Hoekstra (1994) - The Reception and Cultivation of The Italian Madrigal in Antwerp and The Low Countries, 1555-1620

The Reception and Cultivation of the Italian Madrigal in Antwerp and the Low
Countries, 1555-1620
Author(s): Gerald R. Hoekstra
Source: Musica Disciplina , 1994, Vol. 48 (1994), pp. 125-187
Published by: American Institute of Musicology Verlag Corpusmusicae, GmbH
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20532382
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THE RECEPTION AND CULTIVATION
OF THE ITALIAN MADRIGAL
IN ANTWERP AND THE LOW COUNTRIES,
1555-1620*
GERALD R. HOEKSTRA
Between 1555 and 1620 more than eighty-five volumes containing Italian
madrigals were printed in Antwerp and other cities of the Low Countries.1 What
started as a trickle in the 1550s with some madrigals of Lassus and Waelrant
became a stream in the 1580s that continued into the early seventeenth century
and began to abate only toward the end of the second decade of the century. If
one were to include reprints of these volumes, the number would be far greater.
During the late sixteenth century interest in the new Italian styles spread through
out Northern Europe, and while this development has been recognized by stu
dents of the madrigal generally and examined extensively for its importance in the
development of the English madrigal,2 little attention has been paid specifically to
I am grateful to St. Olaf College for providing a Summer Study Grant for travel to
Belgium to work on this project and to Professors James Haar and Donna Cardamone
Jackson for reading this paper in an earlier draft and providing valuable suggestions.
1 See the Bibliography at the end of this article. Of course, this list includes only the
prints that are known today, primarily those that have survived. It is probable that there
were more, though how many is impossible to say. I have learned that the detailed business
records of the Plantin firm housed in the Plantin Moretus Museum record tides of Phal?se
prints not otherwise known today. How many such tides there are, and how many may
have included Italian madrigals, will not be known until a comprehensive study of the
musical references in those records has been undertaken.
2 Jerome Roche, The Madrigal, 2nd ed. (New York, 1990), ch. 7, The Madrigal
North of the Alps; and The Madrigal Outside Italy and England, section V of "Madrigal,"
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 11: 481 - 82. Alfred Einstein, The Ital
ian Madrigal, trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1949) has little to say about the madrigal outside of Italy. For the English
madrigal, see Joseph Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal: A Comparative Study, Ameri
can Musicological Society: Studies and Documents 4 (New York, 1962). See, however,
also Lydia Hamessley, "The Tenbury and Ellesmere Partbooks: New Findings on Manu
script Compilation and Exchange, and the Reception of the Italian Madrigal in Eliza
bethan England," Music and Letters 73 (1992), pp. 177-221, for evidence that the English
drew directly on Italian prints as well.

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126 M?SICA DISCIPLINA
its manifestation in the Low Countries ? either to the extent of interest in the
madrigal or to the cultural basis of its popularity.3

Although madrigals had been appearing sporadically in music prints issued
by Antwerp presses since the mid-1550s, it was Phal?se and Bell?re's anthology
M?sica Divina of 1583 that seems to have really sparked the interest of the Low
Countries in the Italian genre. The reception accorded this volume inspired its
publishers to issue another similar anthology, Harmon?a celeste, later that same
year and a third, Symphonia angelica, in 1585. A fourth, Melod?a olympica, com
pleted the "set" somewhat later in 1591. All of these volumes followed a similar
format: they offered a large number of pieces (more than 50, as compared with
the typical 15-20 in Italian volumes of the period), they combined madrigals of
various voicings (a 4, 5, and 6); and they included works by a variety of compos
ers ? Italians, Italo-Netherlanders, and a few local musicians. The popularity of
these anthologies persisted over several decades and motivated the firm to issue
multiple reprints of them.4 During the later 1580s, Phal?se began also to issue vol
umes of Italian madrigals devoted to the works of individual composers: Jean de
Castro's Madrigali a 3 (1588), Rinaldo del Mel's Madrigal a 6 (1588), Bernardo
Mosto's Madrigali a 5 (1588) and Jan Jacob van Turnhout's Madrigali a 6 (1589).
In the same year that Melod?a olympica was issued, 1591, Phal?se tried a simpler
and quicker approach to meeting Antwerp's demand for Italian music. He
reprinted, with only minor changes, an anthology published in Venice six years
earlier, Antonio Gardano's // lauro verde madrigali a sei voci. He followed this in
the 1590s with reprints of single-composer madrigal books by Marenzio (Books
I-V a 5 and Books I-V a 6), Gastoldi (balletti), Vecchi and others. During the last
two decades of the sixteenth century and the opening decades of the seventeenth,
3 The study that deals most direcdy with this subject is Kristine Forney, "The Role
of Antwerp in the Reception and Dissemination of the Madrigal in the North," Acts of the
14th Congress of the International Musicological Society, Bologna, 1987: Transmissione e
recezione delle forme di cultura musicale (Turin, 1990), pp. 239-253.
4 M?sica divina was reprinted in 1588,1591,1595,1606,1614,1623, and 1634; Har

mon?a celeste in 1589,1593 (with slight modifications), 1605,1614,1628; Symphonia ange
lica in a slighdy altered second edition of 1590 and again in 1594,1611, and 1629; and Melo
d?a olympica in 1594,1611, and 1630. According to Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal, p.
49, of all European anthologies at the end of the century, only // trionfo di Dori went
through a larger number of reprints than M?sica divina (7) and Harmon?a celeste (6);
RISM, however, lists only six reprints for // trionfo, five of them by Phal?se. This figure, of
course, accounts only for those that are known today. See note 1 above.

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ITALIAN MADRIGAL 127
the firm of Phal?se issued more than 70 volumes of madrigals, not counting sub
sequent reissues: both anthologies (some newly assembled from Italian sources,
some straightforward reprints of Italian volumes, and some reprints of Italian
volumes with major modifications) and single-composer volumes (primarily
reprints of Venetian publications). The madrigal, a genre in a foreign tongue and
by composers for the most part unknown in the area, clearly had caught on with
the Antwerp public.5 How might we account for this phenomenon?
The roots of Antwerp's interest in the madrigal, at least from the evidence of
publishing history, appear to go back to 1555, when Tielman Susato first printed
Orlande de Lassus's Le qpuxtoirsiesme livre a quatre parties contenant dixhuyct
5 To fully assess the popularity of any music one would have to know the size of the
press runs and the number of reprints for each of the volumes. While we do not have spe
cific information on the size of Phal?se's press runs, the few extant documents from the
sixteenth century that record edition sizes for music publications suggest that the typical
size of a printing for a set of partbooks was around 500, though in certain exceptional
cases it was as large as 1000 or 1500. Richard Agee, "A Venetian Music Printing Contract
and Edition Size in the Sixteenth Century," Studi musicalilb (1986), pp. 59-68, concludes
from an examination of the eleven known documents referring to edition size of music
publications, four of which specify more than 1000 but most of the others around 500,
that the latter number represented the norm. (This compares to runs of 150 - 3000, with an
average of 1250, for non-music publications of the period; see Rudolph Hirsch, Printing,
Selling, and Reading, 1450-1550 [Wiesbaden, 1967], pp. 65-68, and Leon Voet, The Gol
den Compasses: A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the
Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp [Amsterdam, 1969-72], p. 169.) Daniel Heartz, Pierre
Attaingnant, Royal Printer of Music: A Historical Study and Bibliographical Catalogue
(Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1969), p. 122, citing the four documents that record edition sizes
of 1000 or more, concluded that French press runs usually numbered over 1000; Agee,
though, claims these large runs were atypical. Mary S. Lewis, Antonio Gardano, Venetian
Music Printer 1538 -1569: A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study (New York and
London, 1988), p. 88, suggests that Gardano "probably put out editions in varying sizes,"
from 500 or fewer for publications of minor composers or volumes subsidized by com
posers or patrons, to 1000 or more for composers of international appeal, though she
appears to be working from the same documents as Agee. Samuel F. Pogue, Jacques
Moderne: Lyons Music Printer of the Sixteenth Century (Geneva, 1969), p. 45, puts the
norm for Moderne at around 500. It is difficult to know how to apply this information to
M?sica divina and its successors. As Agee notes, different types of books may have been
printed in different size runs; he suggests, for instance, that books for solo performer such
as lute books may have been printed in larger numbers than ensemble books (p. 64). Pha
l?se's madrigal anthologies are already unusual for their time in that they are larger than
most chanson or madrigal books; they contain more than fifty pieces (many in two or
more partes), compared to the 25-30 in most of Attaingnant's volumes and even fewer in
most Italian prints.
The size of a press run is directly related to the matter of reprints, of course. The
high cost of paper and the relatively low cost of type setting motivated the publishers to
hold the size of a printing to around 500 and republish a volume if demand warranted it
(cf. Heartz, op. cit., p. 115).

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chansons italiennes, six chansons francoixes, &six motetz? A manuscript copied in

the Low Countries circa 1550, though, contains three madrigals by the Antwerp
native Hubert Waelrant and thus shows some interest in the Italian genre already
before this.7 Three years after Lassus's volume appeared, Waelrant published nine
of his own madrigals ? all a 5, all in two partes ? along with eleven chansons, in
his IIprimo libro de madrigali e canzoni francezi (Waelrant & Laet, 1558).8 The
presence of Lassus in Antwerp may well have inspired Waelrant to write and
publish these works, though as noted above they were not his first efforts in the
genre. Waelrant would surely have been in contact with the younger composer,
since he was the printing partner of Jan de Laet, who issued Lassus's first book of
motets in 1555. The nine madrigals in II primo libro resemble in style Lassus's
early five-part madrigals and the madrigals of the Roman anthologies of the 1550,
which the younger composer may well have brought to Antwerp with him.
Other local composers gradually began to try their hand at setting Italian
texts also, and during the 1560s and '70s a number of music books were printed
by the firms of Jan Laet (after his death the firm was run by his widow), Christo
6 Susato issued the volume again the same year with the Italian tide D'Orlando di
Lassus IIprimo libro dovesi contengono madrigali, vilanesche, canzonifrancesi, e motetti a
quattro voci, nuovamente impressizn? a dedication to Stefano Gentile dated May 13,1555;
see Kristine K. Forney, "Orlando di Lasso's 'Opus 1': The Making and Marketing of a
Renaissance Music Book," Revue belge de musicologie 39-40 (1985-86), 33-60. Madri
gals had already begun appearing in intabulation in lutebooks several years earlier. Four
Italian-tided pieces are included in Phal?se's Hortus musarum (Louvain, 1552), and one
appears with words and a mensural soprano part in the Horti musarum secunda pars
(Louvain, 1553); see Howard M. Brown, Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A Bib
liography (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), items 1552n and 155312. After this most of Phal?se's
lutebooks contain some intabulations of madrigals. As far as I know, no other Antwerp
lutebooks offered madrigals for singing until Adriaensen's Pratum musicum appeared in
1584 (Brown, item 15846).
7 Bologna MS Q26, although primarily a chansonnier, contains one anonymous

madrigal a 4 and three madrigals by Waelrant, two a 4 (one in two partes) and one a 6; see
Forney, "The Role of Antwerp," pp. 243-44. The Stonyhurst partbooks, which were
probably copied in Brussels or Antwerp and are dated 1552, also contain four Italian
secular pieces; see Iain Fenlon, "An Imperial Repertory for Charles V," Studi musicali 13
(1984), 221-240.
8 See my edition of Waelrant's volume in Recent Researches in the Music of the

Renaissance, vol. 88 (Madison, Wis., 1991).
On the printers Waelrant and Laet and their music publications, see Robert Lee
Weaver, Waelrant and Laet: Music Printers in Antwerp's Golden Age (Warren, Mich.,
1995) and Robert Lee Weaver, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Music Printed by Hubert
Waelrant and Jan de Laet (Warren, Mich., 1994).

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pher Plantin, and Pierre Phal?se (in Louvain, before his merger with Bell?re),
offering madrigals by Jean de Castro, No? Faignient, and S?verin Cornet, as well
as occasional pieces by Italians and Italo-Netherlanders.9 These earlier volumes
containing madrigals differ in two important respects from M?sica divina and its
successors, though: first, with only a few exceptions, they offer Italian madrigals
in the company of other genres, primarily chansons; and second, again with only
a few exceptions, they offer madrigals not by native Italians but by Netherlanders,
primarily local musicians.
Antwerp's love affair with the Italian madrigal really began to blossom,
however, only in the 1580s and '90s, after the appearance of M?sica divina (see
Table 1). During the later 1580s the Italian madrigal was spreading to other cities in
the North as well.10 In 1588 the Nuremberg printer Catherine Gerlach issued the
first volume of an anthology assembled by Friedrich Lindner under the Latin tide
Gemma musicalis: Selectissimas varii stili cantiones (vulgo Italis madrigali et
napolitane dicuntur) a 4,5, and 6.n In content it was similar to the anthologies that
Phal?se and Bell?re had issued several years earlier. Two more volumes of the set
followed in 1589 and 1590. Soon reprints of Marenzio, Gastoldi, and other Italian
madrigalists began to appear in Germany as they had in Antwerp. Also in 1588
Nicolas Yonge published his M?sica transalpina in London, and in 1589 Thomas
Watson his First Sett, Of Italian Madrigalls Englished, volumes that drew on Phal
?se's anthologies for material.12 Nowhere else in the North, though, was the inter
9 La fleur des chansons a trois... de Jean Castro, Severin Cornet, No? Faignient et
autres (RISM15743) containing one madrigal by Castro, two by Cornet; Castro's Livre de
Meslanges ... a 4 containing eleven pieces with Italian text; the oft-reprinted Septiesme
livre de chansons a 4 o? Phal?se, with two ? one by Berchem, one by Donato; Cornet's
Canzoni napolitane a 4 (Laet, 1564) and Madrigali a 5, 6,7, & 8 (Plantin, 1581); Faignient's
Chansons, madrigales & motetz a 4, 5, e 6 (Laet, 1568); and Castro's II primo libro di
madrigali, canzoni & moteta a 3 (Laet, 1569) and Chansons et madrigales ? 4 (Phal?se,
1570). For an edition of Castro's II primo libro di madrigali, canzoni & moteta a 3 o? 1569,
see Jean de Castro, Opera Omnia, vol. 3, ed. Ignace Bossuyt (Leuven, 1995).
10 See Roche, The Madrigal, ch. 7, "The Madrigal North of the Alps," and "The
Madrigal Outside Italy and England," pp. 481-482.
11A German print including some Italian madrigals had appeared as early as 1544, the
Hundert undf?nffzehen guter newer Liedlein (Nuremberg: Otto), which includes seven
Italian-texted pieces.
12 See Joseph Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal, especially pp. 50-51, 57-58,
where the author examines the ways in which the English volumes are dependent on Phal
?se's anthologies. He observes that at least eight of the nineteen pieces concordant with

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est in the Italian madrigal as great as in Antwerp, at least as evidenced in the num
ber of prints. And unlike Germany and England, where composers such as Hass
ler and Morley soon began to produce music in the new style using their own lan
guages, in Antwerp musicians continued to cultivate and perform madrigals in
Italian.
The publication and dissemination of such a large amount of Italian-texted
music, ostensibly printed for an Antwerp audience, raises a number of questions:
For whom was this music intended ? who was the audience? How could music
in a foreign tongue attain such broad popularity? Who cultivated and sponsored
the publication of these madrigal books? What styles were favored by Antwerp
en? And why were Netherlands composers content to emulate Italians, using a
foreign language, rather than compose pieces in the new style in their own lan
guage? Any attempt to understand the popularity and success of the Italian
madrigal in Antwerp in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries must
deal with these questions.
An essential ingredient for any historical artistic phenomenon is the broader

culture that generates and supports it. This is particularly true in the case we are
dealing with here. The rich and unique cultural life of sixteenth-century
Antwerp ? its international character, its vibrant economy, and its educated citi
zenry ? provided a particularly fertile ground for the cultivation of the Italian
madrigal.
Antwerp was the cultural and economic center of the Low Countries
throughout the sixteenth century. It was a magnificent city, noted for its wealth
and its architectural monuments, and important as a center of the arts and
Phal?se's three volumes "may have been taken direcdy from them." Furthermore, he
points out that Yonge included several pieces by the Antwerp composers No? Faignient
and Cornelis Verdonck that were available in print only in Phal?se's volumes and two
madrigals of Palestrina without attribution that had appeared anonymously also in M?sica
divina, and that the madrigals of Felis and Pordenone were "much more likely to have
been taken from Phal?se than from their obscure individual sources." Watson's collection
consists almost entirely of pieces drawn from Marenzio madrigal books of 1580,1585, and
1586. But the three pieces by other Italian composers that he included are all found in
M?sica divina and were probably drawn from it.

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publishing as well. The Italian historian Lodovico Guicciardini, in his Descrittione

di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567), quotes a poem by Jule Scaliger, a scholar and close
friend of the Antwerp publisher Christopher Plantin, in which Antwerp is the
speaker:
As many towns as look at me sharply with sinister eye,

So many pallid shafts of envy regard us.
Lyon is cosmopolitan, Paris is industrious, Rome
Is huge, the affairs of the Venetians are vast, Toulouse is powerful:
And all the wares and arts both ancient and new
That are found singly in the others are found together in me.13
A Venetian envoy remarked upon visiting Antwerp, "I was astonished and
wondered much when I beheld Antwerp, for I saw Venice outdone," and the
Englishman Daniel Rogers (1538 - 91) called it a "new Rome."14 The principal rea
son for Antwerp's preeminence was that it had become by the second quarter of
the sixteenth century the hub of international trade for Europe and the money
market for international financial transactions. Ludovico Guicciardini wrote,
"Antwerp was the truly leading city in almost all things, but in commerce it
headed all the cities of the world."15 Not only did Antwerp boast flourishing
industries of its own, particularly in cloth finishing and metal trades, but it served
as the principal distribution center for the industries of many other countries as
well. During the sixteenth century it became the main artery for most internation
al European trade.16 It served as the conduit for an extensive trade between Eng
13 "Oppida quot spectant oculo me torua sinistro, / Tot nos invidiae pallida tela put
ant. / Lugdunum omnigenum est, operosa Lutetia, Roma / Ingens, res Venet?m vasta,
Tholosa potens: / Omnimodae merces, artes priscaeq., novaeq. / Quorum insunt alijs
singula, cuneta mihi." From Lodovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi
(Antwerp, 1567).
14 Quoted in Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Breughel (Norman, OK,
1970), pp. 43 and 5-6. Rogers writes: "unless the predictions of my eager mind fail me,
Belgian Rome will not be lesser than the Italian."
15 Quoted in Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Brueghel, p. 43.
16 On the economy of Antwerp, see Herman van der Wee, The Growth of the
Antwerp Market and the European Economy: 14th-16th Centuries (The Hague, 1963).

