Adieu, sweet Amaryllis, madrigal (No. 12, The First Set of English Madrigals)

• Date: 1609
• Composer: John Wilbye
• Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)

Review

Beginning with the presence of Alonso Ferrabosco at court in the 1560s, Elizabethan England carried out a passionate love affair with Italian culture. The entire genre of the English madrigal evolved in emulation for Italian madrigals "Englished." Thus, though light English secular music flourished in a generation of English composers, the techniques, topics, and even often the texts came from Italy, the land of the pope and his hated Roman Catholicism. Somehow the English gentry seemed not to mind.

The blithe and wholesale appropriation of Italian culture may be seen clearly in a piece such as John Wilbye's Adieu, sweet Amaryllis. This four-voiced English madrigal was first published in Wilbye's First Set of Madrigals to 3, 4, 5, and 6 voices as early as 1598; its very text betrays close knowledge of recent Italian fashion, specifically the vogue for setting poetry of Battista Guarini. Italian poet and dramatist Guarini published his most famous work, Il pastor fido, in 1585, and Guarini's pastoral verses quickly became the most popular source for Italian madrigal texts. Guarini's light Arcadian scenes and his simple choruses of lamenting nymphs, shepherds, and lovers appealed to Italian tastes. His characters Amaryllis, Tirsi, and Clorinda rapidly made their way into the mainstream of Italian madrigal composition; Amaryllis herself quickly appears in madrigals of Ferrabosco, de Monte, Pallavicino, d'India, Marenzio, Wert, Monteverdi, and Caccini. It was most likely through Ferrabosco's work that Englishmen such as Wilbye, John Dowland, and William Byrd came to evoke the sad character of Amaryllis.

Despite this deep poetic heritage, Wilbye chose for his Amaryllis text but a brief farewell of six rhymed English verses. Within his simple structure, however, he embeds a rich and graceful musical form. The plaintive G minor opening evokes the musical texture of an English lute song, with repeated solo melodic gestures ("Adieu, adieu") echoed by the lower trio of voices. After a repeat of the opening strain, Wilbye proceeds to a somewhat denser and more chromatic texture to reflect the "heavy tiding" of the lovers' parting; the speaker again falls into repetition on a contrapuntal passage "Yet once again, yet once again, ere that I part." After an apparent close on the major chord, the composer poignantly draws the music out further with a G major codetta, as if the speaker finds himself unable to utter the final "Adieu...." ~ Timothy Dickey, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
A Garland of the Elizabethan	2005
A Treasury of English Madrigals	1988
Dolcissima mia vita
English French and Italian Madrigals	2009
English Madrigals	1993
English Madrigals
English Madrigals
English Madrigals: Sing We At Pleasure
English and Italian Renaissance Madrigals	1999
Flora Gave Me Fairest Flowers: Elizabethan madrigals	2003
Flora Gave Me Fairest Flowers: English Madrigals	1987
Höhepunkte der Chormusik auf fünf Jahrhunderten
If Music Be the Food of Love: Love Songs of the Renaissance & Baroque	1996
La bella Ninfa: European Madrigals ca. 1600	1998
Marien-Liebeslieder	1997
Serious Songs, Sad Faces	2003
The English Madrigal School	1994

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