ABSTRACT
Near the end of his career, in the mid- to late 1580s, Giaches de Wert composed some elaborate madrigals setting poems from Petrarch's Canzoniere. Wert published his late Petrarch settings in his ninth and tenth books of madrigals of 1588 and 1591, five of them in the first and one more, disjoined from its siblings and more than a little out of place, in the second. The extraordinary length of the Petrarch madrigals is a superficial index of more essential musical features. Such lengthily developed and expressive counterpoint is not characteristic of Wert's late madrigals. Wert's participation in the discourse of Petrarchism thus worked toward the codification of that discourse as a particular constellation of exclusionary gestures. It offered an elite musical language, to some degree divorced from more plebeian languages, designed to match an elite literary idiom. Wert's late Petrarch settings inhabit the cultural arena of domination and exclusivity.