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land and Italy and was also the principal port for trade with the South and Central
German hinterlands. During the first half of the century silver from South Ger
man mines was shipped out of Antwerp, and later most American metals entered
Europe through its harbors. Trade between Baltic cities and the South also passed
through Antwerp. Furthermore, Antwerp had become the capital for most major
international financial transactions. Its financiers had developed the concept of
joint stock companies and the practice of selling on commission. They were also
involved in imperial finances, since they raised much of the money needed by the
emperor.
Antwerp's rise had coincided with the decline of Bruges in the late fifteenth
century, a decline brought about not only by the silting up of the Zwyn, but also
as a result of a charter issued June 30,1488 by Emperor Maximilian I that trans
ferred Netherlandish trade from Bruges to Antwerp. This was a reward for the
city's loyalty during the crisis that accompanied the transition of the region to
Hapsburg rule following the death of Charles the Bold.17 Even more important
was the transfer of the Portuguese spice trade to Antwerp in the early sixteenth
century, which Guicciardini lists as one of the three principal reasons for
Antwerp's greatness, along with its great fairs and its impregnable fortifications.
Many of the merchants active in Antwerp were, of course, natives of the
Low Countries.18 But large numbers of them were foreigners who resided more
or less permanendy in the city. Guicciardini lists seven principal trading nations
established there in the mid-sixteenth century:
In Andwerpe there are seven strange nations that trafique there. French,...
Alemans, Danes and Osterlings together, Italians, Spaniardes, English, Por
17 After the death of Charles in the Battle of Nancy (1477), much of the Burgundian
territory came under the rule of Maximilian, who married Charles's daughter, Mary of
Burgundy. The cities of Flanders were opposed to Hapsburg rule and sought to preserve
their relative independence with the help of the French king, Louis XI. Flanders did not
recognize Maximilian's claims until 1489.
18 The term "merchant" (Dutch "coopman" or French "marchand") applied both to

men engaged in commodity trading and those dealing in money; there was no special term
for the latter, such as financier or banker, at this time; see Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age,
p. 275. Regarding the numbers of native merchants active in Antwerp's commercial life,
Voet reports that even during the ebb in international commerce in 1584 - 85, when Farnese
had laid siege to the city, there were as many as 500 - 600 merchants and financiers of local
origin active in various kinds of trade and the import/export business (p. 278).

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t?gales. Of the which these six nations last rehearsed make above the num
ber of one thousand merchantes.19
The motto for the new exchange built in 1531, "For the service of merchants of all
nations and languages,"20 testifies eloquendy to the city's cultivation of foreign
trade. The foreign population did not consist solely of merchants, however. In
addition, craftsmen, artists, scholars, soldiers, and others came in large numbers
and spent weeks or months in the city; many took up residence and even regis
tered as citizens.21 A number of them also brought their families.
Among the foreign "nations" (as the trading communities were called) in
Antwerp, the most important, at least for our purposes here, were the Italians.22
The bulk of trade between Italy and the rest of Europe during the sixteenth cen
tury passed though Antwerp. Fine Italian cloths (silks, satins, brocades, velvets),
jewelry, fruit, armor, and wines came by sea to the harbor on the Scheldt and
were then carried inland or shipped on to England or north German seaports. In
return, English and Flemish cloths, spices, tin, lead, soap, flax, metalwork, tapes
tries, furniture, and other goods were shipped out of Antwerp's docks to Italy.23
The principal Italian trading nations established in Antwerp were the Genoese,
Lombards, Lucchese, and Florentines. A list from 1551 enumerating Italian mer
chants includes 93 names: 37 Genoese, 23 Lombards, 20 Lucchese, and 13 Flor
19 From Thomas Danett's abridged English translation of Guicciardini, Descrittione

di tutti i Paesi Bassi, published in London by Peter Short in 1593 as The Description of the
Low Countreys and of the Provinces thereof preprint: Amsterdam, 1976), p. 32.
20 Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Brueghel, p. 67.
21 Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, p. 14, estimates the number of foreigners in the
city during the sixteenth century to have run into "tens of thousands." Citizenship was
comparatively easy to acquire in Antwerp. Anyone born in the city was considered a citi
zen, even if born to parents who were foreigners; foreign women who married Antwerp
men automatically acquired citizenship; and other foreigners had merely to "take an oath
of allegiance to the duke of Brabant and the city of Antwerp in the presence of the alder
men assembled at the Vierschaar" and pay a fee to the city treasurer (Voet, p. 80).
22 On the Italian trading and banking community in Antwerp, particularly in the

first half of the century, see J. A. Joris, Etude sur les colonies marchandes meridionales (por
tugaises, espagnoles, italienes) ? Anvers de 1488 ? 1567 (Louvain, 1927).
23 See van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, 2: 181, and Murray,
Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Brueghel, pp. 59-60.

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entines.24 The Genoese formed not only the largest but also the wealthiest Italian
nation in Antwerp. They not only controlled the spice and alum trade; they also
dominated Antwerp's banking industry.25 Since 1528, when Andrea Doria had
placed Genoese galleys at the disposal of Charles V, the Genoese had been loyal
allies of the emperor, and they were duly rewarded by him with monopolies, spe
cial grants, and numerous privileges. By the 1530s they had become, along with
the Fuggers, the principal creditors of the emperor; and after the imperial bank
ruptcy of 1557, a blow from which the international capital market never fully
recovered, their importance grew as that of the Fuggers declined. Since Antwerp
was the financial center for the Spanish Netherlands, many of the financial tran
sactions carried out by Genoese financiers took place in their offices there. Even
after the rapid decline of Antwerp as a commercial power, following the surren
der of the city to Alexander Farnese and his Spanish forces in 1585 and the subse
quent closing of the Scheldt by the Northern provinces, the city continued to
serve as the financial center for the Spanish Netherlands, and the Genoese, along
with the Spanish, continued to be its principal bankers.
Antwerp reached the peak of its commercial importance during the 1550s
and began a gradual decline in the second half of the century. Its trade with South
and Central Germany, so important to its initial expansion, began to decrease
with the demise of the South German economy when German silver faced com
petition with silver from the New World. By the mid-sixteenth century the eco
nomic power of Germany had shifted from the South to the North German
Hanseatic and Baltic region and gave new importance to the ports of Bremen,
Hamburg, Emden, and Riga. Antwerp lost much of its shipping trade to these
cities, which were found to be more conveniently located for transportation of
goods inland. Furthermore, with the state bankruptcy of 1557 and the damage
that this did to the money market of Antwerp, many of the state's public financial
transactions shifted to Italy, especially Genoa.26 Then, in 1569, after nearly a dec
24 Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, p. 264. Italians from other cities who were too
few in number to form a nation "remained non-corporate or joined officially recognized
nations as individuals" (Voet, pp. 254 - 55). In his description of the merchandise traded to
and from Italian cities, Guicciardini lists Rome, Ancona, Venice, Naples, Sicily, Milan,
Florence, Genoa, Mantua, and Lucca.
25 See Goris, Etude sur les colonies marchandes meridionales, p. 38.
Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, pp. 220-221.

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ade of wrangling with the English over the cloth trade, Antwerp lost its privileged
position as the axis of English-continental trade. The events that really destroyed
its economic preeminence, however, were the religious wars of the 1570s and '80s
and the retaking of the city by Alexander Farnese from the Calvinists in 1585.
With the closing of the Scheldt by the provinces of the North, Antwerp ceased to
be the center of international maritime trade.27 More damaging, though, was the
general devastation of its industries and the productivity of much of the sur
rounding countryside. In the wake of its recapture, and the great famine of 1585 -
86 that ensued, Antwerp lost much of its population. It had reached a peak of
approximately 100,000 in 1560, but by 1589 was reduced to only about 42,000.28
Much of the attrition occurred after 1585. Most of those who left were adherents
of the Reformed faith, many of them skilled craftsmen and merchants who fled
to the North; but many Catholics emigrated as well. Nevertheless, although

Antwerp was not able to recover what it had lost, a limited revival did begin in the
late 1580s. By 1595 the population had risen to 47,000 and by 1612 to 53,000,
where it remained for much of the seventeenth century. Though no longer the
center of international trade, Antwerp continued to be the door to the South
Netherlands. The foreign merchant colonies that had contributed so importandy
to its rise had never deserted the city and by the 1590s "were back in force" ?
particularly the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians.29
Although Antwerp's importance in the cultural and musical spheres may
not have matched its international preeminence in finance and trade, the city was
nevertheless the artistic and intellectual center of the Low Countries. Particularly
27 Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, pp. 242-243, points out that the effect of the
closing of the Scheldt on maritime trade was "not as dramatic as it has been represented,"
since the waterway was not entirely sealed off. "In the middle of the war ships were still
getting through, and in peacetime traffic was virtually normal. It was in fact vital for the
Zeeland harbors that Antwerp should continue to function_Middleburg, Antwerp's
outpost in the sixteenth century, remained largely dependent on the city for its continued
economic life." The closing of the Scheldt meant that sea-going ships had to transfer
cargoes for Antwerp to riverboats, and taxes, licenses, and tolls were demanded, but
riverboats moved regularly between Antwerp and Middelburg, Flushing, Dordrecht and
Rotterdam. Antwerp's economy collapsed because it had nothing to export and thus no
purchasing power.
28 Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, pp. 237 - 238. Voet demonstrates the decline with
figures of 83,700 for 1582 and 55,000 for October, 1586.
29 Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, p. 244. Even in 1584-1585, during Farnese's
siege of the city, there were 43 Italian merchants in Antwerp (Voet, p. 264).

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important was its publishing industry. Many publishers were attracted to

Antwerp, in fact, because of its importance as a trading and distribution center.
The greatest of them, Christopher Plantin, a Frenchman, wrote in a letter to Pope
Gregory XIII in 1574 that he had decided to establish his shop in Antwerp
because:
No other town in the world could offer me more facilities for carrying on
the trade I intended to begin. Antwerp can easily be reached; various nations
meet on its market; there too can be found the raw materials indispensable
for the practice of one's trade; craftsmen for all trades can easily be found
and instructed in a short time .. .30
Furthermore, many of the great scholars of the age, men such as the humanist
Justus Lipsius, the botanist Rembert Dodoens, and the geographer and map
maker Abraham Ortelius, frequented the city and were published by Plantin and
other firms there.
Most important for our concerns here, of course, was Antwerp's position
specifically as the center of music publishing in the Low Countries. During the
1540s and 50s, the firms of Tielman Susato and Waelrant and Laet produced
numerous music books. Pierre Phal?se, who from 1545 to 1570 worked in Lou
vain and published mostly scientific and religious works along with occasional
music books, entered into an association with Jean Bell?re of Antwerp and began
to concentrate on music books. By 1581 Pierre Phal?se the younger had moved
his operations to Antwerp, and from then on all his musical publications were
produced there. The firm continued to print large amounts of music well into the
seventeenth century. Christopher Plantin also produced a number of music
books during the 1580s and early 1590s, but after his death in 1589 the Antwerp
branch of his firm, at least, stopped printing polyphonic music.31
30 Letter of 9 Oct. 1574, Correspondence de Christophe Plantin, ed. M. Rooses and

J. Denuce (Antwerp, 1883-1920); translated in Voet, Antwerp, the Golden Age, p. 7.
31 See J.-A. Stellfeld, Bibliographie des ?ditions musicales Plantiniennes (Brussels,

1949). The Plantin firm's last musical publications in Antwerp were the four books of
Andr? Pevernage's chansons, begun in 1589 and completed in 1591. The Leiden branch of
the Plantin firm, established in 1583 when Plantin sought refuge from the religious and
political troubles in Antwerp, and managed from 1585 on by his son-in-law Franz Raphe
lengius and his grandsons, published several volumes of music, including madrigals, after
1600.

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Antwerp was an important center of music-making as well, though on the

international scale its importance had declined somewhat after the mid-sixteenth
century, as had the importance of most of its sister cities in the Low Countries.32
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the cathedrals and choir schools of the
Low Countries had been hotbeds of the musical talent of Europe. This was no
longer the case after 1550, and while the composers active there in the 1570s and
'80s ? Hubert Waelrant, S?verin Cornet, No? Faignient, Andr? Pevernage, for
example ? were excellent musicians, they were not among the leading interna
tional figures of the time. Nevertheless, Antwerp still boasted a thriving musical
culture. Guicciardini reported that "one can see there at every hour of the day
weddings, banquets, and dances [and] one can hear everywhere the sounds of
instruments, singing, and the sounds of merry-making." 33 The center of much
music-making was the church of Our Lady, the largest of the five churches in the
city. Earlier in the century D?rer had expressed amazement at hearing several
masses being sung simultaneously in different parts of the church.34 Numerous
devotional services were held throughout the week at the church, many employ
ing the church's singers in polyphony; especially important was the daily lof or
Salve, an evening service in praise of the Virgin sponsored by the Confraternity
of Our Lady. Outside of the church, music was heard in many contexts ? in the
frequent ommegangen (religious processions), at theatrical performances, civic
ceremonies, balls, military band concerts, and masques, and as accompaniment to
the grand entries of royalty. Often it was the professional instrumentalists of the
town band, the stadpijpers, who were heard at these functions. But music-making
32 An excellent overview of musical life in sixteenth-century Antwerp can be found

in Kristine K. Forney, "16th-Century Antwerp," The Renaissance: From the 1470s to the
End of the 16th Century, ed. Iain Fenlon, Man and Music series (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1989), pp. 361-378.
33 "Vedecisi poi a ogn'hora nozze, conviti, danze: sentesi per tutto suoni, canti, &
strepiti giocondi: & in somma per tutti i versi, & per tutte le vie apparische la ricchzzea
[sic], la potenza, la pompa, & splendidezza della terra." Guicciardini, Descrittione, p. 315.
In this, as well several other passages quoted below, I furnish more of the original than is
translated to provide the interested reader with the context of the quotation.
34 A. D?rer, Diary of his Journey to the Netherlands, introduction by J.-A. Goris and
G. Marlies (Greenwich, Conn., 1970), pp. 59-60, cited in Forney, "16th-Century
Antwerp," p. 364. On music at the Antwerp Cathedral see especially Forney, "Music,
Ritual, and Patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp," Early Music History 7
(1987), p. 158.

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was by no means left to professionals. Guicciardini observes of the people of the

Low Countries:
They are the true masters of music, they have restored and reduced it to per
fection, for it is so proper and natural to them that both men and women
sing instinctively to the measure with the greatest grace and melody; also
they make both with voice and with instruments the proof and harmony of
every sort that can be seen or heard, such as are found in all the courts of
Christian princes.35
In spite of Antwerp's decline as a commercial center after 1585, and the con
sequent rise in the fortunes of Amsterdam, the city did not immediately relin
quish its importance as the center of artistic activity in the Low Countries.
Indeed, in many respects its renown as an artistic center was even greater during
its period of economic decline than during its heyday, as was the case with Venice.
Painters, sculptors and other artists continued to gravitate to the city as they had
before; the need to replace religious images that had been destroyed during the
iconoclastic wars and commissions from its wealthy citizens provided many
opportunities for them. This same group of cultivated citizens served as patrons
to the musicians of Antwerp. Music-making, amateur and professional, conti
nued to flourish there; in fact, the phenomenon that is the concern of this paper,
the extensive circulation of madrigal books, did not even begin until the early
1580s. Furthermore, the presses of Plantin and other printers of Antwerp conti
nued to issue important new works, though on a smaller scale. Antwerp was still
the intellectual and cultural capital of the Low Countries, particularly of the
Catholic South.
35 "Questi sono i veri maestri della M?sica, & quelli che l'hanno restaurata, & ridotta
a perfettione, perche l'hanno tanto propria & naturale, che huomini, & donne cantan'
naturalmente a misura, con grandissima gratia, & melod?a, onde havendo poi congiunta
l'arte alia natura, fanno & di voce, & di tutti gli strumenti quella pruova & harmon?a, che si
vede & ode, talche se ne truova sempre per tutte le cort? di Principi Christiani." Guicciar
dini, Descrittione, p. 28.

