GIACHES DE WERT AND THE DISCOURSE OF PETRARCHISM

Abstract

Near the end of his career, in the midto late 1580s, Giaches de Wert composed six elaborate madrigals setting poems from Petrarch's Can zoniere. I have chosen this ?event? as my starting point even though it is not the sort of circumstance we might expect to discuss in a round table such as this. It has no readily discernible international significance ? was no Lepanto, no massacre of Huguenots, no Spanish Armada. Ra ther it looks to be a purely musical occurrence of local or perhaps North Italian resonance. Wert published his late Petrarch settings in his ninth and tenth books of madrigals of 1588 and 1591, five of them in the first and one more, disjoined from its siblings and more than a little out of place, in the se cond. These works evidence the composer's intense reinvolvement with Petrarch after many years when, by the evidence of his madrigal books, at any rate, he had all but completely set aside the poet. In various mu sical features these Petrarch settings stand out from most all of the ma drigals around them and also from the madrigals in Wert's preceding and following publications, the eighth and eleventh books of 1586 and 1595. What is the significance of Wert's return to Petrarch? I will not at tempt here to answer this question in the usual musicological fashion, which as I see it would involve describing the place of these madrigals in Wert's biography and output as a whole, their position in the Man tuan and Ferrarese madrigal of the late sixteenth century, their reflec tion of earlier compositional practices or impact on later ones, their self conscious embodiment of general, extra-jnusical ideologies, and other such issues. Not that I'll avoid all these topics. I'll allude to them repea tedly, but with this difference: not as ends in themselves but in an effort to see beneath them, so to speak, to a level of cultural formation that determined them at the same time as they, engaged and transformed it.