously in minims (Ex. 11). Added to all this are several extended melismas, all of these thwarting any clear perception of the poem's versification.

Nevertheless, Willaert did not ignore the poem's larger verbal structures altogether. On the contrary, he magnified the rhetorical-rhythmic closes, culminating the ends of each half with multiple textual repetitions that stretch line 4 over 23 breves and line 8 over 16 1/2. Other tactics gather momentum toward these final cadences too: the cantus makes a prolonged ascent to gg shortly before the close of the first half and florid, sequenced melismas before the very end. As he did in setting Amor mi fa morire, Willaert brought into relief the internal apex of the poem by carrying line 4 to the madrigal's farthest point of modal remove — in this case an evaded, overlapped cadence on f/D — and then turned almost immediately back to the original tonality of C durus.^[28]

Ironically, Willaert spun out these simple verses with more pliant, elongated melodies than he had ever used before, forsaking the prosodic rhythms that had previously been fundamental to Italian lyric song. Già mi godea and other madrigals of 1540 also mark the beginning of Willaert's experimentation with subtle manipulations of timbre, generated by variously blending and reblending different vocal groups. Certainly none of his earlier expositions looks anything like the one in Ex. 11, which weaves a highly individuated cantus and altus into a spare duo for eight long measures before finally repeating v. 1 a quattro. The madrigal's subsequent dispositions of text continue to project varied groupings that intersect and overlap one upon another, as at line 6 (mm. 71-79), where three high voices replace three low ones. The technique is strikingly new in a four-voice texture and profoundly unsettling to the traditional cantus-tenor edifice on which the madrigal's earlier song textures — even less conventional ones like Amor mi fa morire (Ex.9) — had been built.

Scotto's four-voice reprint of Verdelot presented two more of Willaert's madrigals. One set a lengthy madrigal text, Così vincete in terra,^[29] a fourteen-line encomium of a woman, in a style much like that of the 1534 collection. But the other introduced Willaert's first published sonnet setting, Qual anima ignorante over più saggia (set in toto, as all his essays in the sonnet were to be). Qual anima ignorante is a Petrarchan lament loosely modeled after Petrarch's In qual parte del ciel (no. 159), complete with repetitive rhetorical constructions and pervasive antitheses. Its only debt to repetitive song forms is an internal refrain, lines 3-4 returning as lines 7-8.

[28] After the close of v. 4 nearly all the cadences land on C (e.g.,m. 75, m.80, m.91), with the exception of mm. 66-67.

[29] An anonymous setting of the same text survives in I-Bc, MS Q21, which dates from ca. 1526; see Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, pp. 137-39.

Ex. 11.
Willaert,  Già mi godea felice ogni mio bene,  mm. 1-17; in  Di Verdelotto tutti li
madrigali del primo, et secondo libro a 4  (Venice, 1540) (RISM 1540²⁰ ), p. 47.

Qual anima ignorante over più saggia                  What soul ignorant or more wise,
Qual huom mortal, qual dio, qual donn'o diva,    What mortal man, what god, what woman or goddess
Che non sappia 'l mio mal onde deriva,               That might not know from whence my woe derives
E del mio grand'ardor pietà non haggia.              And might not pity my great ardor?                                   4

Qual selv'è sì riposta o sì selvaggia                     What woods so hidden or so savage,
Qual lauro in aria cresce o qual oliva,                 What laurel rising in the air or what olive tree
Che non sappia 'l mio mal onde deriva,              That may not know from whence my woe derives
E del mio grand'ardor pietà non haggia.              And may not pity my great ardor?                                      8

Qual part'hoggi del mondo, che non sia             What part of the world today that is not
Delle lagrime pien'e di lamento,                         Full of tears and of laments,
Delle voci, sospir'e doglia mia.                          Of voices, sighs, and my griefs?                                          11

Non giace cosa hormai sotto la via                   Not a thing now lies beneath the path
Del ciel che non conosca 'l mio tormento,         Of heaven that does not know my torment
Se non sola colei, ch'io sol vorria.                     But her alone whom I alone desire.                                      14

Willaert's setting of Qual anima ignorante continued the trajectory of other madrigals from 1540, though the basic conception differs from that of sonnet settings in the Musica nova . Willaert made no seconda parte for the sestet or any double-bar division at all and matched the poetic refrain with the same music. In these respects the setting follows conventional norms for setting the lighter forms of the ballata and madrigal. Yet some of the elastic pacing and varied vocal scoring of Già mi godea finds its way into Qual anima ignorante, especially in the last tercet, where the previously languorous rhythms unexpectedly pick up. Here too Willaert loosed the restraints of a prosodic approach by fully recognizing the poetic enjambment with a continuous musical phrase (mm. 110-11).