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This was the cultural milieu that provided a fertile soil for Antwerp's interest
in the Italian madrigal. Yet, while the picture of Antwerp presented here may
account for the thriving of music publishing and music-making generally, it does
not account for the popularity of the Italian madrigal in particular. An under
standing of that requires a closer examination of the various parties ? the musi
cians, music publishers, patrons, and musical public ? that participated in this
phenomenon.
The principal publisher of madrigal books was Pierre Phal?se. Phal?se was
not the first Antwerp music printer to publish madrigals nor even the first to
devote a whole volume to Italian-texted music. As we noted earlier, Susato had
printed Lassus's "Opus 1" with its madrigals and villanesche in 1555, and Wael
rant and Laet (and the firm under Jan Laet's name alone) issued a number of
volumes containing chansons and madrigals during the 1550s, '60s, and '70s. As
early as 1563, Laet had published an entire book of napolitane by S?verin Cornet.
Christophe Plantin, who produced relatively few musical publications, printed a
book of Italian madrigals by Cornet in 1581, one of three volumes of music by the
composer that he published that year,36 though it is doubtful that Plantin expected
a large market for this work.37 Pierre Phal?se himself, and his father, Pierre Phal?se
the Elder,38 had also published madrigals before M?sica divina. The earlier vol
36 The others were a volume of chansons and a volume of motets. Cornet, who had
been chapelmaster at the Church of our Lady from 1572-1581, found himself without a
position when the Catholic mass was suspended in Antwerp under Calvinist rule, and was
at this time seeking to enter the service of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. He was unsuc
cessful. See G. van Doorslaer, "S?verin Cornet, compositeur-ma?tre de chapelle," De gul
denpasser, new ser., 3 (1925 [monograph offprint, Antwerp, 1925]), pp. 8-9; also Donna
G. Cardamone, "S?verin Cornet," The New Grove 4: 787-88. Forney, "16th-Century
Antwerp," p. 367, states incorrecdy that Cornet took a position with Ferdinand at Inns
bruck.
37 Plantin produced beautiful, luxurious music prints. Suzanne Clercx, "Les ?ditions
musicales anversoises du XVIe si?cle et leur role dans la vie musicale des Pays-bas,"
Gedenkboek derPlantin-Dagen (Antwerp, 1956), p. 374, suggests that the large formats of
his books address themselves really only to the choirs ("les ma?trises") of Antwerp with
substantial income or to princely chapels.
38 Phal?se the Elder worked in Louvain from 1545 to 1570. In that year he com
menced his association with Jan Bell?re of Antwerp, and his tide pages from 1570-1582
bear the names of both men and both cities. Phal?se the Elder died in the mid-'70s (Susan

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urnes of the Phal?se firm, though, like those of Laet, combine madrigals with
chansons; they include several books of Lassus chansons, each of which contains
a few madrigals,39 two volumes of madrigals and chansons by Jean de Castro,40
and several anthologies of chansons and madrigals.41
Phal?se the Younger, however, was clearly the first to recognize that there
was a market for whole books devoted entirely to Italian music. He seems to have
been a competent judge of music, and he assembled the first of his anthologies,
M?sica divina, himself from a great variety of Italian sources. For the remaining
three volumes in his great anthology "series," Phal?se turned to local musicians
for help: Andr? Pevernage, a composer and musical adviser to Plantin, for
Harmon?a celeste-, Hubert Waelrant for Symphonia angelica; and the English ex
patriate Peter Philips for Melod?a olympica. No editors are named in most of the
later anthologies, but dedications signed by Phal?se in several of them suggest that
he assembled them himself. Two late anthologies, IlParnasso (1613) and IlHeli
cone (1616), have dedications signed by a Samuele Dunio, and very likely Dunio
assembled them.
An examination of the contents of these anthologies shows that Phal?se and

his colleagues had at their disposal a remarkably large collection of recent prints
from Venice; the list of Italian volumes from which he and his editors drew in
compiling their initial four anthologies is long and diverse. Pevernage seems to
Bain thinks 1576-77), and Phal?se the Younger took over. In 1581 he moved to Antwerp,
and from 1582 all publications bear only the Antwerp address. He maintained the collabo
ration with Bell?re until the latter's death in 1595. See Susan Bain, "Music Printing in the
Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974), and "Pha
l?se," The New Grove, 14: 617. On Phal?se's Louvain publications, see Vanhulst, Catalo
gue des editions de musique publi?es ? Louvain par Pierre Phal?se et ses fils 1545 -1578,
M?moires de la Classe des Beaux-arts, 2e s?rie, tome XVI/2 (Brussels, 1990).
39 The Tiers livre a4,5,&6 (1560) contains one madrigal, the Quatriesme livre a4&
5 (1564) contains two, the Premier livre (1570) includes two madrigals of Rore, and the
Second livre (1570) contains madrigals by Lassus, Rore, and Monte (1570).
40 The Chansons et madrigales ? 4 (Louvain, 1570) and the Chansons, madrigaux et

motetz ? 3 (Antwerp, 1582), the latter a much expanded version of the composer's Second
livre de chansons, madrigaux, et motetz a 3 published two years earlier in Paris by Le Roy
and Ballard.
41 La fleur des chansons a 3 ... de Jean Castro, Severin Cornet, No? Faignient et
autres (1574), with two madrigals by Cornet and one by Castro, the Livre de Meslanges a 4
(1575), with eleven madrigals by Italians and Italo-Netherlanders, and the Livre septi?me
des chansons a 4 (1576), with single madrigals by Berchem and Donate

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have drawn the madrigals of Harmon?a celeste, for instance, from at least 27 dif
ferent sources, though, of course, he may have acquired some of these in manu
script copies. The overwhelming majority of sources for all four volumes come
from Venice ? prints issued by Antonio Gardano, Girolamo Scotto, Ricciardo
Amadino, and Giacomo Vincenti. A small number of items come from prints of
Alessandro Gardano in Rome, Vincenzo Baldini in Ferrara, or from Phal?se's
own earlier publications. The sources for the two earlier volumes date primarily
from the late 1560s and 1570s, but Harmon?a celeste includes some pieces first
printed as recendy as 1581 or 1582.42 Most of the madrigals in Symphonia angelica
(1585) date from the 1570s and '80s, though a few appeared initially in the 1550s or
'60s, and most of those in Melod?a olympica are from the 1580s. While a few
selections were drawn from anthologies, most seem to have been taken from
madrigal books of individual composers.
Phal?se's interest in the madrigal, as well as the enthusiasm of the public that
made his publications possible, was probably sparked by the fascination of local
composers and musicians with Italian music. According to Susan Bain, the musi
cian Jean de Castro, who had moved from Li?ge to Antwerp in the early 1570s,
"acted as musical adviser [to Phal?se], supplying Phal?se with the latest French
and Italian compositions for publication."43 It is probable, though, that Phal?se
was himself an accomplished amateur musician and judge of music. Evaluation
and selection of pieces probably followed the performance and discussion of
them at musical gatherings of Phal?se, Pevernage, and others. We know of such
gatherings at Pevernage's house from several lines of a sonnet by the poet Jonker
Jan van der Noot dedicated to the scholar Jan van Gheesdale:
Tis the joy of my eyes and the delight of my ears,

for you to see good living and for you to hear beautiful song
at Pevernage's house, where all good spirits gather.44
42 One piece by Stefano Felis seems not to have appeared in print until 1585 in his
Madrigali libro IVo a 5, and another was printed in 1583 in his Madrigali libro IIo a 5.
43 Bain, "Phal?se," The New Grove 14: 618.
44 "Tis mijnen ooghen vreughdt, en tis lust mijner ooren, / U goedt leven te sien, en
U schoon liet te hooren / Tot Pivernages huys daer d'eel gheesten vergheeren." The com
plete sonnet is reprinted in J.-A. Stellfeld, Andries Pevernage ? zijn leven, zijne werken
(Louvain, 1943), Appendix, item DC

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F?tis claims that concerts were held at Pevernage's house weekly, but he does not
give a source for his information.45 Wealthy patrons also frequented these gather
ings, and perhaps participated in the performance and discussions of the music.
In his dedication of Harmon?a celeste to Cesare Homodei, Pevernage observes
that Homodei, "among his other virtues, delights himself in the art of music ...
praising in particular that fine volume that Pierre Phal?se recently brought to light
[M?sica divina]" and notes that he endeavored in this volume to make a similar
collection of madrigals, "principally those that I have observed most please you
and give you enjoyment."46 Phal?se, in dedicating Defloridi virtuosi to Giovanni
Francesco de Ceville, states that his patron often enjoys music with friends. These
small gatherings of musicians provided professionals and amateurs alike the
opportunity to become familiar with the latest Italian music.
Not only did local musicians assist Phal?se in selecting and preparing madri
gals for publication; most of them also tried their hand at writing madrigals or
napolitane. As we noted above, one of his editors, Hubert Waelrant, had already
written madrigals as early as the 1550s and had published some in his IIprimo libro
de madrigali e canzonifrancezi (1558); he had also written a set of napolitane that
were published in Venice in 1565. Waelrant provided five new madrigals for Sym
phonia angelica. While Andr? Pevernage never produced a complete book of
madrigals, he did try his hand at the genre. Besides a dedicatory madrigal for
M?sica divina, he composed five for Harmon?a celeste (two more were added
to the edition of 1593) and two for Peter Philips's Melod?a olympica. Of all the
locally active musicians, Philips was the most avid composer of Italian madrigals.
Besides the four pieces he wrote for his M?sica divina, he later produced three
complete books of his own madrigals. Among the earliest local musicians besides
Waelrant to write madrigals was Jean de Castro, a native of Li?ge who lived in
Antwerp in 1569 - 76 and again briefly in 1586; he included them along with chan
sons in his books of the 1560s and '70s. No? Faignient, a musician from Cambrai
45 Fran?ois Joseph F?tis, Biographie universelle des musiciens, 2nd ?d. (Paris, 1860
65), vol. 7: 17.
46 "Havendo io considerato quanta tra le altre sue virtu V. S. si diletta d?lia M?sica,
arte veramente liberale, e ama e honora li Autori e Professori di quella, lodando in particu
lare quel' bel volume che Pietro Phalesio messe ?ltimamente in luce, mi ha fatto risolvere di
far medesimamente un Raccolto e Scelta di tutti li migliori Madrigali, de piu Illustri e Ecce
lenti Autori di nostr tempi, e principalmente di quelli che io ho osservato piu piacerle e
darle gusto."

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who became an Antwerp citizen in 1561, did the same. Faignient later furnished
two madrigals for each of Phal?se's anthologies of 1583. The chapelmaster at the
Church of Our Lady until its choir was disbanded in 1581, S?verin Cornet, was
the first to publish complete books of Italian-texted music: a set of Canzoni napo
litane in 1563 and his Madrigali a 5 in 1581. Although no formal connection be
tween Cornet and Phal?se can be shown, and although Phal?se published none of
Cornet's madrigals, it would be unlikely that Phal?se would not be familiar with
the chapelmaster of the city's largest church and with the madrigals printed by
Plantin. He did publish madrigals by Cornet's young pupil, Cornelis Verdonck,
in two of the anthologies, and he later issued a complete book of Verdonck's
madrigals in 1603. Other local composers who produced complete books of
madrigals were Jean Desquesnes, a Flemish singer and composer who was for a
time in the service of Margaret of Parma, Regent of the Low Countries from
1559-1567,47 and Jan Jacob van Turnhout, a native of Brussels who before the
religious turmoil of the early '80s was chapelmaster at Mechelen and who in
1586 became chapelmaster to Alexander Farnese, Governor-General of the Low
Countries from 1586-1594.
Although these men may not have been among the leading figures in
European music, they were accomplished musicians and were thought of highly
throughout the Low Countries at the time. Guicciardini, in his Descrittione di tutti
i Paesi Bassi (1558), describes Waelrant as one of the best musicians of the day,48
and the Flemish poet Jan van der Noot, in one of his sonnets, names Hubert
Waelrant, Andr? Pevernage, Cornelis Verdonck, and Gregory Trehou as "the
four best and most outstanding composers and masters of music."49 The human
ist and scholar Francis Sweerts (Sweertius), in his Athenae belgicae of 1628, a
compendium of information about leading figures of the time, calls Pevernage "a
leader in the art of music" ("artis musicae coryphaeus")50 and says of Verdonck
47 Desquesnes wrote two books of madrigals, but only one survives, the Madrigali
Primo libro a 5 (1594). Another, also for five voices, was published in 1603 ; to see The New
Grove 5: 395.
48 Guicciardini, Descrittione, p. 29.
49 The entire sonnet appears in Stellfeld, Andries Pevernage, Appendix, item XIV.
Gr?goire Trehou, or Trechoven, less well known than the other three, served as chapel
master at St. Sauveur in Bruges from 1573-1577 and in the same role at the Danish court
from 1590 into the early seventeenth century. Only one composition by him is known
today.
50 Francis Sweertius, "Pevernage," Athenae belgicae (Antwerp, 1628).

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that he was "renowned in music and, if we believe Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck,

musician and clearly first among Belgian organists, if he had had the opportunity
in his employment, would have vied with all the composers of Italy."51
How might we account for the popularity of the Italian madrigal among
Antwerp musicians? Whether most of them ever went to Italy is difficult to deter
mine. Hubert Waelrant and Jean de Castro both had music published in Venice ?
Waelrant his Canzon napolitane a 4 (Scotto, 1565) and Castro his Rose fresche,
madrigali novi a 3 (Amadino, 1591) and Scelta depiu vaghi madrigali a 5 (Ama
dino, 1594) ? and may have been in Italy at the time, but in neither case can their
presence there be documented.52 Details of Waelrant's life are sketchy, and little is
known of his life after his last collaborative publication with Jan Laet in 1558.53
F?tis provides no documentation for his claim that Waelrant studied in Italy, nor
does Edmund vander Straeten for his assertion that Pevernage made an Italian
sojourn.54 In fact, the only two of the Low Countries composers whose presence
51 Sweertius, Athenae belgicae, article on Verdonck: "A M?sica clarus, & si Joanni
Petri Swelingo m?sico & organistarum Belgii facile principi credimus, si per occupationes
licuissit, cum omnibus Italiae phonascis contendisset."
52 For discussions of the question of an Italian sojourn by Waelrant, see Robert Lee
Weaver, Waelrant and Laet, Music Printers in Antwerp '5 Golden Age, pp. 45 - 55, vol. I, pp.
17-22 and Walter Piel, Studien zum Leben und Schaffen Hubert Waelrants (Marburg,
1969), pp. 49 - 52. Edward Lowinsky argues in favor of Waelrant's presence in Italy on the
basis of modern Venetian characteristics he sees in some of the composer's motets, the
relation of Waelrant's solmization system to theories of Ramis, and characteristics of
Waelrant's publications and printing techniques resembling those of the Venetian printer
Gardano; see Edward E. Lowinsky, Das Antwerpener Motettenbuch Orlando di Lasso ys
und seine Beziehungen zum Motettenschaffen der niederl?ndischen Zeitgenossen (The
Hague, 1937), p. 70, note 97, and p. 88.
Regarding Castro's life, see Ignace Bossuyt, "Introduction" to Jean de Castro, Opera
Omnia, vol. I (Louvain, 1993). Castro was still employed by Johann Wilhelm, Duke of
J?lich-Kleve-Berg in D?sseldorf until 1591, and during the remainder of the 1590s seems
to have lived in Cologne.
53 See Weaver, Waelrant and Laet: Music Printers in Antwerp's Golden Age, ch. 2
for a discussion of the sources of information on Waelrant's life.
54 Edmund vander Straeten, Histoire de la musique aux Pays-bas avant le XIJC si?cle
(reprint, New York, 1969), vol. 6, pp. 56-57, seems to have based this conclusion on the
dedication of Harmon?a celeste to Cesare Homodei di Milano. But Cesare Homodei was
clearly a resident of Antwerp at the time. See also Stellfeld, Andries Pevernage, p. 19, note
1. For more recent material on the life of Pevernage, see Bruno Bouckert, Katrin Derde,
Eugeen Schreurs, and Saskia Willaert, "Andreas Pevernage (1542/43 -1591) en het muziek
leven in zijn tijd," M?sica Antiqua (1993), 161-175.

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in Italy can be verified are Peter Philips, who served as organist at the English Col
lege in Rome in 1583 before coming to Antwerp,55 and S?verin Cornet, who,
according to the opening sonnet in his Chansons francoyses a 5 (Plantin, 1581), had
spent some time in Italy during his youth.
Even without going to Italy, however, Antwerp musicians had ample
opportunity to become familiar with Italian styles and the madrigal. Long before
Phal?se began "reprinting" Italian music, Italian music books were undoubtedly
available in Antwerp, at least in limited quantities, for those who were interested.56
In fact, it is likely that he decided to begin printing Italian music when he thought
the demand exceeded the supply.57 The large number of varied sources used for
Phal?se's anthologies alone attests to the presence of many Italian publications in
this cosmopolitan trading center. But it was probably the presence in the 1550s of
their own compatriots who had studied in Italy that most sparked the initial inter
est of Netherlands musicians in the madrigal. Lassus was there in the mid-1550s.
After spending his youth in various cities of Italy, Lassus returned to his native
country and arrived in Antwerp in about September of 1554; he stayed there
55 See John Steele, "Peter Philips," The New Grove, 14: 657; and "Calendar of the
Life of Peter Philips," M?sica Britannica 29 (London, 1970), p. xvi. Philips left England to
escape religious persecution. He first went to Rome, and then traveled through Europe for
five years before settling in the Netherlands, first in Antwerp, then as organist at the court
of the Archduke in Brussels. According to David Smith, Philips's madrigals were written
with the musical tastes of his Antwerp patrons in mind, his output of secular vocal music
decreasing after he took up his post at the archducal court; David Smith, "Italian Influence
on the Music of Peter Philips (c. 1561-1628): Musical Taste and Patronage in the Spanish
Netherlands at the End of the Sixteenth Century", paper read at the 4th International Col
loquium of the Alamire Foundation, Migration of Musicians to and from the Low Coun
tries (c. 1400-1600), Antwerp, Aug. 26-27,1996.
56 Many Italian music books were exhibited at the great annual fairs in Frankfurt,
which book dealers from Antwerp such as Plantin attended. For a listing, see Albert G?h
ler, Verzeichnis der in den Frankfurter und Leipziger Messkatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759
angezeigten Musikalien (Hilversum, 1965; reprint of Leipzig edition of 1902). Surpri
singly, for the years between 1566-1578, Plantin lists few publications of Italian madrigals
in his Journaux and Grands livres, the record books that record his dealings with other
local and foreign firms; see Henri Vanhulst, "Suppliers and Clients of Christopher Plantin,
Distributor of Polyphonic Music in Antwerp (1566-1578)," Musicology and Archival
Research, ed. Barbara Haggh et al. (Brussels, 1994), 558 - 604. Among the entries are only a
"Madrigali d'authori etc." sent to Piere de la Tombe in Brussels in 1566 (catalog item 1566, no.
1), four Madrigali de Pietro Taglia received from Jehan Mareschal of Lyons (1566, no. 9),
and two Mllanesche a 4? sent to Jan Desserans in London (1566, no. 45).
57 This was still the case as late as 1610. See note 84 below.

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about two years.58 Besides the Italian pieces of his "Opus 1," Lassus may well have
carried with him copies of some of his early five-part madrigals or pieces by other
Roman composers.59 The young Philippe de Monte, a native of Mechelen who
had also received his training in Italy, arrived about the same time. He is known to
have been in Antwerp in 1554 and again in 1555; it is not unreasonable to assume
that he also brought with him madrigals from his Libro primo a 5, which was
printed in Rome in 1554. These young composers were conversant with the new
Italian styles and probably carried their enthusiasm home with them. It might also
be noted that Cipriano de Rore, the dean of Italo-Netherlander madrigalists,
returned to the Low Countries just a few years later. He was in Antwerp in 1558,
and from 1558-1561 served the court of Margaret of Parma in Brussels.
Other madrigalists, both Italians and Italo-Netherlanders, visited the city in
the later 1580s and later, though by this time interest in the madrigal among
Antwerp musicians was well established. Rinaldo del Mel, a Flemish musician
who had studied under Cornet at St. Rombaud's in Mechelen and after that had
worked in Lisbon and Rome, had his Madrigali a 6 printed while he was in
Antwerp in 1588. Bernardino Mosto, a minor figure about whom little is known,
was also probably in the city in that year, when Phal?se and Bell?re printed his
Madrigali a 5. Both of these volumes are dedicated to Duke Ernst of Bavaria.
According to his tide page, Mosto served the Duke as organist. In 1594 Phal?se
printed the first madrigals of another minor figure working for the Hapsburg
58 See Guido Persoons, "Orlandus Lassus in Antwerpen (1554 -1556)," in Orlandus

Lassus, ed. by Ignace Bossuyt (Louvain, 1982), and Forney, "Orlando di Lasso's 'Opus
1'," especially pp. 34-38. While archival evidence to confirm Lassus's two-year stay in
Antwerp is lacking, we know of it from the dedication of "Opus 1" dated 13 May 1555.
59 The music of Lassus's first three books of five-part madrigals was most likely
written before the composer's departure from Rome; see James Haar, "The Early Madri
gals of Lassus," Revue belge de musicologie 39-40 (1985-86), 17-32. Although the first
known print of the Primo libro a 5 is that of Gardano in Venice (1555), Haar speculates
that there may have been an earlier printing by D?rico or Barre in Rome (p. 23). The
madrigals of Lassus's Secondo and Terzo libro are thought to have been written before his
visit to Antwerp as well, even though they were not published until later; in fact, those of
the Secondo libro probably predate those of the Primo libro (Haar, p. 17). Haar also states
that "it would appear that Lassus had nothing to do with the publication of his early
madrigals in Italy and that the only music he took with him when he left Rome was that
published by Susato" (p. 18, n. 4). It is possible, though, at the least, that he carried with
him manuscript copies of some of his five-part madrigals, or that he had a copy of an ear
lier Roman print of the Primo libro a5,'? there was one, or of other madrigals from com
posers of the Roman circle with which he had associated.

