Part-Songs, Madrigals, Chansons
Thomas Weelkes
Thomas Weelkes (baptized October 25, 1576, Elsted, Sussex?, England—died November 30, 1623, London) was an English organist and composer, one of the most important composers of madrigals.
Nothing definite is known of Weelkes’s early life, but his later career suggests that he came from southern England. He may have been the Thomas Wikes who was a chorister at Winchester College from 1583 to 1584, because he was organist there from 1598 to 1601. He was appointed organist of Chichester Cathedral probably late in 1601. He received the degree of bachelor of music at the University of Oxford in 1602, and the following year he married. In his last volume of madrigals (1608) he claimed the title “Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.” From 1609 he was frequently reprimanded at Chichester for a variety of reasons, including bad language and drunkenness.
Nearly 100 of his madrigals survive, of which his finest work is in the two books of madrigals, of five and six parts, respectively, that appeared in 1600. His madrigals have been said to combine the elegance of Luca Marenzio and the firm sense of tonality characteristic of Thomas Morley with the verbal sensitivity of William Byrd.
Weelkes is noted for his word painting, lively rhythms, and highly developed sense of form and structure. He also wrote music for virginal, viol, and organ. His sacred compositions, most of which were written before his appointment at Chichester in 1601, are largely unpublished. Of Weelkes’s 10 Anglican services none survives complete; three that have been reconstructed blend the solo writing of the English verse anthem with the massive antiphonal style of the Venetian school. Twenty-five of Weelkes’s 41 anthems are either complete or restorable; the “full” anthems (with no solo verses) show him deploying large numbers of voices. His range of expression is illustrated by the airy song in the Italian madrigal style, the balletto “On the Plains Fairy Trains” (1598). Examples of the graver manner include the madrigal “O Care, Thou Wilt Despatch Me” (1600), noted for its chromaticism (use of notes outside the basic scale, for effects of colour or intensity), and the massive anthem O Lord, Arise.
The
Madrigal
Madrigals are a form of vocal chamber music that originated in northern Italy during the 14th century, declined and all but disappeared in the 15th, flourished anew in the 16th, and ultimately achieved international status in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Early Madrigals (14th Century)
The origin of the term madrigal is uncertain, but it probably comes from the Latin matricale (meaning “in the mother tongue”; i.e., Italian, not Latin). The 14th-century madrigal is based on a relatively constant poetic form of two or three stanzas of three lines each, with 7 or 11 syllables per line. Musically, it is most often set polyphonically (i.e., more than one voice part) in two parts, with the musical form reflecting the structure of the poem. A typical two-stanza madrigal has an AAB form with both stanzas (AA) being sung to the same music, followed by a one- or two-line coda (B), or concluding phrase, the text of which sums up the sense of the poem.
Florence, where a new style of lyric poetry influenced the madrigalists, produced the greatest madrigal composer of the 14th century, Francesco Landini. His madrigals, along with those of his contemporaries Giovanni da Cascia, Jacopo da Bologna, and others are found in the Squarcialupi Codex, a famous illuminated manuscript.
New Madrigals (16th Century Onwards)
Unlike the 14th-century madrigal, the musical style of the new madrigal was increasingly dictated by the poem. Early in the century the madrigal more closely resembled the simple, homophonic or chordal style of the frottola. But under the influence of the polyphonic style of Franco-Flemish composers working in Italy, it became more contrapuntal, using interwoven melodies; accordingly, the text was less syllabically declaimed. Both of these early styles are represented among the works of the first generation of 16th-century madrigal composers: Costanza Festa, Philippe Verdelot, Jacques Arcadelt, and Adriaan Willaert. Important works by Festa and Verdelot appear in the first printed book of madrigals (Rome, 1530).
Willaert and his pupil Cipriano de Rore (d. 1565) brought the madrigal to a new height of expression through their sensitive handling of text declamation and the introduction of word painting. Emotional words such as “joy,” “anger,” “laugh,” and “cry” were given special musical treatment but not at the expense of continuity. Another Willaert pupil, Andrea Gabrieli, was one of the creators of the Venetian style, in which polychoral effects and brilliant contrasts of musical texture are characteristic. Perhaps the greatest madrigal composer of the 16th century was Luca Marenzio, who brought the madrigal to perfection by achieving a perfect equilibrium between word and music. Later in the century, composers like Don Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa, subjugated the music entirely to the text, leading to excesses that eventually exhausted the genre.
Although the madrigal was popular outside Italy, the only country to develop a strong native tradition was England. In 1588 Nicholas Yonge published Musica Transalpina, a large collection of Italian madrigals in English translation. Thomas Morley, the most popular and Italianate of the Elizabethan madrigalists, assimilated the Italian style and adapted it to English taste, which preferred a lighter mood of poetry and of music. Other English madrigalists include John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes, Thomas Tomkins, and Orlando Gibbons.