All three of the poets in 1540²⁰ have continued to elude identification. The point is suggestive, for it relates to Willaert's general disengagement in anthologized madrigals from verse authorized by classical tradition or having pretensions to the highest literary pedigree. If the poets' voices remain so consistently unrecoverable in our day, they were probably muted in Willaert's too. More than theirs, it was probably Willaert's voice that resonated "authorially" among buyers and auditors in salons and print shops. This does not mean that poems were typically chosen through Willaert's agency or authority: the mechanisms through which he acquired texts remain mysterious and the impetuses for his settling on one or another were probably as fragmentary and diverse as their printing venues.

Both of Willaert's two five-voice madrigals featured in Scotto's anthology Le dotte, et eccellente compositioni de i madrigali a cinque voci (RISM 1540¹⁸ ) may have arisen at the behest of particular patrons or for special occasions.^[30] One of these is

[30] As Fenlon and Haar point out, the composers listed in this print appear in "what looks like a descending order of importance" (ibid., p. 313): Willaert, "suo discipulo" Leonardo (Leonardus) Barré, Verdelot, Arcadelt, Festa, Corteccia, Berchem, and so on (the order thereafter becomes slightly less straightforward) — an arrangement only a little different from that given on the title page of the cantus part book. The undated print RISM [1538²⁰] (Il nuovo Vogel, no. 2883) is undoubtedly a later reprint of 1540¹⁸, as established by Mary S. Lewis, "Antonio Gardane and His Publications of Sacred Music, 1538-55" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1979), p. 629, and Fenlon and Haar, The Italian Madrigal, p. 313.

the famous homage to Polissena Pecorina, Qual dolcezza giamai (the text of which appears in Chap. 2, pp. 34-35). Qual dolcezza giamai is the only madrigal from these years that essays an explicitly celebratory style, with appealing melodies that have little place in Willaert's Petrarch settings. The graceful, catchy soggetto in Ex. 12, announced by the tenor under a shimmery alto countersubject and imitated at m. 5 by the cantus, has no analogues among expositions in the Musica nova. Einstein viewed this kind of five-part writing as technically new; "the choral response, the vocal coloring (one might call it 'vocal glazing'). Just as a painter covers over but does not conceal a shining ground color with another one, delicate and transparent, so Willaert superimposes upon a prominent voice, the bearer of the espressivo, another purely radiant one."^[31] Einstein did not link this to the celebratory nature of the text. But he did note the new dramatic potential inherent in such textural flexibility and particularly the rhetorical and timbral possibilities in treating the fivepart madrigal as two four-part textures (as happens at the beginning of the seconda parte ). (The only text for which Verdelot uses such a technique in the same print is an actual dialogue.) In making the words easily perceptible, Willaert also kept the declamatory meter uniform, even when the parts give out different rhythms and melodies on the same words. His short, simple formulas for acclamations like "Desta nei cor" usually repeat the same motive (as shown in Ex. 13) but also vary it with the more athletic motion of the bassus (Ex. 13b) or the rising movement of the altus (Ex. 13c). Willaert pitched settings like these to a lighter — hence lower — stylistic level than his settings for the Musica nova (even switching to a near-homorhythmic triple time at "Et si rallegra in ciel di gir'in giro").

Though Qual dolcezza giamai progresses through an accumulation of enjambments (vv. 1-3, 5-6, 7-8, 10-11, 13-14), Willaert's setting still largely ties its phrases and contrapuntal articulations to the poem's versification.^[32] Superficially the parts appear to function autonomously, but Willaert stitches them to a series of cadences that coordinate the parts at moments of prosodic definition (note the four upper voices at m. 13, Ex. 12).^[33] The combination of relatively short melodious strains and frequent multivoice cadencing keeps the words clear and the texture delightfully transparent.

Both Qual dolcezza giamai and the other setting in Le dotte, the ballata Quanto più m'arde e più s'accende il foco, may owe their existence to local sources of patronage.

[31] The Italian Madrigal 1:327-28.