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courts, Giovanni Battista Galeno. Perhaps the most important Italian to visit the
city and see his madrigals published there was Girolamo Frescobaldi, though he
was very young at the time, and the polyphonic madrigal never figured very
prominendy in his output. In the dedication of his Madrigali a 5 of 1608 to Mon
signor Guido Bentivoglio, Archbishop of Rodi and papal nuncio in Flanders,
Frescobaldi states that he had come to Antwerp to see the city and to put
his madrigals into print, which he had composed in Brussels while staying at the
archbishop's residence. Frescobaldi's visit was, of course, too late to be influential
on Antwerp madrigalists.
The interest of a handful of publishers and composers alone, though, would
not have been sufficient to account for the large number of madrigal publications
issued in Antwerp during the 1580s and '90s. In fact, since Phal?se, like other
publishers, was a businessman, one could argue that his personal interest in the
madrigal would have had little to do with the number of volumes he published.
His publishing ventures had to be financially viable. Since the cost of music publi
cations was often subsidized by patrons, some insight into the audience for the
madrigal may be gained by looking at the group of individuals to whom these
books were dedicated. Who were these patrons of the madrigal? For the most
part they were merchants ? the dedications refer frequendy to their "negocii e
quotidiani occupationi" or, in the case of Pruenen, a civil servant, his "negocii
tanti travagli del Paese." According to Murray, these men were broadly educated:
Many powerful merchants, as youngsters, had been instilled with an interest

in learning and in the classics. Some became amateur scholars; others
patronized scholarly undertakings, either by direct subsidy or by purchas
ing for their own libraries the products of Antwerp presses. Most of the
leading scholar-merchant-statesmen were bibliophiles or at least collectors.60
Table 2 lists the dedicatees of all of the volumes containing significant num
bers of Italian madrigals that were published between 1555 and 1616 (chanson
books containing only a few madrigals were not included). In addition to the
dedicatees of madrigal books published in Antwerp, it includes dedicatees of
books published by the Leiden press of Plantin, which was run by Christopher's
son-in-law Frans Raphaelengius and his grandsons.
60 Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Breughel, p. 98.

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Several of the dedicatees are, of course, political figures or prominent eccle

siastical figures whom the musicians served or turned to for support. Alexander
Farnese, the dedicatee of Jan Jacob van Turnhout's Madrigali a 6 (1589), was
Governor-General of the southern provinces after he retook Antwerp for Philip
II; Turnhout was his chapelmaster. Ernst, Duke of Bavaria and Elector of
Cologne, was recipient of the dedications of two volumes: the Madrigali a 5 of
Bernardo Mosto, an Italian who served as organist at the ducal court, and the
Madrigali a 5 o? Rinaldo del Mel, published while the composer was in the Low
Countries. Another Italian whose madrigals were published by Phal?se, Giovanni
Battista Galeno, dedicated his madrigal book to Archduke Ernst of Austria, suc
cessor to Farnese and regent of the Netherlands from 1594 to 1599. Galena served
in the Archduke's chapel. The successors to Ernst of Austria, Archduke Albert
and his wife Isabella of Spain, were also patrons of musicians who published
madrigals; Peter Philips dedicated his six-part madrigals to them. Already in 1597,
a year before Albert assumed this position, Philips refers to himself on the title
page of his eight-part madrigals as "organista del Serenissimo Alberto," a position
he retained until his death.61 The extent to which any of these ecclesiastical and
political figures may have been musicians themselves or may have been interested
specifically in the madrigal, though, cannot be determined from the dedications.
Nor do dedications to prominent figures necessarily mean that the composer
received financial support from them. As Cornet notes in the Madrigali (1581),
"There are some today who take care to dedicate their works to Princes and great
Gendemen, not so much perhaps because they are protectors of them as by this
means to aggrandize them with a great title."62
Where the dedicatee is not a political or ecclesiastical figure whom the com
poser served directly, the nature or extent of his involvement is not always clear.
In some cases, both for single-composer volumes and anthologies, the individual
61 Colonel William Stanley, the dedicatee of Philips' Madrigali a 8, is identified by

Steele, "Peter Philips," The New Grove 14: 655, as an English Roman Catholic "free
booter"!
62 "Sono alcuni al giorno d'hoggi che van procurando di dedicare le fatiche loro ?
Principi, e gran Signori, non tanto forse perche sieno protettori di esse, quanto che col
mezo di quel gran' titolo aggrandirle ?"

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probably underwrote some or all of the cost of publishing.63 In other cases the
individual seems to have served as a patron of the composer in a more general
way, such as by providing a living stipend or lodging for the composer. Occasion
ally within the stilted and florid prose of the dedications one can glean bits of
information that tell something about the relation between dedicatee and musi
cian. The writers often refer to the dedicatees as "padrone mio," which in the for
mal language of dedications usually denotes one to whom the composer was
obligated financially. Cornet writes of Giuseppe d'Oria in the dedication of his
Canzoni napolitane: "[you have] always shown yourself to favor and assist
me." M Phal?se, in M?sica divina, comments that Giovanni Battista Bartolomei
has always had "endless affection" ("Pinfinita amorevolezza") for him and has
supported him in his labors. In the case of Cornelis Verdonck and the de Cordes
brothers the relationship was fairly close: Verdonck lived in the house of Joannes
Carolus de Cordes, and his burial marker in the Convent of the Carmelites in the
cloister of the Onze Lieve Vrouwebroeders reads "Placed here by de Cordes"

("Ponebat de Cordes"). Similarly, Cornet notes in the dedication of his Madrigali
that he lodged in the home of his patron, Gerarde de Craen.
What is immediately striking about the list of dedicatees in Table 2 is the
large number of Italian names, particularly during the earlier years; in fact, there
are as many Italian names as there are Netherlandish. The Italians were, of course,
63 Publishing a set of partbooks was a fairly cosdy venture, and sixteenth-century

music publications were financed in a variety of ways. Jane Bernstein, "Financial Arrange
ments and the Role of Printer and Composer in Sixteenth-Century Italian Music Print
ing," Acta musicologica 43 (1991), 39-56, determined that Venetian publishers usually
funded their publications either independendy or in partnership with other bookmen as a
business venture, or they published them on a commission basis, taking no financial risk.
Plantin, and perhaps other publishers as well, often required the composer to buy, or sell
for him, a certain number of copies; Bain, "Music Printing in the Low Countries," p. 131,
notes, for instance, that Jacob de Brouck agreed to take 162 copies of his Cantiones sacrae,
Georg de la H?le agreed to take 40 copies of his masses, and S?verin Cornet 100 copies of
his Cantiones. It seems that Cornet was not required to take copies of his Madrigali or his
Chansons (1581); perhaps the patrons put up sufficient funds to cover the costs. Pevernage
was not required to buy copies of his four books of chansons (1589-91) either. Bain ob
serves that this may have been due to the close friendship between Pevernage and Plantin
and the fact that the composer often served as a mediator between the publisher and musi
cians. It might also be noted that the three cases she cites in which a composer was required
to ensure sales involved volumes of sacred rather than secular part-songs, which may have
sold more easily.
64 "... come ella si ? sempre mostrata pronta infavorir mi & giovarmi dal di ch'io
cornminciai d'esser suo."

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members of the large Italian merchant communities spoken of earlier, particu

larly the Genoese. Stefano Gentile, to whom Lassus dedicated the Italian-titled
version of his "Opus 1", was a Genoese financier.65 His presence in the city can be
documented from 1555-1564. Cornet's sponsor for his Canzoni napolitane,
Giuseppe d'Oria, was also Genoese, as was Stefano Ambrosio Schiappalaria, the
author of three sonnets addressed to Genoese merchants residing in Antwerp;
these were set to music by Cornet in his madrigal book of 1581.66 Three of the
dedicatees of Phal?se's celebrated quartet of anthologies were Italians. Giovanni
Battista di Bartolomei, the dedicatee of Phal?se's first anthology, is called a "gioi
liere," that is, a jeweler or goldsmith. The precise profession of Cesare Homodei
is not clear, but both Pevernage's dedication in Harmonia celeste and Castro's in
his 1588 Madrigali teti. us he was Milanese. Pevernage refers to him as the "Maece
nas of musicians." Giulio Balbani came from a long line of financiers from Lucca
residing in Antwerp.67 As early as 1533 the name Balbani had appeared on a
memorial plaque in the Church of Our Lady ? a Gregorio Balbani, who is re
ferred to as "civi ac mercatori Lucensi."68 Giulio was a banker; a few years before
the publication of Melod?a olympica, in fact, he was asked by Alexander Farnese
to draw up a contract for a loan.69
The Flemish patrons on the list were also for the most part merchants.
Members of the Low Countries' nobility were not prominent in the city's cultural
life. Most of them lived on their country estates, and their wealth was in land.
Guicciardini names the foremost families among the Antwerp nobility; the list is
relatively short, and none of the family names appears among the dedicatees of
these volumes.70 Several of the dedicatees, however, were among the most
influential and prominent citizens of the city. Francis Sweertius, to whom Phal?se
65 Forney, "Orlando di Lasso's 'Opus T," pp. 38-40.
66 Forney, "The Role of Antwerp," p. 241.
67 Voet, Antwerp, p. 271, names the Balbanis among the most important Italian
financiers in Antwerp.
68 Inscriptions fun?raires de la province d Anvers (Antwerp, 1843), vol. I.
69 See Stellfeld, Andries Pevernage, p. 83.
70 The names are van Liere, van Immerseel, van Berchem, van Ursel, van Schoon
hoven, van de Werve, van Halmale, Ruckox, Sterkx, van Stralen, Schetz, and vander Hei
den.

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dedicated the Madrigali a 8 and whom he addresses as "padr?n mio osservandis

simo," was one of the leading scholars of his day. He counted among his friends
Justus Lipsius, Ortelius, and Plantin.71 He had studied music with Waelrant and
became an accomplished musician: Phal?se says that he knows him to be a lover
of music, one with "mature judgment and perfect knowledge of it" ("cognos
cerlo tant' Amatore della M?sica, accioche per il suo maturo giuditio & perfetta
cognitiona ch'a della:"). Cornelis Pruenen, the dedicatee of Symphonia angelica,
was a member of one of the most prominent Antwerp families in the late six
teenth century. Pruenen was treasurer of the city and a wise senator, as the
inscription on his monument in the Antwerp cathedral makes clear.72 He served
as patron to several musicians. Cornelis Verdonck, in dedicating his Madrigali a 6
(1603) to Pruenen's nephew, Joannes de Cordes, in whose house he was residing
at that time, speaks affectionately of the "continued indebted devotion" he feels
for nearly twenty years in the service of Joannes's uncle and his brother Arnolde
de Cordes.73 Besides the names Pruenen and de Cordes, other family names from
our list that appear frequendy on the monuments in Antwerp churches are van
Hove and de Smidt, though the particular individuals on our list could not be
found.
Cf. Biographie nationale de Belgique, vol. 24, col. 362-369.
72 The inscription on his memorial plaque reads: "... publi?e privatimque exhibuit a
Thesauris hujus Oppidi saepius itemque in Senatu saepius omnibus profuit off ico benefi
cio consilio exemplo." Cf. Inscriptions fun?raires de la province ? Anvers, vol. I.
73 "Ma poi havendo guardato al mi? debito & considerato l'amore che V. S. porti ad
essa, spero che a lei non saranno disca, i frutti che in casa sua sono produtti dal mi? poco
coltivato ingegno, & forse sarei ripreso d'ingratitudine s'io non mostrassi anco al mondo la
mia debita devotione continuata corne V. S. sa con ogni affettione & fedelt? poco meno di
vinti anni, nel servitio del suo Honoratiss. Zio, & sempre da me riverto mio Cariss. Patrone
Sig. CORNELIO PRUENEN, insieme di suo fratello il Sig. ARNOLDO DE COR
DES." Sweertius, Athenae belgicae, in his entry on Verdonck confirms this, noting that
during his early years he was "devoted to D. Cornelis Pruenen... and now of the house
hold of Joannes Carolus de Cordes" ("Primos iuventutis annos D. Cornelio Prunio Sena
tori & Thesauris Anverpiensi consecravit, & nunc D. Ioanni Carolo de Cordes, Toparchae
in Wichelen & Ceeskam domesticus"). The name of Joannes Carolus de Cordes also
appears on a monumental plaque in the Church of Our Lady for Arnold Pruenen, which
shows his relation to the Pruenen name through his grandmother, Isabella Pruenen, the
sister of Cornelis: "Sepulchrum Nobilis ARNOLDIPREUNEN mortui 22. Decembris
A.? 1536 et ejus filiae Isabellae Preunen uxoris Nobilis Joannis DE CORDES filiorumque
Joannis Arnoldi & Jacobi DE CORDES ac nepotis D. JOANNIS DE CAROLI DE
CORDES ..."; Inscriptions fun?raires, vol. I.

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Most of these men, Italians as well as Netherlanders, appear to have had a

strong interest in music and in many cases considerable ability. The writers of the
dedications frequently observe that they "delight in music" (Homodei, Harmon?a
celeste) or "enjoy music with others" (de Ceville, Homodei, Pruenen), or they
refer to them as "Amatore della m?sica" (de Smidt, Homodei [Castro, 1588],
Pruenen, Sapesteyn, Stanley, and Sweerts). In some dedications the authors note
that their patron is a "good judge of music" (Balbani, Sweerts, Stanley [Phal?se,
Novifrutti]), that he "knows" or "understands music" (de Craen, van Hove), or
that he has a "mature judgment and perfect knowledge of music" (Bartolomei).
In the dedication of IlHelicone, Samuele Dunio tells us that Godin and the Drog
brodio brothers assisted him "in singing and seeking out the most enjoyable
[madrigals]" both for IlParnasso and for this volume.74 For these merchants the
musical gatherings in which madrigals ? and most likely chansons and motets as
well ? were sung and discussed provided delightful recreation and a diversion
from their business affairs.
If it were only the composers and their patrons ? the musical cognoscenti ?
who were interested in Italian madrigals, though, there would not have been suf
ficient reason to print and reprint numerous books of them. There had to be a
market for the books. Surely the large Italian community in Antwerp would have
accounted for some of the sales. Forney suggests that the Italian-titled version of
Lassus's "Opus 1" was directed toward this community.75 The audience for later
madrigal publications, however, was undoubtedly much broader and was spread
across the large and well-educated middle classes of the Low Countries. Guicciar
dini's comments regarding the musical talents of the Netherlandish people have
already been cited. He claims that the people of the Low Countries were "natu
rally musicians." Music instruction was widely available, not only from private
74 "... mi son resoluto di fame un altra ? cinque voci, intitulara EL HELICONE, e

per che le W. SS. nel raccogliere da sopradetto PARNASSO, come da presente HELI
CONE, spesse volto hanno havuto moke fatiche (non obstante gli loro negotii e quoti
diane occupation!) per aiutarmi cantar e cercar gli piu gustevoli, pareami far torto al mio
giuditio stesso se non l'havessi dedicata alla W. SS."
75 For whom this volume was intended is not clear. Since it had already been pub
lished earlier in the year with a French tide page and without a dedication ? one would
assume for local distribution ? the commission to reissue it in the same year under an Ital
ian tide, Forney suggests, may have been on behalf of the Genoese nation, and the book
may have been intended for export back to Italy or elsewhere. Forney, "Orlando di
Lasso's 'Opus 1'," p. 38.

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tutors and in the Latin school of the cathedral, but also in the many other schools
that educated Antwerp's youth.76 Education had been compulsory for all chil
dren ? rich and poor, male and female ? since 1546, when Charles V had issued a
decree to that effect. Along with grammar, reading, writing, bookkeeping, and
various languages, instruction was given in singing and playing instruments.
Many of the teachers registered in the Guild of St. Ambrose were certified to
teach music along with other subjects. Forney has shown that the curriculum at
the school of the Laurel Tree, run by Peter Heyns from 1551 -1585, included vocal
instruction and learning to play and tune the harpsichord. A music primer, offer
ing basic instruction in note-reading, rhythms, and solf?ge, was readily available,
along with a supply of relatively easy songs, in Phal?se's Septiesme livre des chan
sons, which appeared in numerous editions and reprints between 1560 and 1660.77
The cultivation of musical talents was abetted by the wealth and cosmopolitan
character of the area. Clercx makes clear that this is the reason music publishing
flourished in Antwerp:
Music... needs a social sub-strata [in which to flourish]_The expansion

of Antwerp had created for musicians a new type of clientele: a wealthy,
urbane, and confident middle class. It was for this clientele that musicians
and printers worked; it was by them that they lived. Why, then, explain this
76 See Lewis, Gardano, pp. 7-8, for a discussion of the increasing musical literacy
and musical education of the middle classes in Europe in the sixteenth century. In
Antwerp, specifically, it is known that Waelrant, a tenor at the cathedral, was a teacher of
singing and that he provided vocal instruction for the instrumental pupils of Gregorius de
Coninck; cf. Howard Slenk, "The Music School of Hubert Waelrant," Journal of the
American Musicological Society 21 (1968), 157-167. These pupils, it should be noted,
however, appear to have been apprentices being trained as professional musicians. Kristine
Forney, "'Nymphes gayes en abry du Laurier': Music Instruction for Women in Renais
sance Antwerp" (paper read at the meetings of the American Musicological Society,
Pittsburgh, Perm., Nov. 6-10,1992) showed that music was a part of the education of
children in Antwerp's schools, and Anne Tatnall Gross, "'Brieve & facile Instruction pour
bien apprendre la Musicque': Vocal Anthologies and the Music Amateur in the Low
Countries, 1560-1660" (paper read at the meetings of the American Musicological
Society, Pittsburgh, Perm., Nov. 6 -10,1992) demonstrated the pedagogical function of the
many editions of Phal?se's Septi?me livre des chansons a quatre parties. I am grateful to
Kristine Forney and Anne Tatnall Gross for providing me with copies of these papers.
77 Tatnall Gross, "Brieve & facile Instruction." See also Henri Vanhulst, "Un succ?s
de l'?dition musical: Le Septiesme Livre des Chansons a quatre parties (1560-1661/3),"
Revue belge de musicologie 32-33 (1978-79), 97-120.

