Giaches de Wert

Francesco was often in France and adjacent areas on military campaigns, and as an adjunct to these adventures he brought musically talented youths back to Italy with him.

Most likely around 1550 he moved to Novellara, a town in what is now the Province of Reggio Emilia, as a musician in the service of a branch of the Gonzagas; a previous suggestion that he may have been in Rome has not been securely established.

The dedications are significant: one is to Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Duke of Sessa, and in the dedicatory preface Wert thanks him for the opportunity to lead his choir.

The most significant came in Augsburg in 1566, where Wert's spectacular ability to improvise counterpoint engendered an offer to join the imperial court in Prague, serving Maximilian II, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Wert, however, had fallen in love with the widowed Tarquinia Molza, the most famous female singer and poet in Italy, who was a lady-in-waiting at the Este court, so he endeavored to spend as much time as possible in Ferrara.

Wert died in 1596 in Mantua, in his house near the ducal palace; his tomb is near to that of his contemporary Francesco Rovigo, in the crypt of Santa Barbara, beneath the church where he worked for many years.

While Wert wrote both sacred and secular music, as well as a handful of instrumental fantasias, his madrigals were by far the most famous portion of his output during his lifetime.

Wert's early style was heavily influenced by Cipriano de Rore, the renowned mid-century madrigalist active at Ferrara.

Wert's first three books show some features typical of Rore's writing, such as chromaticism, word-painting, and, according to Alfred Einstein, an "indifference to everything merely formal and ... [a] striving for the most intense expression.

[2][3][8] Once Wert made the acquaintance of the virtuoso singing ladies of Ferrara, the concerto delle dame, he began to write madrigals for them in an appropriate style – with elaborate parts for three high voices, often containing separate blocks for high and low voices, and the most virtuosic singing required in the topmost part.

In his tenth book of madrigals (1591), six of the compositions may have been intended for a solo singer with instrumental accompaniment, in the manner of the monodies which were one of the forerunners of opera.

One of its madrigals was a setting of Guarini's notorious Tirsi morir volea, an obscene poem that Einstein called "worthless, indeed contemptible", and "...more obscene than the coarsest mascherata, the most suggestive canto carnascialesco, or the most impertinent chanson ... could not be more removed from true poetry"[9] but yet which was the most-often set individual poem of the late sixteenth century.

It portrayed a nymph and a shepherd attempting, by speeding up and slowing down, to achieve simultaneous orgasm, with multiple double entendres on "death" and "dying"; the popularity of this poem was enormous.

[2] The style of his sacred music varies from simple homophony, designed for absolute clarity of textual expression in conformance with the dictates of the Council of Trent (as Mantua was a center of the Counter-Reformation, this was to be expected), to motet settings similar in expressive intensity to his madrigals including passages of surprising chromaticism not unlike that of Gesualdo.