[32] The only exception is that of the strong enjambment that opens the second part, "A la dolce armonia si fa serena / L'aria, s'acqueta il mar, taccion'i venti" (At the sweet harmony the air becomes / serene, the sea calms, the wind turns quiet), for which Willaert provided a separate exposition for "A la dolce armonia," and then made what follows continuous.

[33] Some of these cadences involve as many as all five voices, for example, mm. 79, 84, and the general pause preceding the triple-time passage, m. 63. For the full setting see Willaert, Opera omnia 14:65-70.

Ex. 12.
Willaert, Qual dolcezza giamai,  mm. 1-13; in  Le dotte, et eccellente compositioni de
i madrigali a 5  (Venice, 1540) (RISM 1540¹⁸ ), p. 1.

Ex. 13.
Willaert, Qual dolcezza giamai:  a,
m. 33; b, mm. 32-33; and c, mm. 36-37;
in  Le dotte, et eccellente compositioni
de i madrigali a 5  (Venice, 1540)
(RISM 1540¹⁸ ), p. 1.

Quanto più m'arde had recently been published (like Già mi godea ) in a setting by Constanzo Festa,^[34] and in light of Festa's previous settings of both texts one cannot discount the possibility of a Strozzi connection. Both Quanto più m'arde and Già mi godea remain without poetic identifications. But an important poet-patron of Festa's (and one not represented in surviving literary sources) had significant Venetian connections, namely Filippo Strozzi. One of Willaert's anthologized madrigals, the six-voice Rompi dell'empio core il duro scoglio, published the year after Le dotte in Verdelot's six-voice print La più divina musica (1541¹⁶ ), set Strozzi's invective on his incarceration by the Medici. By 1541 Filippo had been dead for about three years (as noted in Chapter 2), but his trusted nephew Neri Capponi and sons Piero and Ruberto maintained a Strozzi presence in Venice. Since Festa benefited from Filippo's patronage and set his poems to music,^[35] it is tempting to consider whether Willaert may have reset texts set by Festa because they were Strozzi's.

Such a scenario seems plausible in view of Willaert's having composed music for both texts. And Quanto più m'arde shares with an attributed Strozzi poem set by Willaert about 1542, Rompi dell'empio cor il duro scoglio, a darker, more dramatic expression than found in any of Willaert's previous settings. Einstein singled out Willaert's Quanto più m'arde for the violent rhetoric it used to assail the poem's mass of Petrarchan oppositions: death is sweet, pain a jest; ice does not freeze, or fire burn, grief grieve, or death kill; thus does the poet beg Love to freeze, inflame, and kill him.^[36]

In lieu of such additive development, Rompi dell'empio cor weaves a bitter address to a "cruel lady" into the theme of Filippo's imprisonment.

  Rompi dell'empio cor il duro scoglio                   Break the hard reef of your evil heart,
Depon gli sdegn'e l'ire                                     Put down your ire and your disdain,
Hormai, donna crudel, depon l'orgoglio,          Now, cruel lady, swallow your pride;
Nè ti rincresc'udire,                                         Don't be unhappy to hear
Com'io, giont'al morire,                                   How I, having arrived at death,                            5
Non più di te d'amor del ciel mi doglio.            No longer grieve for you, for love of Heaven;
  Ma sol qual cign'in trist'accenti chieggio,             But only like a swan in sad tones ask
Che se m'odiast'in vita                                     That if you hated me in life,
Non mi niegh'un sospir alla partita.                  You not deny me a sigh at my departure.
  Ah, dove folle son, come                                   Ah, where am I going mad, why do
    vaneggio?                                                              I rave on?                                                10
Qui non m'od'o risponde                                 Here no one hears or answers me
Altri che de Mugnon le riv'e l'onde.                 But the shores and waves of Mugnone.

[34] Festa's setting was printed in Arcadelt's Terzo libro a 4 (Venice, 1539). There is also a setting of the poem in Scotto's Primo libro a 4 of 1542.

[35] See Richard J. Agee, "Filippo Strozzi and the Early Madrigal," JAMS 38 (1985): 227-37.

[36] The Italian Madrigal 1:329, where the text is not mentioned by incipit.