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musical vitality and this publishing industry by the importance of church

music? That which was true for the ecclesiastical centers of Li?ge or Cam
brai, that which was true for the princely courts ? where manuscripts suf
ficed ? was not true for Antwerp, a commercial, industrial, and financial
center, where the churches, moreover, had only modest wealth.78
It was this large population of talented amateur musicians that constituted the
market for the extensive production of French chansons, Latin motets, Flemish
songs and instrumental music that had come off the presses of Susato, Waelrant
and Laet, Plantin, and Phal?se since the middle of the century.
That the musically literate people of the Low Countries should purchase
songbooks in French and Latin, as well as their native Flemish, is not surprising.
French was a common second language for the area and, of course, had always
been more common in musical settings. One would expect them to know
French. But many knew Italian as well. Guicciardini marvels at the understanding
of languages among the people of the Low Countries and notes that many were
able to speak Italian:
The majority of them understand grammar, and nearly all, even the peas
ants, can read and write_An infinite number, even those that never were
out of the country, besides their native language, are able to speak several
foreign languages, especially French, with which they are most familiar;
many speak German, English, Italian, Spanish, and others speak languages
even more remote.79
78 "... musique ... a besoin d'un substrat social_L'expansion anversoise avait

cr?e, pour les musicians, une client?le d'un type nouveau: une bourgeoisie riche, de civili
sation urbaine tr?s pouss?e. C'est pour cette client?le que musiciens et typographes travail
laient; c'est d'elle qu'ils vivaient. Pourquoi, alors, expliquer cette vitalit? musicale et cette
industrie du livre par la primaut? de la musique d'?glise? Ce qui ?tait vrai pour des centres
eccl?siastiques tels que Li?ge ou Cambrai, ce qui ?tait vrai pour des cours princi?res,?o? le
manuscrit suffit ? la demande, ? ne l'?tait plus pour Anvers, centre commercial, industriel
et bancaire, o? les ?glises, du reste, avaient de modeste revenus." Suzanne Clercx, "Les
?ditions musicales anversoises," p. 369.
79 "la maggior' parte d'essi, hanno qualche principio di grammatica, almeno sono
quasi tutti, infino alli contadini & leggere & scrivere_ci sono infinite persone, le quale
oltre alla lor' lingua materna, quantumque non sieno stati fuora del paese, fanno ancor'
parlare parecchi linguaggi forestieri, & specialmente il Franceze, il quai' linguaggio hanno
familiarissimo: & mold parlano Tedesco, Inghilese, Italiano, Spagnuolo, & altri altre lingue
piu remote." Guicciardini, Descrittione, p. 27.

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It was common for Netherlanders, women as well as men, to be able to

speak three or four languages; many knew six or even seven. Beyond Flemish and
French, the most common were Spanish and Italian. Plantin published in many
languages, and the public consumed large numbers of volumes from his presses.
Antwerpers could not expect the large number of travelers and merchants who
came to their cosmopolitan city to be able to speak Flemish. So they learned to
speak the many languages of their visitors, the languages they heard regularly in
the city, the languages of the people with whom they dealt in business transac
tions and in social situations. Guicciardini observes that, by using these diverse
tongues in their encounters with foreigners in the city, Antwerpers became so flu
ent that the languages seemed natural to them.80 Merchants and financiers would
need to be conversant in Italian in particular, since it was the language used for
international trade in Antwerp; evidence suggests that the Antwerp exchange rate
current and the commodity price current were, in fact, published in Italian.81 Cor
net remarks specifically that the merchant and Antwerp citizen Gerarde de
Craen, to whom he dedicated his Madrigali (1581), was not only well endowed
with musical talent but was one for whom "the Italian tongue is no less familiar
than his mother tongue."82 Cornelis Pruenen knew Italian well enough to write
poetry in the language; one of the texts set by Cornelis Verdonck in his Madrigali
a 6 of 1603 was penned by him. It is not improbable that dedicatory madrigal
texts such as Pevernage's "Fra l'altra virtu" for Bartolomei in M?sica divina or
"Caesar gentil" for Cesare Homodei in Harmon?a celeste may have been written
by the composers themselves. Certainly the composers would have had to have at
least some knowledge of Italian to appreciate adequately the madrigals they dis
80 Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Breughel, writes extensively in Chap
ter 5 on the literacy and educational level of Antwerp's citizens.
81 John J. McCusker, "The Role of Antwerp in the Emergence of Commercial and

Financial Newspapers in Early Modern Europe," unpublished paper, p. 16 and n. 27.
These lists were published in what McCusker claims was the earliest business newspaper,
which first appeared in Antwerp around 1540. Although no copies of this business news
paper survive from the mid-sixteenth century, McCusker shows that one did exist and
points to manuscripts of price lists copied by hand from it. McCusker admits that we do
not know the language it was published in, but he demonstrates that it was "probably
Italian."
82 "V. S. laquale per essere fra le sue altre virtu dotata ottimamente della m?sica &
per havere lei la fingua Italiana non meno propria e famigliare che la sua materna ..."

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cussed in their musical gatherings and to be able to set the texts with sensitivity to
expression and declamation.
Clearly these madrigal books were intended for local consumption, and the
music was appreciated by a wide segment of the population, not just the Italian
communities. In the dedication for his anthology of Madrigali a 8 Phal?se speaks
of the "entreaties of many virtuous friends and lovers of Musical Melody, [which
motivated him] to give to the public yet this selection of the most beautiful and
artistic madrigals and dialogues for eight voices," and adds that he has "resolved to
do it in order to continue in the good wish that I have always had to be useful to
the public, and in particular to all lovers of music."83 Antwerp musicians could
not get enough of this music. Even with the thriving trade between Antwerp and
Italy (though it had declined greatly by the end of the century) not enough madri
gal books arrived to fill the demand. That is why Phal?se set about reprinting
them, as he tells us in the dedication to his Novifrutti musicali (1610):
The obligation that I hold to you, most illustrious sir [William Stanley], for
the many kindnesses demonstrated to me, and at the same time, to Divine
Music, recognizing you to be a true lover and protector of it, they together
command me to present myself before you with these NOVI FRUTH
MUSICALI, gathered (already a year ago) in the garden of the finest talents
of the flower Italy, and still sent to us by the presses of Venice, but so
scarcely that they have only whetted, but not satisfied, the appetite of our
virtuosi: by this I am myself moved (so that the Lovers of music might be
able to taste enough, and enjoy to their fill the sweetness of these savory
FRUITS) to collect anew and even supplement them with other new ones,
judged worthy not only by me, but by those knowledgeable in this honored
and virtuous profession.84
83 "Novamente da prieghi di molti vertuosi amici & amatori della Melod?a Musicale
astretto, di dar in publico ancor questa Scelta delli piu vaghi & artif iciosi Madrigali & Dia
loghi ? otto voci_mi son risoluto di farlo, per continuare nel buon desiderio ch'io ho
sempre havuto di giovare al publico, & in particular' alii Amatore dell' arte musicale."
84 "L'obligo ch'io tengo a V.S. molto Illustre per molte cortesie mostratemi, &
insieme alia Divina M?sica, cognoscendola d'essa vero Amatore ? Protettore, mi comman
dono unitamente di presentarmi avanti lei, con questi NOVI FRU'l'l'l MUSICALI, colti
(gia armo son?) nel giardino degli primi ingegni della f iorita Italia, & anco mandateci per le
stampe di Venetia, ma cosi scarsamente che solo habbiano acceso, non sodisfatto l'appetito

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Antwerp music prints were not intended only for local consumption, how
ever. They were shipped throughout the Low Countries and to other countries as
well. Since Antwerp retained some importance as a trading center in the 1580s and
'90s, it is not surprising that music books were an important export as well as an
import. Antwerp's two great fairs, or "Martes" ? one beginning 15 days before
Whitsuntide, "La foire de Pentecoste," and the other, the second Sunday after
Our Lady day in August, "La foire de S. Remy" ? each lasted six weeks, and
booksellers took part in them. Plantin served as a distributor and seller of books ?
not only his own, but those of others as well. Among these were many music
books. Plantin also regularly attended the great Frankfort fair. His Grand livre de
Francfort, 1566 -1596s5 (one of many of Plantin's records preserved at the Plantin
Moretus Museum in Antwerp) shows accounts with book dealers from such
cities as Heidelberg, Basel, Cologne, Venice, Paris, Leipzig, Lyons, and Frankfurt.
Plantin's catalog of the Frankfurt fairs from 1597-161886 lists by tide three to ten
new music books for the spring and fall fairs each year. The music publishers most
commonly listed are Phal?se and Kaufmann of Nuremberg, but there are others
as well. The listings contain tides of a variety of madrigal publications, including
many of the new madrigal books of Phal?se: for example, in autumn 1597 the
Vago dilletevole arboreto di madrigali, in autumn 1598 the Convito musicale di
Horatio Vecchi and the Madrigali di Pietro Philippi a 8 voci, in autumn 1599
madrigals a 6 by Felice Anerio, and in autumn 1600 Madrigali by Agazzari,
Mosto, and Macque. Occasionally these records also list new publications from
Venetian music printers (e.g., in spring 1598 a volume of villanelle a 3 & 4 by
Giov. Petro Gallo just published by Vincenti). Registers of sales from Plantin's
own bookshop, which was run by his wife, show that he often had up to five
copies of a music book in stock, and that besides works from his own press he
di questi nostri Virtuosi: per questo mi son? mosso (accio li Amatori possino a bastanza
gustare, & a pieno godere la dolcezza di questi saporiti FRU'lTl) di raccoglierli di novo &
anco augmentarli con altri novi, giudicati degni non solo da me, ma da Intelligenti di questa
honorata e virtuosa professione."
85 Reg. 43. See also J.-A. Stellfeld, "Het muziekhistorisch belang der catalogi en
Inventarissen van het Plantinsch Archief," VlaamsJaarboek voor muziekgeschiedenis,]v%.
n-m (1940-41), pp. 5-50.
86 Catalogus Francfurtiensis 1597-1618. Catalogus librorum qui singulis Nundinis

Francfurtensibus novitur prodierunt, Reg. Latin N? 269.

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sold prints of Phal?se, Kaufmann, and others, including Venetian printers.87 His
Journaux, the records of the printing firm's daily transactions, frequendy record
receipt of madrigal books from Phal?se. The entries for 6 July in the Journal for
1583, for instance, shows receipt "Dejan Bell?re, 2 M?sica Divina 4o, 4 Madrigaux
de Castro 4o, 4 Chansons de Castro 4o"; the entry for 3 November shows receipt
of "2 Meslange de Castro, 2 M?sica Divina 4o, 2 Harmon?a celeste 4o, 2 Madri
gaux et motetz de Castro," along with other items. The journals also list the con
tents of crates of books packed for shipping to other cities of the Low Countries
or to France or Germany. These frequendy include madrigal books of Phal?se.
A box sent to Theodore Ronsardt in Caen, Nantes, and Bordeaux 6 April 1596
lists "3 Trionfi di Dori 4?, 3 Madrigali di Faignient 4?, 3 Harmonia 4?, 3 Paradiso
musicale 4o, 3 M?sica divina 4o, and 3 Symphoniae angelicae 4o."88
What remains to be considered is the taste of Antwerp musicians in Italian music.

What kind of Italian music appealed to Antwerpers? While a detailed examina
tion of the styles and types of madrigals in the anthologies or of those written by
local composers is beyond the scope of this article, some general observations can
be made. First, although the styles selected range widely, they generally reflect the
styles and composers that were most popular in Italy during the previous ten
years. These changed slighdy from decade to decade.
From the beginning, Antwerpers were attracted to the lighter types of Ital
ian song.89 Lassus's "Opus 1" had included villanesche, often reprinted as a set in
the Low Countries, among its diverse genres. Phal?se was later to reprint Lassus's
second book of villanesche also, in 1582.90 The Antwerp composers Cornet and
Libri venales 1555 -1670, Reg. N? 795.
88 See Stellfeld, "Het muziekhistorisch belang," p. 45.
89 On the distinctions between the various Italian light genres, see Ruth DeFord,
"Musical Relationships Between the Italian Madrigal and Light Genres in the Sixteenth
Century," M?sica Disciplina 39 (1985), 107-168.
90 The Libro de villanelle, moresche, etaltre canzoni, a 4. 5. 6. et 8. This volume had

been published by Le Roy and Ballard in Paris the previous year. The villanelle of both

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Waelrant had both composed and published entire books of napolitane during
the early 1560s, though Waelrant's were printed in Venice, and several of the
pieces of his own that Waelrant included in Symphonia angelica are also napoli
tane. Among the pieces selected for Phal?se's four early Italian anthologies are
napolitane or canzonette by Conversi, Vecchi, Gastoldi, and Ferretti. Ferretti, one
of the most popular composers of five- and six-part canzone, appears with par
ticular frequency. Among the Venetian volumes reprinted in their entirety by
Phal?se are a number of books of lighter genres also: Gastoldi's Balletti a 5 voci
(1596) and Canzonette a 3 (1602), Vecchi's Convito musicale... madrigali e can
zonetti a 3. 4. 6.7. & 8 (1598) and Canzonette a 4 (1611), Macque's Madrigaletti et
canzonetti napolitane a 6 (1600), Anerio's Canzonette a 4, and Marenzio's Villa
nelle et canzonette alia napolitane a 3, books 1-7 (1610). In fact, a full third of the
single-composer madrigal volumes printed or reprinted in the Low Countries
between 1585 and 1625 are devoted entirely or substantially to canzone, canzo
nette, or balletti. The demand for some of these, particularly the balletti of
Gastoldi, warranted further reprints.91
Apart from the light genres, in the realm of the madrigal proper, one finds
both madrigals of the light pastoral type and serious madrigals accessible to ama
teurs. Many of the lighter pieces exhibit traits of the canzone/mz?ngA hybrid so
popular in the latter part of the sixteenth century: pastoral texts, patter rhythms,
mosdy chordal texture, and repeated sections.92 Among the Italians whose madri
gal books Phal?se selected to reprint in full are Giovanelli, Pallavicino, Agazzari,
Marenzio, Croce ? composers who specialized in the light madrigal and pastoral
madrigal. The composers selected for the anthologies include also a number who
produced expressive and serious madrigals accessible to accomplished amateurs:
Lassus books can be found in modern editions in Donna G. Cardamone, ed., Orlando di
Lasso et al. Canzoni villanesche and Mllanelle, Recent Researches in the Music of the
Renaissance 82-83 (Madison, Wis., 1991).
91 After first reprinting Gastoldi's Balletti a 5 in 1596, Phal?se reprinted it five more
times between 1601 and 1624; the firm offered it again in 1637 and 1640. He printed the
Balletti a 3 first in 1602 and then again three more times before 1631. Interest in Gastoldi's
balletti in the Netherlands continued into the middle of the century with Dutch-texted
versions; for an examination of this later development, see Rudi Rasch, "The Balletti of
Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi and the Musical History of the Netherlands," Tijdschrift van
de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 24 (1974), 112-145.
See Roche, The Madrigal, chapters 4 and 6.

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Andrea Gabrieli, Lassus, Monte, Marenzio, Baccusi, G. M. Nanino, Wert (earlier

works), Palestrina, and others.
In his study of the English madrigal, Joseph Kerman regards the success of
Phal?se's anthologies as "evidence of the editor's own provinciality, and more
important, that of the audience he addressed" and claims that "the public that
admired these anthologies, like the Elizabethan public, lacked the specialized and
esoteric orientation of the Italian academies, to which the Italian editors so natu
rally directed their attention."931 think it can be shown, however, that the popu
larity of this music in the Low Countries is indicative of provinciality neither on
the part of the publisher nor his audience. (In fact, one could argue that it tells us
little about the taste of the publisher himself, since as a businessman he would be
interested in producing volumes that would sell.94) It is true that the four-part liter
ature in the anthologies is several decades old; Phal?se was merely making more
widely available some of the classics of the Italian repertory, pieces such as Rore's
"Anchor che col partir?" and Ferrabosco's "Io mi son giovanetta." But it should
be noted that, while four-voice texture may have been no longer used extensively
in madrigal composition at this time, reprints of madrigal books a 4 were still
being issued and reissued even in Italy in the 1580s and later.95 Most of the five
and six-part pieces in Phal?se's anthologies are not that old. Most of them had
been in print for less than ten years. Furthermore, madrigals and canzone by
Andrea Gabrieli and Ferretti from the late 1560s and 1570s continued to be reis
sued in Italy in the 1580s and '90s, so the Low Countries' taste for this music must
be considered no more out of date than that of the Italian public. Likewise,
Gastoldi's Balletti a 5 (Phal?se, 1596 and several later reprints) had appeared
Kerman, The Elizabethan Madrigal, pp. 49-50.
94 Scholars have suggested that printers replaced patrons as arbiters of musical taste
in the sixteenth century, but have recognized that their control "was modified by the
demands of the market"; cf., e.g., Lewis, Antonio Gardano, p. 15. Lewis demonstrates
how the changes in the wording of tide pages show increasingly a "new appeal to a public
that was buying by name and reputation" (p. 13). Any printer concerned with sales had to
take into account the musical abilities and tastes of his market.
95 Rore's II primo libro de madrigali a 4 (1550), which includes "Anchor che col par
tire," was reissued by Angelo Gardano in 1582 and by G. Vincenti as late as 1590. Wert's
Primo libro de madrigali a 4 was reprinted as late as 1583 by Angelo Gardano. Marenzio
issued his set of four-voice madrigals in 1585 (Rome: Alessandro Gardano); Italian prin
ters issued reprints in 1587, 1592, 1603, and 1608.

