ABSTRACT
The study of national traditions in the European Renaissance has special importance for musicians. The complex relationships between Italian and Franco-Flemish composers has always had to be one of our central concerns, given that the history of music in sixteenth-century Europe revolves around the group of northern Europeans who went to Italy to make their fame and fortune and in the process created what we think of now as the central musical language of the Renaissance. Composers in northern Italian courts set a great many different kinds of poetry to music, of course, but many of their greatest virtuoso madrigals offer stylized dramatizations of intense emotional states of mind. The history books tell us that the second half of the sixteenth century was dominated by the virtuoso madrigalists working in the elegant courts of northern Italy, composers like Rore, Wert, Marenzio, Monteverdi and Gesualdo.