Given the continued presence in Venice of the Strozzi sons, especially Ruberto, Willaert's setting may have served as a eulogy, with its deep tessituras and large scoring (it is his only anthologized setting for six voices).^[37]

In 1542 Willaert published his second sonnet setting, Chi volesse saper che cos'è amore, again in one complete part. The setting was included in Scotto's Madrigali a quatro voce con alcuni alla misura breve as one of the black-note madrigals, though it bore the unusual time signature O (tempus perfectum, prolatio imperfecta ). In the same year Willaert also published what are now his first firmly datable settings of Petrarch, Qual più diversa e nova cosa and Quante volte diss'io (Canzoniere, nos. 135 and 126). Remarkably, canzone stanzas are Willaert's only known Petrarch settings outside of the Musica nova.

Then in 1544 came the three settings in Di Cipriano il secondo libro de madregali a cinque voci insieme alcuni di M. Adriano et altri autori a misura comune novamente posti in luce a cinque voci (RISM 1544¹⁷ ), nominally Rore's second book albeit with only eight of his madrigals. Willaert's settings assume an almost equal symbolic position in the collection next to Rore's,^[38] with both composers arranged as symmetrical frames for the rest: the print begins with a madrigal each by Rore and then Willaert and ends with the reverse — perhaps a bow to age. Otherwise it resembles other books issued by Venetian printers in the 1540s that presented works by local Willaertians like Perissone, Jachet Berchem, Leonardus Barré, and Parabosco.^[39] More will be said about the print in Chapters 8 and 9. For the moment it is important to note how many rhetorically conceived settings clustered in it all at once, signaling the gradual displacement of Florentine madrigalian style in the face of a growing consolidation and diffusion of Venetian practices.

Notwithstanding this, Willaert's anthologized madrigals continued setting texts outside the literary canon of Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro, and Ariosto. All the verse in

[37] Possibly Willaert resorted to mode 3 for the same reason. His use of Hypophrygian for one of the only two sonnets from the "in morte" portion of Petrarch's Canzoniere included in the Musica nova (Mentre che'l cor dagli amorosi vermi ) makes me think he may have.

For identification of Rompi dell'empio core and its sources see Eugenia Levi, ed., Lirica italiana nel cinquecento e nel seicento fino all'Arcadia . . . (Florence, 1909), pp. 307, 419, and 445.

[38] It should be noted that Einstein doubted the authenticity of the second, a resetting of Qual anima ignorante, on the grounds of its voice leading and what he took to be removal of the attribution to Willaert in later editions of Rore's Secondo libro (The Italian Madrigal 1:329). To be sure it is difficult to explain the presence of a passage with parallel fifths between tenor and bassus, like that from the upbeat of m. 53 to m.55. Yet the madrigal is also attributed to Willaert in various reprint editions (see Il nuovo Vogel 2:1487-88).

[39] See Table 8. Similar prints include the 1546 reprint of Verdelot's six-voice volume La piu divina, et piu bella musica, originally issued by Gardane in 1541 and later reprinted by him as Madrigali di Verdelot et de altri autori a sei voci novamente con alcuni madrigali novi ristampati & corretti a sei voci (RISM 1546¹⁹) with madrigals by Noletto (Nolet or Noleth, known from Doni's Dialogo della musica), Jachet Berchem, Parabosco, and Perissone, among others; and Rore's third book, Di Cipriano Rore et di altri eccellentissimi musici il terzo libro di madrigali a cinque voci, as published by Scotto in 1548 (1548⁹) with madrigals by Rore, Perissone, Donato, Willaert, Gabriele Martinengo, and Zarlino. Venetian composers are also scattered throughout Scotto's Verdelot reprint Le dotte, et eccellente compositioni de i madrigali a cinque voci da diversi perfettissimi musici fatte. Novamente raccolte, & con ogni diligentia stampate (RISM 1540¹⁸), reprinted in 1541 and 1549, which includes works of Verdelot, Willaert, Barré, Constanzo Festa, Arcadelt, Corteccia, Berchem, Yvo, and Nolet.

the 1544 group remains anonymous and some of it ventures strategies of voice and address foreign to conventional lyrics of the early cinquecento. The unorthodox Sciocco fu 'l tuo desire — a lengthy ballata-madrigal couched in the invective of a woman called "Chiara" who rails against the folly and ills of a noble lover — turns on its head the notion that Venetian polyphonists adhered to strictly Bembist literary norms.