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initially in Venice in 1591, but it continued to be popular in Italy no less than in the
North: Amadino was still reprinting it for his Venetian audience as late as 1607 and
1613.
It is true that Phal?se seems not to have been very interested in representing
the more extreme directions of the late sixteenth-century Italian madrigal in his
anthologies or reprints. There are no chromatic or virtuosic madrigals of Luzzas
chi in the anthologies, for instance, and none of Gesualdo's books was selected
for reprinting. The later works of Wert also, with their virtuosity and experiments
in declamatory writing, are missing. It may be that Phal?se did not even know of
them, of course. Or one might conjecture that the intimate connection between
words and music in this repertory inhibited an appreciation by those for whom
Italian was not their primary language. As we have seen, though, many Antwerp
ers did know Italian well enough to speak it, so that was probably not the case. It
should not be surprising that Phal?se did not print madrigals of this type; indeed,
it would be surprising if he had. He sought to provide music for a market of musi
cally literate amateurs, and the difficulty of most of these madrigals put them
beyond the range of amateur singers. They were written for professional singers
at the courts of Ferrara and Mantua or for the singers of the academies that Ker
man mentions, and, as he notes, they reflect the "specialized and esoteric orienta
tion" of those academies. These pieces were no more accessible to the vast market
of talented amateur singers in Italy than that of the Low Countries. Furthermore,
it is arguable whether the Italian publishers did in fact direct their attention to this
repertory. Although they did publish it, they also had an audience of accom
plished amateurs to serve, and, as we have noted, they continued to reprint the
same madrigal repertory that Phal?se was printing. Demand for the more vir
tuosic and progressive repertory rarely warranted more than a single printing
even in Italy. None of the madrigal books of Luzzaschi was printed more than
once, and of Wert's later books, only VDI and XI were reprinted.
Phal?se did not shun chromatic and experimental madrigals entirely, how
ever; his taste, and that of the Antwerp public, was not as uniformly conservative
as Kerman and others suggest. He did reprint Marenzio's Books VI-IX a 5, which
contain the composer's most mannered pieces (he had reissued Books I-V a 5 in
1593 and Books I-VI a 6 in 1594), Pallavicino's Book Via 5, which shows the
composer's adoption of a mannerist style like that of Wert or Marenzio, and
Monteverdi's Books E-V, though in all three cases he did so at least ten years
after their initial printings. The later Marenzio books, with their more manneristic
styles, did not appear until 1609, the Pallavicino appeared in 1612, and the Monte
verdi books had to wait until 1615. Again, it might be noted that the Italian public

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was also still buying these madrigals at this time: Gardano reprinted Marenzio's
Books W and EX in 1609 and Book VI a 5 in 1614. Monteverdi's Book V a 5 was
reprinted in Venice in 1615 and again as late as 1620.

Despite the popularity of the lighter genres and styles from Italy, Antwerp
composers themselves for the most part did not write many villanelle or pastoral
madrigals, nor did they write canzonette.96 The exceptions are Waelrant and Cor
net, who each produced entire volumes of napolitane, though Waelrant's was
printed in Venice. Waelrant also contributed several canzone to Symphonia ange
lica. Otherwise, the contributions of Low Countries composers to anthologies as
well as their single-composer volumes consist entirely of madrigals. When they
did set villanella texts, they often either set them as madrigals or wrote madrigal
parodies of earlier villanella settings. In Ruth DeFord's studies of the canzone/
madrigal hybrids these composers figure more prominendy in the mixing of gen
res than one might expect, based on their numbers. Cornet, in his Madrigali of
1581, published two madrigal parodies of villanelle and three madrigal settings of
villanella texts; all of the texts are also found in his Canzoni napolitane of 1563.
Jean de Castro's earlier volumes of 1569,1582, and 1570 are devoted entirely to
madrigals, as are the volumes of 1588,1591, and 1594, but the latter three also con
tain a few villanella texts set as madrigals. Other Northerners who occasionally
set hybrid texts or set villanelle as madrigals include Faignient, Waelrant, Philips,
and Turnhout.97 Although mixing genres in the opposite direction, that is, treating
madrigal texts in a lighter fashion, was fairly common among the Italians, in only
one case did a Northern composer do this. That was Cornet, who in his Canzoni
napolitane of 1563 wrote three light parodies of madrigals.98
96 On distinctions between the various types of light genres, see Ruth DeFord,
"Musical Relationships between the Italian Madrigal and Light Genres," pp. 110-118.
97 Cf. Ruth DeFord, "The Influence of the Madrigal on Canzonetta Texts of the
Late Sixteenth Century," Acta musicologica 49 (1987), Table 3. Philips's first book (1596)
has one madrigal setting of a villanella text and two texts of hybrid character set as madri
gals; his second book contains two madrigal parodies of light pieces and one madrigal set
ting of a light text. Turnhout, in addition to the villanella text in a madrigal setting in his
Madrigali (1589), set another in Melod?a olympica. Faignient set one villanella text in his
1568 volume of chansons and madrigals a 3, "Ogn' uno sap'hormai." And Waelrant, in
addition to the villanelle he wrote for Symphonia angelica, set one villanella text, "Mi
voglio fare," as a madrigal. My thanks to Donna Cardamone Jackson for access to her files
of villanella texts and help in distinguishing text types.
98 See DeFord, "Musical Relationships," Table 1.

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The madrigals written by Antwerp composers generally fit more into the
mold of the serious madrigal for amateurs rather than the pastoral type or the
napolitane. Although Hubert Waelrant shows himself a capable composer of
napolitane and, as we noted above, produced an entire book of them, his five-part
madrigals of 1558 are serious in character. Of course, these pieces predate the
pastoral madrigal and the canzone (i.e., the more ambitious five- and six-part vil
lanella), which became popular in Italy only in the 1560s and '70s. All have seri
ous texts (five of the nine are from Petrarch) and show concern for the declama
tion and expressive character of the words. They usually begin contrapuntally
and then shift to a chordal or loosely homophonic texture for internal phrases,
varying slightly in texture from one phrase to the next; phrases of text are usually
set as complete units; rhythms shift between the rapid repeated-note patter of
semiminims and slower drawn-out breves and semibreves, depending on the
meaning of the words; and harmonies, while colorful, are only occasionally, and
even then mildly, chromatic.99 The same general description could be made of the
madrigals of Pevernage, though his are almost entirely homophonic. Both com
posers were accomplished musicians who show an understanding of the genre, its
styles, and the Italian texts they set, but their madrigals are in no way experimen
tal or avant-garde. Pevernage's "Misera che faro" and "Dolce mi? foco ardente"
from Harmon?a celeste are typical: their mild chromaticism results primarily from
raised Fs, Cs or Gs (as thirds above the bass) and lowered Bs (thirds or roots next
to related harmonies), and text-painting accompanies obvious pictorial words like
"fuggite." Pevernage, like Waelrant and like Philips later, chose primarily serious
texts and tailored his music to them. In fact, Steele's description of the style of
Philips's madrigals could serve for those of several other Antwerp composers as
well: he observes that they demonstrate "complete mastery of this chosen style
[the Roman 'amateur' tradition] within its characteristics limits: an easy com
mand of contrapuntal technique, a liking for suave harmonic progressions, and a
restrained attitude towards word-painting." 10?
99 For a fuller discussion of the style of Waelrant's madrigals, see the Introduction to
my edition of Hubert Waelrant, Il primo libro de madrigali e canzoni francezi. For a dis
cussion of the Roman style of the 1550s, which seems to have been influential for Wael
rant, perhaps because of the presence of Lassus, see Haar, "The Early Madrigals of Las
sus," especially p. 27.
100 Steele, "Peter Philips," The New Grove 14:657. As was noted above, Philips had
been organist at the English college in Rome in 1582.

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The texts chosen for setting by Antwerp madrigalists reflect this predilec
tion for the serious madrigal. Although there are noteworthy exceptions, such as
the pastoral texts of Castro's Rosefresche of 1591 and some of those in his Scelta
deipiii vaghi madrigali of 1594, both published in Venice, most of the texts are
serious. Poetry of Petrarch figures prominendy in the output of most of the com
posers published before 1595. Five of the eight madrigals in Waelrant's IIprimo
libro (1558), five of the 23 in Cornet's Madrigali (1581), eight of the nineteen in
Turnhout's Madrigali (1589), and five of the eight madrigals in Desquesnes'
Madrigali (1594) have Petrarch texts. Poets set less often by these composers
include Bembo, Spira, Cassola, Tasso, Ariosto, Sannazzaro, and Guarini. The
slighdy later composer Peter Philips, on the other hand, set no Petrarch texts in his
books of 1586,1598, and 1603, preferring rather poets such as Celiano, Ceb?, and
Guarini.
With the ready supply of Italian madrigals in Antwerp and their familiarity
among Antwerp musicians, one might assume that Northern composers would
simply have drawn their texts from Italian musical settings. In some instances, this
is clearly the case. Jean de Castro's two settings of Guarini's "Tirsi morir volea" {a 3,
1588, and a 5,1594) were probably inspired by the Marenzio setting, which had
appeared in Harmon?a celeste. Likewise, texts such as "Io son ferito, ahi lasso"
(Castro 1569; Philips 1596), "Anchor che col partir?" (Castro 1569, Cornet 1581),
and "Occhi piangete" (Cornet 1581; Turnhout 1589) were undoubtedly drawn
from familiar settings by Nola, Rore, and Lassus. Although it is likely that most
Antwerp composers drew their Italian texts from earlier settings, this is especially
clear in the case of Castro. The ten madrigals in his 1569 volume include some of
the most popular madrigal texts; all but one can be readily found in earlier settings
by Rore, Arcadelt, Verdelot, Hoste da Reggio, G. D. da ?ola, Donato, and oth
ers. The same is true of the madrigals of his 1570 book a 4, which includes two
texts he had earlier set a 3, "Vita de la mia vita" and "Io son ferito." The clearest
evidence that Castro drew his texts from other settings, however, comes from his
Madrigali a 3 o? 1588; all but one of the 21 texts in this volume had appeared ear
lier in M?sica divina (10), Harmon?a celeste (7), and Symphonia angelica (3), and
he probably drew them from these volumes. In the case of other composers,
generally more than half of the texts can be readily found in earlier settings. Of
the nineteen texts in Turnhout's volume, seven had been set by Lassus. Where no
earlier setting of a text is known, it was in some cases probably provided by a col
league or by the composer himself. This is most obvious in the case of dedicatory
madrigals such as Waelrant's "Tra rumor di tamburi" (Symphonia angelica),
Pevernage's "Cesar gentil" (Harmon?a celeste), or Schuyt's "O Leyda, gratiosa

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madre" (Madrigali a 5,1600), but is likely true of others as well. Cornelius Prue
nen has already been mentioned as having written one of the texts in Verdonck's
Madrigali of 1603. Considering the prominence of the Italian community in
Antwerp and the importance of the international book trade there, though, it is
not unlikely that many of the texts for which no earlier setting is known were
drawn from volumes of Italian poetry available to composers who knew Italian.
This seems particularly likely in the case of Verdonck, who in his madrigal book
takes the unusual step of providing the names of the poets; only seven of the 22
texts in this volume are known in other musical settings.
Given the popularity of the Italian madrigal in Antwerp, one might wonder
why Netherlands composers were not inspired to produce madrigals in their own
language. After all, English composers transformed the genre into a distincdy
English type of composition, and Germans soon began to produce villanelle and
balletti with German texts. In the Low Countries, however, composers were
generally content to set Italian texts. Only one, Cornelis Schuyt, wrote pieces he
called madrigals to Dutch texts, and he was not from Antwerp but from the
North Netherlands; his Hollandse madrigalen appeared in Leiden in 1603.101
There were probably several reasons. The Flemish language was never a very
popular one for musical settings. Netherlands composers more often set French
texts. But probably an equally important reason was the ready acceptance of Ital
ian-texted music by the Antwerp public. The people who bought music books,
not only members of the local Italian community but native Antwerpers as well,
knew Italian well enough to appreciate this music in its original language. There
may even have been a bit of snobbishness involved, perhaps, as there was with the
vogue of Italian opera in England a little more than a century later. More impor
tandy, though, it was simply not necessary to go through the work of translating
madrigals for the Antwerp audience.
Even apart from the few madrigals in Dutch, it is not entirely accurate to say
that Netherlands composers did not adapt the madrigal style to their own Ian
101 Cornelis Schuyt, Hollandse Madrigalen a5,6,&8 (Leiden: Rafelengio [Plantin],

1603). Frits Noske edited some part-songs of Cornelis Padbru? from 1631 under the tide
"Nederlandse Madrigalen," but Padbru? does not use the term; his tide was Kusies, in yt
Latijn geschreven door Joannes Secundus, Ende in Duytsche vaersen ghesteldt door Jacob
Westerbaen, Bey de Haeghsche Poeten, met 5, 4, and 3 stemmen (Harlem, 1631). See C T.
Padbru?, Nederlandse Madrigalen. 3-5 voc, ed. Frits Noske, Monumenta Musicae Neer
landica 5 (Amsterdam, 1962). The print of 1631 is cited in The New Grove but not in
RISM. Einzeldrucke vor 1800.

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guage, if one considers their principal language for music to have been French.
Many Antwerp composers began to incorporate madrigalistic techniques into
their settings of French texts ? particularly chromaticism, text painting, declama
tory rhythms, shifting voice combinations, and through-composed forms. This
can be seen already to some extent in the expressive writing of some of the chan
sons of Waelrant's Madrigali e canzoni francezi a 5 (1558).102 Several of Pever
nage's chansons are so permeated with the madrigal style that they might be
called madrigals with French texts.103 Cornet, Faignient, and Verdonck also wrote
madrigalistic chansons.104 In general, the chanson in the Low Countries, as well as
in France, had become stylistically less distinct from the madrigal in the later
decades of the century than it had been in the 1540s. Nevertheless, composers
continued to call these compositions "chansons"; they never used the term
"madrigal" for French-texted compositions, nor did they write French canzonette
or balletti. For musicians of the Low Countries, madrigals and canzonette were
compositions with Italian texts set in the Italian style.
This study has accounted for the wide popularity of the Italian madrigal
repertory in Antwerp, a repertory in a foreign tongue written for the most part by
composers not active in the area. As I have demonstrated, this phenomenon was
made possible by a variety of factors ? the cosmopolitan character of Antwerp
and its history as a hub of international commerce, the prominence of Italian
merchants and financiers in Antwerp society and presence of a large Italian com
munity there, the cultural and musical literacy of Antwerp's leading citizens as
well as its broader population, and the widespread knowledge of the Italian
language in the Low Countries at this time. This phenomenon, like so much
in music history, can be understood only in the context of the cultural milieu of
102 See, for example, my edition of "Dictes ouy ma dame ma maistresse," in Hubert
Waelrant, II Primo Libro de madrigali e canzoni francezi, cited abore in note 8.
103 See, for example, "Les oyseaux cherchent" and "Comme le Chasseur" from his
Livre troisi?me des chansons (Antwerp: Plantin, 1590); modern edition in Andr? Pever
nage, The Complete Chansons, Gerald R. Hoekstra, ed., Recent Researches in the Music
of the Renaissance, 6064 (Madison, Wis., 1983): vol. 62, nos. 10 and 13.
104 Phal?se's Le Rossignol Musical des chansons a 4, 5,&6 (1597) contains madriga
listic chansons by all three.

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which it was a part. By painting that broader picture, this study is intended to
contribute to a fuller understanding of both the history of the madrigal and the
culture of the Low Countries in the late sixteenth century in general.
St. Olaf College,

Northfield, Minnesota

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Table 1. Numbers of Volumes Containing Madrigals Issued in Antwerp and

Other Cities of the Low Countries, 1555-1620.
The first column represents anthologies (both newly assembled anthologies and reprints of Italian publications), the
second represents single-composer volumes, and the third represents reprints of Italian single-composer volumes. Italics
indicates volumes of multiple genres that contain one or more madrigals. Underlining indicates reprints of volumes
issued earlier in Antwerp (reprints of volumes containing four madrigals or fewer, though, are not included). It should
be noted that these numbers cannot be taken at face value, since multi-genre volumes may contain only a small number
of madrigals, and even volumes devoted solely to madrigals vary greatly in length. In a number of cases Phal?se combi
ned two or more Venetian prints into a single volume (in the case of Marenzio's madrigals a 5 and a 6 as many as five).
Anthologies Single- Repr. Italian Anthologies Single- Repr. Italian

Comp. Vols. Single-Comp. Comp. Vols. Single-Comp.
1555 hi 1591
1556 1592 1
1557 1593
1558 1594
1559 1595
1560 hi 1596 2,1 LL
1561 1597
1562 1598
1563 1599
1564 1600
1565 1601 1,1
1566 1602
1567 1603
1568 1604
1569 i, r+j?" 1605
1570 1606
1571 1607
1572 1608
1573 1609
1574 1610
1575 1611
1576 1612 U
1577 1613
1578 1614
1579 1615
1580 1616
1581 1617
1582 1618
1583 1619
1584 1620
1585
1586 Total: 4, 22, H 13, 5,21, 2
1587
XI
1989
1590 hi
Combined totals: Prints combining madrigals with other genres: 77, 5
Prints devoted solely to madrigals: 71,25

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APPENDIX
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MADRIGAL PRINTS

IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1555-1620
The following list, assembled from the various volumes of RISM, bibliographic
studies of Low Countries music printers, and other bibliographic sources, lists all
publications including Italian-texted music known to have been printed in the
Low Countries between 1555 and 1620. Dates of reprints issued in the Low
Countries are indicated following the the -> sign.
Abbreviations:
RISM = International Inventory of Musical Sources, Recueils imprim?s XVIe
XVIIe si?cles
Vogel/Einstein = Emil Vogel, with additions by Alfred Einstein, Bibliothek der
gedruckten weltlichen Vokalmusik Italiens aus den Jahren 1500-1700 (Hil
desheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1962).
NV = "II nuovo Vogel": Emil Vogel, Alfred Einstein, Fran?ois Lesure, and
Claudio Sartori, Bibliograf?a della m?sica italiana vocale profana pubblicata
dal 1500-1700 (Pomezia: Staderini, 1977).
BrownIM = Howard M. Brown, Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A
Bibliography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
NB: Where numbers of madrigals in a volume are offered, pieces in two or more
partes are counted as single compositions.
I. Madrigal Anthologies and Anthologies Including Madrigals Printed in the

Low Countries.
1564. Septiesme livre de chansons a quatre parties, de nouveau reveu, cor

rig?, et de plusieurs autres nouvelles chansons... augment?.?Louvain,
P. Phal?se, 1564.
Not listed in RISM.
Note: Although this is the third edition of the Septiesme livre (the first was
printed in 1560), it is the first to include madrigals. It contains two ? one by
Berchem, one by Donato. These pieces appeared in all of the 24 further edi
tions and reprints of the volume that were issued during the next hundred
years. Cf. Henri Vanhulst, "Un succ?s de l'?dition musicale: Le Septiesme
livre des chansons a quatre parties (1560-1661/3)," Revue belge de musicolo
gie 32-33 (1978-79), 97-120.

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1574. La fleur des chansons a trois parties contenant un recueil, produit de la

divine musique de Jean Castro, Severin Cornet, No? Faignient et
autres. ? Louvain, P. Phal?se & Antwerp, J. Bell?re, 1574. Ded. to Jacques
Alewyn, by Castro.
RISM 15743. Vogel/Einstein 15744.
Note: Besides the 96 French chansons, includes three Italian madrigals: one
by Castro, two by Cornet.
1575. Livre de meslanges contenant un recueil de chansons a quatre parties,
choisy ... par Jean Castro. ? Louvain, P. Phal?se & Antwerp, J. Bell?re,
1575. Ded. to Frederic Perrenot, Chevalier, Baron de Renaix et D'Aspre
mont, Seigneur de St. Loup.
Note: Of the 83 pieces, ten are madrigals.
1583. M?sica divina di XIX. autori illustri, a IIII. V. VI. et VII. voci, nuova
mente raccolta da Pietro Phalesio, et data in luce... ? Antwerp, P. Pha
l?se et J. Bell?re, 1583. Ded. to Giovanbattista di Bartolomei Gioiliere.
RISM 158315 -> 158816,1591". Vogel/Einstein 15832.
Note: See M?sica divina (1595) below for another edition. Modern facsi
mile in Corpus of Early Music in Facsimile, no. 19.
1583. Harmon?a celeste di diversi eccellentissimi musici a IIII. V. VI. VII. et
VIII. voci, nuovamente raccolta per Andrea Pevernage, et date in

luce... ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1583. Ded. to Cesare Homodei
di Milano, by Pevernage.
RISM 158314 -> 15899. Vogel/Einstein 15831.
Note: See Harmon?a celeste (1593) below for later edition and reprints.
Corpus of Early Music in Facsimile, no. 20.
1585. Symphonia angelica di diversi eccellentissimi musici a IIII. V. et VI.
voci, nuovamente raccolta per Huberto Waelrant, et data in luce. ?
Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1585. Ded. to Cornelis Pruenen, by Waelrant.
Note: See Symphonia angelica (1590) below for later edition and reprints.
Corpus of Early Music in Facsimile, no. 21.
1590. Symphonia angelica di diversi eccellentissimi musici... ? Antwerp,
P. Phal?se et J. Bell?re, 1590. Ded. same as 1585 edition.
RISM 159017 -> 15948, 161112, 16298. Vogel/Einstein 15902.
Note: Contents altered slightly from the 1585 edition: four madrigals
removed, five new ones added.
1590. Bicinia, sive cantiones suavissimae duarum vocum, tarn divinae musi

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ces tyronibus, quam eiusdem artis peritioribus magno usui futurae, nee
non & quibusuis instrumentis accommodatae... ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se
etj. Bell?re, 1590.
Note: Includes four madrigals a 2, one by Pevernage in three partes and
three by Verdonck. Cf. Bicinia, sive cantiones, 1609 below for later edition.
1591. II lauro verde madrigali a sei voci, composti di diversi eccellentissimi
musici. Aggiontovi di pi? doi madrigali ? otto voci, Tuno d'Alessandro
Striggio, & di Gio. Gabrieli. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se et J. Bell?re, 1591. No
dedication.
Source: = RISM 158310 (see Section VI, no. 1) but with two compositions a 8
added.
1591. Melodia olympica di diversi eccellentissimi musici a IIII. V. VI. et VIII.
voci, nuovamente raccolta da Pietro Philippi inglese, et data in luce. ?
Antwerp, P. Phal?se et J. Bell?re, 1591. Ded. to Giulio Balbani, by Philips.
RISM 159110 -> 15947,161111,16303. Vogel/Einstein 159T.
Note: Corpus of Early Music in Facsimile, no. 22.
1593. Harmon?a celeste di diversi eccellentissimi musici ... Nuovamente
raccolta per Andrea Pevernage et data in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se et
J. Bell?re, 1593.
RISM 15934 -> 16058(?), 161412,162814. Vogel/Einstein 15931.
Note: Contents altered slightly from 1583 edition: six madrigals removed,
eight new ones added.
1595. II trionfo di dori descritto da diversi, et posto in m?sica, da altretanti
autori. A sei voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1595.
RISM 15952 -> reprinted by Phal?se in 15969,16016,161411,162812.
Source: RISM 159211. Vogel/Einstein 15922. (See Section VI, no. 8).
Note: Vogel/Einstein does not list the 1595 Antwerp print by Phal?se.
1595. M?sica divina ...
Note: Same as the 1583 edition, though one piece by Monte is exchanged
for another by the same composer.
1596. Madrigali a otto voci. Di diversi eccellenti et famosi autori. Con alcuni
dialoghi, et echo, per cantar et sonar ? due chori. Novamente raccolti
et dati in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1596. Ded. to Francisco Sweerts il
Giovane, by Phal?se.
RISM 15968 -> 159712. Vogel/Einstein 15961.

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1596. Paradiso musicale di madrigali et canzoni a cinque voci, di diversi

eccellentissimi autori. Novamente raccolti da P. Phalesio et posti in
luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1596. Ded. to Bald, de Smidt, by Phal?se.
1597. II vago arboreto di madrigali et canzoni a quattro voci, di diversi eccel
lentissimi autori. Novamente raccolti et posti in luce. ? Antwerp, P.
Phal?se, 1597. Ded. to Carole van Hove, by Phal?se.
RISM 159715 -? 162012. Vogel/Einstein 15974.
Note: Source for much of the contents: RISM 15955 (see Section VI, no. 10).
Modern edition, see Stephen Thomson Moore, "Il vago arboreto (Antwerp,
1597): An Edition of and Commentary on the Unpublished Works"
(D.M.A. diss., Stanford University, 1982); also modern fasimile in Corpus
of Early Music in Facsimile, no. 23.
1600. De floridi virtuosi d'ltalia madrigali a cinque voci ridotti in un corpo.
Nuovamente con ogni diligentia stampati & seguendo Pordine de suoi
toni posti in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1600. Ded. to Gio. Francesco de
Ceville.
Source: Three books published in Venice by Vincenzo & Amadino under
the same tide (see Section VI, nos. 2, 3, & 4).
Note: Phal?se dropped seven madrigals and added nine not included in Vin
cenzo and Amadino's prints, eight by Italians and one by Cornelis Ver
donck.
1601. Ghirlanda di madrigali a sei voci, di diversi eccellentissimi autori de
nostri tempi. Raccolta di giardini di fiori odoriferi musicali. Nuova
mente posta in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1601. Ded. to Giovanni le
Blon, by Phal?se.
1604. Madrigali pastorali a sei voci descritti da diversi et posti in m?sica da
altri tanti autori di novo stampati. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1604. No dedi
cation.
Source: = RISM 15946 -> 16007. (See Section VI, no. 9).
1604. Fiori musicali a tre voci de diversi eccelentiss. auttori. Di novo stampati
& seguendo Pordine de suoi toni posti in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se,
1604. No dedication.
RISM 160413 -> 161810.
Source: = RISM 15876 and 158820. (See Section VI, nos. 5 & 6).

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1605. Nervi d'Orfeo, di eccellentiss. autori a cinque et sei voci: nuovamente

con ogni diligentia raccolti, & seguendo l'ordine de suoi toni posti in
luce. ? Leiden, H. L. de' Haestens, 1605. Ded. "Alli amatori della m?sica,"
Jacopo Graswinkel.
1607. Canzonette alia romana de diversi eccellentissimi musici romani a tre
voci. Nuovamente raccolte & date in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1607.

Source: = RISM 16018. (See Section VI, no. 11).
1609. Bicinia sive cantiones suavissimae duarum vocum ... ? Antwerp,
P. Phal?se, 1609.
Note: New edition of 159019, now with only three madrigals, omitting one
by Verdonck.
1610. Novi frutti musicali madrigali a cinque voci di diversi eccellentissimi
musici novamente augmentad et dati in luce. ? Antwerp, Phal?se, 1610.
Ded. to Guillielmo Stanlei, Cavalliero inglese.
Source: = RISM 159015 (see Section VI, no. 7) but with one piece missing
and 18 added, including one by Sweelinck and two by Verdonck.
1613. II Parnasso, madrigali de diversi eccellentissimi musici a sei voci nuova
mente raccolti & dati in luce. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1613. Ded. to
Guglielmo de Sypesteyn, Middelburg, Zeeland, by Samuele Dunio.
1616. Il Helicone, madrigale de diversi eccellentissimi musici a cinque voci
novamente raccolti. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1616. Ded. to Antonio Godin,
Abraham and Giacomo Drogbrodio, Middelburg, Zeeland, by Samuele
Dunio.
II. Madrigal Books (and Mixed Genre Prints Containing Madrigals) by Indi
vidual Netherlands Composers Printed in Antwerp and Other Cities of the
Low Countries.
NB: Lassus is included here along with the local Netherlandish composers,
even though he spent most of his life outside the Low Countries.

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1555. Orlande de Lassus. Le quatoirsiesme livre a quatre parties contenant

dixhuyct chansons italiennes, six chansons francoixes, & six motetz
faictz (a la nouvelle composition d'aucuns d'Italie) par Rolande di Las
sus nouvellement imprime ... ? Antwerp, T. Susato* 1555.
RISM 155519. NV 1387.
= 155529 below.
Note: This volume was reissued the same year with an Italian tide as given
below and a dedication to Stefano Gentile. Later editions were issued by
Susato in 1558 (dated 1555 on purpose but printed probably ca. 1558) and
1560 (RISM 15604). See Kristine Forney, "Orlando di Lasso's 'Opus 1': The
Making and Marketing of a Renaissance Music Book," Revue belge de
musicologie, 39-40, pp. 33-60.
Orlande de Lassus. II primo libro dovesi contengono madrigali, vila
nesche, canzoni francesi e motetti a quattro voci, nuovamente
impressi. ? Antwerp, T. Susato, 1555. Ded. to Stefano Gentile, 13 V1555.
RISM 155529 -> 15604. NV 1387 bis.
= 155519 above.
1558. Hubert Waelrant. II primo libro de madrigali & canzoni francezi a cin
que voci. ? Antwerp, H. Waelrant & J. de Laet, 1558. Ded. to Bartholomeo
Doria Invrea.
NV 2958.
Note: Nine madrigals (all in two partes), eleven chansons.
1560. Orlande de Lassus. Tiers livre de chansons a 4,5, & 6 parties.?Louvain,
Pierre Phal?se, 1560.
Note: Contains one madrigal a 4, "In dubbio di stato mio," which is missing
from later reprints.
1563. Severin Cornet. Canzoni napolitane a quattro voci, nuovamente stam
pati & dati in luce. ? Antwerp, Jan de Laet, 1563. Ded. to Giuseppe d'Oria.
NV619.
1564. Orlande de Lassus. Quatriesme livre des chansons a 4 & 5 parties. ?
Louvain, Pierre Phal?se, 1564.
NV1391
Note: Contains two madrigals a 4 and two a 5, all by Lassus.
1568. No? Faignient. Chansons, madrigales & motetz a quatre, cinq & six
parties, nouvellement compos?es ... ? Antwerp, the widow of Jan de
Laet, 1568. Ded. to Gon?ali Garcia.
NV903.
Note: Contains five madrigals a 4 and five a 5.

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[1568. No? Faignient. Chansons, madrigals and motets a 3. ? Antwerp,

Waelrant & Laet, 1568.]
Note: For evidence of the existence of this print, see Robert L. Weaver, A
Descriptive Catalog of the Music. Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de
Laet (Warren, Mich., 1994), no. 33.
[1569. No? Faignient. Motetti e madrigali a quattro, cincque e sei voci. ?
Antwerp, Jan de Laet, 1569.]
Note: Alphonse Goovaerts, Histoire et bibliographie de la typographie musi
cale dans les pays-bas (Antwerp, 1880), p. 241, mentions this work, stating
that it was probably published by Jan de Laet. Its location today is unknown
and Weaver doubts that it ever existed. See Weaver, A Descriptive Catalog of
the Music Printed by Hubert Waelrant and Jan de Laet, no. 35.
1569. Jean de Castro. II primo libro, di madrigali, canzoni & motetti a tre
voci. ? Antwerp, to the widow of Jan de Laet, 1569. Ded. to Giovanni
Fiesco.
NV505.
Note: Contains 12 madrigals, 13 chansons, 8 motets.
1570. Premier livre des chansons a quatre et cincq parties, compos?es par
Orlando di Lassus, Cyprian de Rore, et de nouveau plus correctement
que cy devant imprim?es & emend?es. ? Louvain: Pierre Phal?se, 1570.
NV 1479.
Note: Contains two madrigals of Cipriano de Rore.
1570. Second livre des chansons a quatre & cinq parties compos?es par
Orlando di Lassus, Cyprian de Rore, & Philippe de mons, de nouveau
corrig?es & emend?es. ? Louvain, P. Phal?se & Antwerp, J. Bell?re, 1570.
RISM 15706. NV 1481.
Note: Contains 15 Italian pieces: 13 by Lassus (including the six villanelle
from 1555), one each by Rore & Monte.
1570. Jean de Castro. Chansons et madrigales ? quatre parties, convenables
tant ? la voix comme ? touttes sortes d'instrumens. ? Louvain,
P. Phal?se, 1570. Ded. to Gerardo a Grousbeck, Bishop of Li?ge.
NV508.
Note: Contains 11 madrigals.
1581. Severin Cornet. Madrigali a cincque, 6,7, et 8 voci. ? Antwerp, C. Plan
tin, 1581. Ded. to Gerardo de Craen, "Maestro, Cittidino, e Mercante d?lia
citt?."
RISM 15817. NV 619.
Note: includes 23 by Cornet, one by Corneille Verdonck.

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1582. Orlande de Lassus. Libro de villanelle, moresche, et altre canzoni a 4.5.

6. & 8 voci. - Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1582.
NV 1478.
= 1581, Paris, A. LeRoy & R. Ballard.
1582. Jean de Castro. Chansons, madrigaux et motetz ? trois parties par M.
Jean de Castro. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1582. No dedication.
NV506.
Note: This print combines the contents of II primo libro ...a 3 (1569) above
the contents of Castro's Second livre de chansons, madrigaux et motetz a
trois parties printed in 1580 by Le Roy and Ballard in Paris (NV 507); 11 of
the 13 chansons from II primo libro were omitted, however.
1588. Jean de Castro. Madrigali... Con doi canzoni francese a sei voci... A
tre voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1588. Ded. to Cesare Homodei
de Milano, "Colonia Agrippina, Anversa, 20 VIII1588." [Colonia Agripp
ina refers to Cologne.]
NV509.
1588. Rinaldo del Mel. Madrigali ... a sei voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se &
J. Bell?re, 1588. Ded. to "Ernesto Duca dell'Alta et Bassa Baviera, et Conte
del Rheno, etc."
NV726.
Note: Most of this volume was reprinted in Venice in 1593 as // Secondo
Libro di Madrigali a 6 voci novamente composti e date in luce and bearing a
new dedication.
1589. Jan Jacob van Turnhout. Madrigali a sei voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se &
J. Bell?re, 1589. Ded. to Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza,
Brussels.
NV 2775.
1592. Orlande de Lassus. La fleur des chansons d'Orlande de Lassus, prince
des musiciens de nostre temps. Contenant un recueil de ses chansons
francoises & italiennes a quatre, cine, six & huit parties, accomod?es
tant aux instruments comme a la voix: toutes mises en ordree selon
leurs tons. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1592.
RISM 15929 -> 15967, 1604, 1612, 1629; for last three reprints cf. RISM,
Einzeldrucke vor 1800, "Lassus." NV 1399.
Note: 77 pieces by Lassus, one by Rore; eight of those by Lassus have
Italian texts: six are the villanesche from Le quatoirsieme livre (1555).

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1594. Jean Desquesnes. Madrigali di Giovan Desquennes II primo libro a

cinque voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1594. Ded. to Ernst, Arch
duke of Austria.
NV816.
1596. Peter Philips. II primo libro de madrigali a sei voci. ? Antwerp,
P. Phal?se, 1596.
Ded. to Alessandro di Giunta, Anversa, 8 11596.
NV2209
-> 1604 "... nuovamente ristampati & corretti"; 1628.
1598. Peter Philips. Madrigali a otto voci. - Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1598. Ded.
to Guillielmo Stanlei, "Cavalliero inglese, e Collonello d'un Reggimento
Inglesi et Walloni, Anversa, 24 XI1598."
NV 2213.
-> 1599,1615
1600. Cornelis Schuyt. Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci. ? Leiden,
"nella stampa del Plantino, apresso Christoforo Rafelengio," 1600. Ded. to
"Pretore Consuli e Senato d?lia Citt? di Leyda."
NV 2591.
[1603. Jean Desquesnes. Il secondo libro de madrigali a cinque voci. ?
Antwerp, P. Phal?se ?, 1603.]
Note: Cf. The New Grove 5: 395.
1603. Peter Philips. Il secondo libro de madrigali a sei voci.?Antwerp, P. Pha
l?se, 1603. Ded. to "Alberto et Isabella d'Austria, Anversa, 10 XI1603."
NV 2211.
-U615
1603. Cornelis Schuyt. Hollandsche madrigalen met vijf, ses, end acht stem
men. ? Leiden, "in de Plantijnsche druckerije, op kosten van Jan Jansz.
Oders," 1603.
NV 2590.
1603. Cornelis Verdonck. Madrigali novamente a sei voci posti in luce. ?
Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1603. Ded. to "Giovanni de Cordes, Anversa, 8 VIII
1603."
NV 2893.
1603. J[an] Vredemann. M?sica miscella o mescalanza di madrigali, canzoni
e villanelle a 4 & 5 voci. ? Franeker, G. van den Rade [1603].
-> Leeuwarden, 1630
Note: This entry relies on a listing in Plantin's Catalogus francfurtiensis
1597 -1618 in the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Plantin's note (p. 187), "In vere

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1603," reads "Franikerae, Radaeus. M?sica Miscella Madrigali etc. di Gia

como Vredeman, 4, 5 v." Goovaerts, Typographie musicale dans les Pays
bas, 293, gives the location as Leeuwarden, a city about 15 km. east of Fra
neker. Gilles van den Rade was active in Franeker 1586-1611. He had
worked as a printer in Antwerp 1571 - 86, but he left after Farnese took over
the city and thus may have been a Protestant. Among his varied publications
were apparently only two books of music. Cf. Anne Rouzet, Dictionnaire
des imprimeurs, libraires et ?diteurs belges des XVe et XVIe si?cles (Brussels:
Niewkoop, 1975). No copy is extant.
1607. Jean de Castro. Madrigali a 3 voci. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1607. No dedi
cation.
NV 510.
-U620
Note: Reprint of 1588 with the two chansons a 6 omitted.
[1610. ? J. Fabreus (Favereus). Canzoni alia napolitana a sei voci. ? Douai, J.
Bogaerd, 1610.]
Source: Susan Bain, Music Printing in the Low Countries in the Sixteenth
Century (Ph.D. diss., U. of Cambridge, 1974), p. 121. Bain cites J. A. Stell
feld, "Het muziekhistorisch belang der catalogi en Inventarissen van het
Plantinsch Archief," Vlaams Jaarboek voor muziekgeschiedenis, Jrg. H-HI
(1940-41), pp. 5-50; but Stellfeld's entry for 1610 in the table of Bogard
music prints lists only "Chansons" by Fabreus.
The bibliography of works published by the Bogard firm in G. Persoons,
"Joannes I Bogardus, Jean II Bogard en Pierre Bogard als muziekdrukkers te
Douai van 1574 tot 1633 en hun betrekkingen met de Officina Plantiniana,"
De gulden Passer 66 - 67 (1988 - 89), 613 - 666, lists the item as "Chansons de
Jodoco Fabreo."
1611. Cornelis Schuyt. Hymeneo overo madrigali nuptiali et altri amorosi a
sei voci con un echo doppio a dodeci. ? Leiden, "nella stampa de' Rafe
lengi," 1611. Ded. to "Giacomo di Duvenvoorde, Signor d'Opdam, Leida,
8 V 1611."
NV 2590.
1612. Jan Sweelinck. Rimes fran?oises et italiennes, mises en musique, ? deux
et ? trois parties, avec une Chanson ? quatre. ? Leiden, "imprimerie
plantinienne de Raphelengius," 1612. Ded. to "Jean Lodovicq Calandrini,
Amstrelredam, 20 VI1611."
NV 2694.