  Sciocco fu 'l tuo desire                                    Foolish was your desire
Veramente pensando ch'a miei danni            In truly imagining that at my expense
Teco n'entrassi a gli amorosi affanni.             I should enter into amorous troubles with you.
Mi maraviglio, quando                                 I wonder that
Non anchor chiaro sei del foll'errore,           You are not yet certain of the foolish error,            5
E come desiando                                        And how you lost days and hours
L'amor mio ne perdest'i giorni e l'hore.         In craving my love.
  Donna cortes'e humana                                   A courteous, humane woman
Con vil amante certo mal s'accorda.           With a vile lover surely is badly matched.
Non mi conosci, o cieca mente insana         You do not know me, o blind twisted mind            10
Di bastardo, nè vo' che per me leggi           Of a bastard, nor do I want you to read me
El suon di privileggi                                     The sound of your
Tuoi ch'ogni orecchia assorda.                    Titles, which deafen every ear.
Hor tienti al mio consiglio:                           Now take my advice:
Pon giù, se puoi, l'insania e cangia               Set aside, if you can, your madness and change
  l'ire,                                                               your wrath,                                                      15
Ch'assembr'al vespertil e non al giglio.        Which resembles bats, not lilies.
Chiara son io, qual fui, nè mi scompiglio      I am Chiara, as I was, nor do I
A fart'il vero udire:                                     Trouble myself to make you hear the truth:
Se di te mai pensai, poss'io morire.             If I ever thought about you, I might die.

The poem's harsh, chiseled diction replaces Petrarch's lyric meditations with the direct discourse not just of a real-life lover but a female one, no less, and frames her speech in vituperative secular protestations linked with class. Chiara's low-styled cannonade on her lover's high-born vice foregrounds the matter of social rank as it inverts it. She delivers her tirade in a familiarizing second-person singular, crescen-doing from passato remoto to present tense (v. 8) and finally to a rebuke aimed, at last, not (Petrarchistically) at herself but at him. Even the familiar turn to dying for the final rhetorical point does not propose a Petrarchan love-death — a love that ambivalently relishes love pangs as welcome death — but rather hints formally at Petrarch's paradox to reject it. The poem resembles Veronica Franco's invective retorts to challenges to her class and virtue from later in the century (cf. Chap. I, n. 35). Yet madrigalian settings of texts spoken either in a woman's voice or even in a voice overtly aligned with class were rare throughout the sixteenth century, making this one striking despite the relatively neutral treatment Willaert gave it. Rather than embodying the text's invective realism in musical events, Willaert realized it by continuing to experiment with different three- and four-voice choral responses, especially at the most heated and direct parts of Chiara's tirade — the declamation of

v. 12, "El suon di privileggi," whipping by in minims and fast registral shifts of dialogue, or again for the imperative of v. 14, "Hor tienti al mio consiglio."

It is instructive to recall that the madrigals in Rore's Secondo libro were published in the same year Doni described Neri Capponi hoarding Willaert's music, music undoubtedly kept from print for a long time afterward (see Chap. 2 above, nn. 38-39). This coincidence underscores the impression that social polarities were crucial in segregating public madrigals from private ones, and that the madrigals of the Secondo libro were textual and stylistic exemplars of the former ilk, while those kept by Capponi were marked by Musica nova -like reserve. More than that, the stylistic, thematic, bibliographical, and biographical evidence clustering on each side of this polarity suggests that social contexts actually worked to exaggerate differences between them.

From this point on Willaert essentially reworked approaches he had developed by the early to mid-forties. The five madrigals published in Rore's Third Book set occasional texts, with only one or two exceptions, but did not experiment with new approaches.^[40] Nothing in subsequent publications surprises much either, except perhaps a spiritual madrigal published posthumously in 1563 — a modified terza rima that turns out to be a gloss of Jacopo Sannazaro's capitolo Se mai per meraviglia alzando il viso (note the adaptation of Sannazaro's second, third, sixth, and part of the fourth stanzas indicated below).

   Poem Set by Willaert (with rhyme scheme)               Stanze from Sannazaro's Poem

a         Piangete' egri mortali,                                    3        Piangete il grave universal dolore
B     Piangete l'aspra morte del Signore,                         Piangete l'aspra morte e 'l crudo affanno
B     Se spirto di pietà vi punge il core.                           Se spirto di pietà vi punge il core.

C       Volgete gli occhi in qua c'hoggi dimostra         2        Volgete gli occhi in qua, che ve presente
D     Non quella forma, oimè, non quel colore                 Non quella forma (ahimè), non quel dolore
C    Che finge forse i sensi in mente vostra.                     Che contemplaron gli occhi de la mente.

e        Vedete 'l volto esangue                                   6        Ecco che hor vi dimostra il volto exangue
F     Le chiome lacerate, il capo basso,                           Le chiome lacerate: el capo basso
E    Qual rosa che calcata in terra langue.                        Come rosa dismessa in terra langue.

G       O mirabil pietà, o dolce pegno,
e    O sacrosanto sangue,
G   Si largamente sparso al duro legno;                      4/v.2 Pende come vedete al duro legno.

[40] See Table 2. Amor, da che tu vuoi exemplifies texts that are not specifically occasional, but use the playfully direct voice prevalent in anthologized madrigals: "Amor, da che tu vuoi pur ch'io m'arischi / In udir e vedere / Sirene e Basilischi? / Fammi gratia, signore, / S'egli avvien che mi strugga lo splendore / Di due occhi sireni, e ch'io sia preda / D'un ragionar accorto, / Che chi n'ha colpa creda / Che per udir e per veder sia morto. / Gentil coppia eccellente, / Chi vi mira et ascolta / Solamente una volta / E non mor di piacere, / Può gir arditamente / Ad udir e vedere / Le Sirene d'amor e i Basilischi" (Why do you still want me to endanger myself / By hearing and seeing / Sirens and basilisks? / Do me a favor, Lord, / If it happens that the splendor / Of two serene eyes melts me, and that I am prey / To a crafty reasoning; / For one who is guilty of this believes / That by hearing and seeing he may die. / Gentle excellent couple, / He who gazes at you and listens / Just once / And doesn't die of pleasure / Can turn ardently to listen and see / The sirens of love and the basilisks).

h        O rara, o nuova legge,
J    Humiliarsi a morte acerba e dura
H  Quel che 'l ciel e la terra e 'l mar corregge.

J        Piangi mond'orbo, piangi egra natura:
H   Morto è 'l pastor per liberar lo gregge,
J    Come agnel mansueto alla tonsura.

The similarities between Willaert's and Sannazaro's texts, and especially the publication in 1511 by Franciscus Bossinensis of Sannazaro's text in an anonymous frot-tola setting, presents a potentially fascinating link between Willaert's written polyphony and the capitolo in terza rima so closely identified with oral tradition. Recall that the anonymous setting in Bossinensis's lute book gave every indication of having its genesis in improvised song, indeed song of an epic recitational sort (see Chap. 4 nn. 72-73). As Willaert's only effort at setting terza rima, we might expect to find some semblance of oral genesis in Piangete' egri mortali, but Willaert's madrigal lacks all the traces of oral prehistory that mark the Bossinensis arrangement. The vestigial affinities with oral traditions found in written Italian polyphony from the 1520S and 1530s, even in Willaert's own madrigals of 1534 and his lute intabulations of Verdelot's madrigals from 1536, found no place here.

The collective diversity evinced by the madrigals that Willaert anthologized from the 1530s to 1550s resembles the physiognomy of vernacular literary production during the same period. The earlier end of this span coincides with the beginnings of a phenomenon that parallels our modern-day "journalism," a period when professional polygraphs like Lodovico Domenichi, Lodovico Dolce, Ortensio Landi, Antonfrancesco Doni, and Niccolò Franco began to adapt a wide variety of subjects for popular consumption, often framing them in what I earlier called "dialogic" modes. In 1537 Aretino's Primo libro delle lettere inaugurated the familiar vernacular letter; in 1539 the first anti-Petrarchan parody, Niccolò Franco's Il Petrarchista, dialogo . . . nel quale si scuoprono nuovi secreti sopra il Petrarca, appeared; in 1543 Landi's satirical popularization of the classical genre of paradox Paradossi cioè, sententie fuori del comun parare; and (not least) in 1544 Doni's quasi-comic dialogue evoking the meetings of a musical academy, Dialogo della musica. The playful poetics found in many of Willaert's anthologized texts, the occasional, even biographical side of others, and the appealing musical persona of the settings share the public consciousness of those eclectic literary publications. Both kinds of literary and musical production were designed for the largest possible audience, an audience that thrived on the direct speech and referentiality of realistically situated verse and on the diminutive forms, ludic inversions, and general accessibility to be had in simple plays on Petrarchan courtly love.