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III. Madrigal Books by Netherlands Composers Printed Outside the Nether

lands.
1565. Hubert Waelrant. Le canzon napolitane a quattro voci di novo stam

pate. ? Venice, G. Scotto, 1565.
NV 2957.
Note: This volume contains 34 napolitane, 17 of which also appear in the
Winchester partbooks (Winchester College Library MS 153).
1580. Jean de Castro. Second livre de chansons, madrigalz et motetz ? trois
parties. - Paris, A. le Roy & R. Ballard, 1580. Ded. to De la Porte.
NV507.
Note: Contents of this volume reprinted and combined with IIprimo libro
... a 3 by Phal?se in 1582.
1591. Jean de Castro. Rose fresche. Madrigali novi... a tre voci.?Venice, Ric
ciardo Amadino, 1591. Ded. to Herman Van Wedich "de Colonia Agripp
ina." [Colonia Agrippina refers to Cologne.]
NV511.
1594. Jean de Castro. Scelta de pi? vaghi madrigali a cinque voci. ? Venice,
Ricciardo Amadino, 1594. Ded. to "Marc' Antonio Gani, Colonia Agrippina."
NV512.
1597. Jan Tollius. Madrigali a sei voci. ? Heidelberg, H. Commelin, 1597. Dedi
cated to "?nclito Amsterdamensium Musicorum Collegio."
NV 2726.
IV. Madrigal Books of Italian Composers and Other Non-Netherlanders

Printed or Reprinted in Antwerp.
Note: Volumes that were published earlier in a different city are marked with an
asterisk; the date, place, and publisher of the earlier edition are given after the
= sign. Dates for reprints are given only for reprints issued in Antwerp or other
cities in the Low Countries.
1585. Claude Le Jeune. Livre de Melanges de C. Le Jeune. ? Christopher

Plantin, 1585.
Includes 27 French chansons a 4-8,34 Italian-textedpieces a 4-6, primar
ily villanelle, and seven Latin motets a 5, 6, 8, & 10.
NV 1495.

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1588. Bernardino Mosto. Madrigali a 5 voci. - P. Phal?se & J. Bell?re, 1588.

Ded. to Ernst, Duke of Bavaria, Elector of Cologne.
NV 1976.
"1593. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali a 5 voci ridotti in un corpo. ? P. Phal?se &
J. Bell?re, 1593. Ded. by Phal?se to Gerarde de Homes, Baron of Bassigny.
NV 1627. = Books I-V in one volume: 1580,1581,1582,1584 & 1585. All
were printed in Venice: I-TV, Angelo Gardano; V, Girolamo Scotto; and
reprinted by other Venetian printers.
-U609
1594. Giovanni Battista Galeno. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se &
J. Bell?re, 1594. Ded. to Ernst, Archduke of Austria.
NV 1052.
"1594. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali a 6 voci in un corpo ridotti. ? P. Phal?se &
J. Bell?re, 1594. Ded. by Phal?se to Eduardo, Ferdinando, & Consalvo
Ximenez, "Mercanti d'Anversa."
RISM 159414, NV 1670. = Bks. I-V, 6 vv.: 1581,1584,1585,1587 & 1591.
All printed in Venice: I, II & V, Angelo Gardano; HI, Girolamo Scotto; IV,
Ricciardo Amadino; and reprinted by other Venetian printers.
-M610
Note: Contains one madrigal by A. Bicci along with 77 by Marenzio. One
madrigal from Book I was omitted and one madrigal a 10 was added.
"1596. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi. Balletti a 5 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1596.
NV 1079. = 1591, Venice, Ricciardo Amadino.
-> 1601,1605,1612,1617,1620,1624,1628,1631,1637,1640; Bogard, Douai,
1627; Amsterdam, Cloppenburch, 1641.
'1598. Orazio Vecchi. Convito musicale... madrigali e canzonetti a 3.5.6.7.
& 8 voci. - P. Phal?se & the widow of J. Bell?re, 1598.
NV 2824. = 1597, Venice, Angelo Gardano.
'1599. Felice Anerio. Madrigali a 6 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1599.
"1600. Agostino Agazzari. Madrigali harmoniosi e dilettevole a 6 voci. ?
P. Phal?se, 1600. Ded. to Pietro le Maire by Phal?se.
NV 20. = 1596, Venice, Angelo Gardano.
"1600. Giovanni de Macque. Madrigaletti et canzonetti [sic] napolitane a 6
voci. - P. Phal?se, 1600.
NV 1547. = Bks. I and II combined: 1581, 1582, Venice, Ang. Gardano.
"1600. Giovanni Battista Mosto. Madrigali a 6 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1600.
NV 1981. = 1595, Venice, Ang. Gardano.

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"1602. Agostino Agazzari. Madrigali a 5 voci libro I con un dialogo ? sei, &
un pastorale ? 8. ? P. Phal?se, 1602. Ded. to Pietro Le Maire, by Phal?se.
"1602. Giulio Eremita [Heremita]. Madrigali a 6 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se,
1602. Ded. to Girolamo Scholier, by Phal?se.
NV 895. = 1584, Ferrara, Vittorio Baldini.
"1602. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi. Balletti a 3 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1602.
-> 1606,1617,1624,1631.
"1604. Benedetto Pallavicino. Madrigali a 5 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1604.
NV 2122. = Pallavicino's Bk. II, selections (1584, Venice, Ang. Gardano),
Bk. IV complete (1588, Ang. Gardano), and Bk. V, all but one piece (1593,
Venice, Giacomo Vincenzi) combined into one volume.
*1606. Ruggiero Giovanelli. Madrigali a 5 voci... in un corpo ridotto. ?
P. Phal?se, 1606. Ded. to Gaspare Duarte.
NV 1227. = Bks. HE: 1586,1593 & 1599, all Venice, Ang. Gardano.
?(1606. Benedetto Pallavicino. Madrigali a 6 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se, 1606.
Ded. to John of Austria, by Phal?se.
NV 2133. = 1587, Venice, Giacomo Vincenti.
"1607. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali a 4 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se, 1607.
NV 1594. = 1585, Rome, Alessandro Gardano.
Note: Also earlier reprints in Nuremberg, 1593, and Paris, 1598.
1608. Girolamo Frescobaldi. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se, 1608.
Ded. to Guido Bentivoglio, "arcivescovo di Rodi, nuntio della sede apost?
lica in Fiandra."
NV 1023.
"1609. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali a 5 voci ... libro VI-IX. ? P. Phal?se,
1609.
NV 1644. = Bks. VI-IX, 5 vv.: 1594,1595,1598,1599. All printed in Venice
and reprinted by various printers in Venice.
-M632
"1610. Felice Anerio. Canzonette a 4 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1610.
NV 59. = 1586, Venice, G. Vincenti & R. Amadino.
"1610. Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi. Concenti musicali a 8 voci. ? P. Phal?se,
1610.
NV 1110, RISM 161015. = 1604, Venice, R. Amadino.
Note: Besides the 17 pieces by Gastoldi, this contains one balletto each by
B. Pallavicino and A. Taroni.

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"1610. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali a 6 voci, libro VI. ? P. Phal?se, 1610.

NV 1674. = 1595.
"1610. Luca Marenzio. Madrigali spirituali a 5 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1610.
NV 1679. = 1584, Rome, Alessandro Gardano.
"1610. Luca Marenzio. Villanelle et canzonette alia napolitane a tre voci...
libro I-V. - Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1610.
NV 11708. = Bks. I-V: 1584,1585,1585,1587,1587. All were printed and
reprinted in Venice by various publishers.
"1611. Oratio Vecchi. Canzonette a 4 voci con aggiunta di altre a 5.4. et 3 voci
... in un corpo ridotto. ? P. Phal?se, 1611.
NV 2819. = Canzonette, Books I-IV (1578?-90, Venice, Ang. Gardano)
combined in one volume with some additional canzone a 3, 4, and 5.
Reprint of a compilation issued by Catherine Gerlach in 1593 and again by
Kaufmann in 1600/1601. (NV 2818).
"1612. Benedetto Pallavicino. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro VI. ? P. Phal?se, 1612.
"1613. Benedetto Pallavicino. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro VII.?P. Phal?se, 1613.
NV 2129. = 1604, Venice, R. Amadino.
"1615. Giovanni Croce. Madrigali a 5 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1615.
NV 667. =1585, Venice, Ang. Gardano.
"1615. Claudio Monteverdi. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro III [-V]. ? P. Phal?se,
1615.
NV 1912,1919,1929. = Bks. ffl-V: 1592,1603,1605, all Venice, R. Amadino.
Three volumes printed individually by Phal?se.
"1618. Giovanni Croce. Madrigali a 6 voci. ? P. Phal?se, 1618. Ded. by Phal?se
to Giovanni d'Andelev, "Consigliero di Wratislao, Conte di Furstenberg."
NV 671. = 1590, Venice, G. Vincent!
"1618. Salamone Rossi. Madrigali a 5 voci... libro I. ? P. Phal?se, 1618.
NV 2449. = 1600, Venice, R. Amadino.
Note: Alphonse Goovaerts, Histoire et bibliographie de la typographie musi
cale dans les Pays-bas (Antwerp: 1880), p. 284, incorrectly lists a 1598 print
of this volume by Phal?se.
1620. Richard Dering. Canzonette a 3 voci. Con il basso continuo. ? P. Pha
l?se, 1620. Ded. to Giorgio Gagie, "Cava?ero inglese, Brussels 2IV1620."
NV814.
1620. Richard Dering. Canzonette a 4 voci. Con il basso continuo. ? P. Pha
l?se, 1620. Ded. to Thomas Morgan, "Cavallero inglese."
NV815.

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V. Netherlandish Lutebooks Containing Madrigals.
Note: The following volumes of lute music contain Italian-texted pieces, along
with chansons, motets, fantasias, and dances for lute. For most of the Italian pie
ces (as well as for the other intabulated vocal pieces), two or more melodic lines
from the original partsong are given in mensural notatation with text, while the
others are produced by the lute accompaniment in tablature. Many other collec
tions of music for lute, guitar, or cittern published in the Low Countries con
tained intabulated madrigals and napolitane, but in purely instrumental arrange
ments.
1553. Horti musarum secunda pars, continens selectissima quaedam ac

iucundissima carmina testudine simul et voce humana, vel alterius ins
trumenti Musici admmiculo modulanda.... ? Louvain, P. Phal?se, 1553.
Note: Contains one Italian song for solo voice and lute, "Si pur te guardo,"
by Rogier Pathie.
BrownIM 1553]0. RISM 155333
1584. Emanuel Adriaensen. Pratum musicum longe amoenissimum, cuius
spatiosissimo, eoque iucundissio ambitu, (praeter varii generis auto
mata seu phantasias) comprehenduntur_Omnia ad testudinis tabu
laturam f ideliter redactam, per... Emanuelem Hadrianium.... Opus
novum. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1584.
BrownIM 15846. RISM 158412
1592. Emanuel Adriaensen. Novum pratum musicum longo amoenissimum,
cujus spatiosissimo, eique ucundissimo ambitu (praeter varii generis
aytomata, seu phantasias) commprehenduntur selectissimi diverso
rum autorum et idiomatum madrigales, cantiones, & moduli 4.5 & 6
vocum .... Omnia ad testudinis tabulaturam f ideliter redacta, per...
Emanuelem Hadrianum antverpiensem .... Opus plane novum, nee
hactenus editum. ? Antwerp, P. Phal?se, 1592.
BrownIM 15926. RISM 159222
1600. Emanuel Adriaensen. Pratum musicum longe amoenissimum ... .
Selectissimi diversorum autorum et idiomatum madrigales, et cantio
nes 4.5.6. vocum. Balletti 5 vocum. Cantiones trium vocum... variae
... modulationes. Omnis generis chorae_Omnia ad testudinis tabu
laturam f ideliter redacta, per id genus musices... Emanuelem Hadria
num, anverpiensem .... Editio nova priori locupletior. ? Antwerp,
P. Phal?se, 1600.
RISM 160018

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1601. Joachim van den Hove. Florida, sive cantiones, ? quamplurimis praes
tantissiimorum nostri aevi musicorum libris selectae. Ad testudinis
usum accomodatae ... I. van Hove, antverpiani.... ? Utrecht, S. de
Roy and J. G. de Rhenen, 1601.
RISM 160118
1612. Joachim van den Hove. Delitiae musicae, sive cantiones, e quam pluri
mus praestantissimorum nostri aevi musicorum libris selectae. Ad tes
tudinis usum accommodatae, opera atque industria Ioachimi van den
Hove antverpiani. ? Utrecht, S. de Roy and J. G. de Rhenen, 1612.
RISM 161218
VI. Italian Prints of Madrigal Anthologies Reprinted by Phal?se With or

Without Alteration (see Section I above).
1. II lauro verde, madrigali a sei voci di diversi autori. ? Ferrara, Vincenzo

Baldini, 1583.
RISM 158310 -> 15932, Venice, Angelo Gardano. Vogel/Einstein 15833.
2. De floridi virtuosi d'ltalia, il secondo libro de madrigali ? cinque voci_
? Venice, Giacomo Vincenzi & Ricciardo Amadino, 1585.
3. De floridi virtuosi d'ltalia, il terzo libro de madrigali ? cinque voci... ?
Venice, G. Vincenzi & R. Amadino, 1586.
4. De floridi virtuosi d'ltalia, il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci, nova
mente ristampato ... ? Venice, G. Vincenzi & R. Amadino, 1586.
Note: New edition of an original 1583 print with three pieces dropped. Pha
l?se used this edition.
5. Fiori musicali de diversi auttori a tre voci, libro primo .... ? Venice,
G. Vincenzi, 1587.
RISM 15876 -> 159018. Vogel/Einstein 15909. Vogel/Einstein lists no copy of
the first edition.
6. Fiori musicali di diversi auttori a tre voci, libro secondo ... ? Venice,
G. Vincenzi, 1588.
RISM 158820 -> 159810. Vogel/Einstein 158811 and 15985.
Note: The 1598 edition, which Phal?se used, has one additional piece.

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7. Novi frutti musicali madrigali a cinque voci, di diversi eccellentissimi

musici. ? Venice, G. Vincenti, 1590.
8. Il trionfo di dori, descritto da diversi, et posto in m?sica, ? sei voci, da
altretanti autori. ? Venice, Angelo Gardano, 1592.
RISM 159211 -> 15952,15969,159910,16016,161411,162812. Vogel/Einstein 15922.
9. Madrigali pastorali, descritti da diversi, et posti in m?sica da altri
tanti autori ? sei voci intitolati il bonbacio. ? Venice, Ang. Gardano,
1594.
RISM 15946 -> 16007. Vogel/Einstein 15954 & 16001.
10. Di XII autori vaghi e dilettevoli madrigali a quattro voci. ? Venice,
R. Amadini, 1595.
Note: II vago arboretto (Antwerp, 1597) (see Section I) draws from this
collection.
11. Canzonette alia romana de diversi eccellentiss. musici romani a tre voci,
novamente composte, et date in luce. ? Venice, Ang. Gardano, 1601.
Note: This print brings together in one volume the contents of three canzo
netta anthologies issued in 1591 by G. Vincenti under the tide Canzonette
per cantar et sonar di liuto a tre voci, libro 1,2, & 3 (cf. Vogel/Einstein 15917,
15918, 15919).
Northf ield, MN

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madrigal or to the cultural basis of its popularity.3

4 M?sica divina was reprinted in 1588,1591,1595,1606,1614,1623, and 1634; Har

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chansons italiennes, six chansons francoixes, &six motetz? A manuscript copied in

7 Bologna MS Q26, although primarily a chansonnier, contains one anonymous

8 See my edition of Waelrant's volume in Recent Researches in the Music of the

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An essential ingredient for any historical artistic phenomenon is the broader

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publishing as well. The Italian historian Lodovico Guicciardini, in his Descrittione

As many towns as look at me sharply with sinister eye,

15 Quoted in Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Brueghel, p. 43.

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18 The term "merchant" (Dutch "coopman" or French "marchand") applied both to

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19 From Thomas Danett's abridged English translation of Guicciardini, Descrittione

20 Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Brueghel, p. 67.

22 On the Italian trading and banking community in Antwerp, particularly in the

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25 See Goris, Etude sur les colonies marchandes meridionales, p. 38.

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to the North; but many Catholics emigrated as well. Nevertheless, although

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important was its publishing industry. Many publishers were attracted to

30 Letter of 9 Oct. 1574, Correspondence de Christophe Plantin, ed. M. Rooses and

31 See J.-A. Stellfeld, Bibliographie des ?ditions musicales Plantiniennes (Brussels,

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Antwerp was an important center of music-making as well, though on the

32 An excellent overview of musical life in sixteenth-century Antwerp can be found

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was by no means left to professionals. Guicciardini observes of the people of the

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An examination of the contents of these anthologies shows that Phal?se and

40 The Chansons et madrigales ? 4 (Louvain, 1570) and the Chansons, madrigaux et

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Tis the joy of my eyes and the delight of my ears,

43 Bain, "Phal?se," The New Grove 14: 618.

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48 Guicciardini, Descrittione, p. 29.

50 Francis Sweertius, "Pevernage," Athenae belgicae (Antwerp, 1628).

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that he was "renowned in music and, if we believe Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck,

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58 See Guido Persoons, "Orlandus Lassus in Antwerpen (1554 -1556)," in Orlandus

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Many powerful merchants, as youngsters, had been instilled with an interest

60 Murray, Antwerp in the Age of Plantin and Breughel, p. 98.

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Several of the dedicatees are, of course, political figures or prominent eccle

61 Colonel William Stanley, the dedicatee of Philips' Madrigali a 8, is identified by

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cloister of the Onze Lieve Vrouwebroeders reads "Placed here by de Cordes"