MADRIGALS. (With) PHILIPS, Peter.

A fascinating collection of four rare Renaissance part books for madrigals in French and Italian, printed in Antwerp by the musical publisher Pierre Phalèse, purchased and bound together by their original owner, including songs in Italian by the noted English composer and organist Peter Philips (c.1560-1628).

Hieronymus van Winge, who appears to have noted individual purchases of separate parts prior to their being bound together, was a canon at the cathedral in Tournai. He came from a wealthy family, and there is evidence of his collecting a wide range of books and prints, including from the Plantin-Moretus press. The book is also evidence of his possible participation in musical gatherings. Madrigal part books were published with all the vocal parts appearing consecutively, which could then be split up and divided among the singers, each receiving all the songs in their own part, as here. Owning a set of single parts such as this would therefore imply participation in a group of singers; it was of course possible for singers to purchase only their own part.

Italian madrigal music was extremely popular in Antwerp, perhaps more so than anywhere else in Europe besides Italy, due in part to the large Genoese merchant population. Il Trionfo di Dori contains music by some of the most significant Italian composers of the time, including Gabrieli, Palestrina, Croce, Anerio, Gastoldi and Striggio. First published 1592, it was dedicated to a prominent Venetian nobleman, Leonardo Sanudo (1544-1607), possibly in honour of Sanudo’s wife, Elisabetta Giustinian, either at the time of their marriage in 1577 or as a later commemoration of the event. She is praised through the alter-ego of Dori, a sea-nymph and daughter of Oceanus, the texts describing an Arcadian pastoral paradise filled with nymphs and satyrs. Due to the rarity of madrigal part books, we have been unable to identify the first partial work, a collection of French madrigals, which contains five ll. supplied in contemporary manuscript, possibly but not certainly by van Winghe himself. Numerous French madrigal books were issued by Phalèse in Antwerp during the 1590s, none apparently corresponding to this; there was also a popular series of Chansons à cinq parties published by the Plantin-Moretus press in the same period.

The Catholic composer and organist Peter Philips trained in the choir of Old St. Paul's Cathedral before leaving England in 1582. In Rome he briefly served Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-89), before being engaged as organist to the English College in Rome. There he met fellow Catholic exile Thomas Paget (c. 1544-90), who employed him as a musician, travelling for several years in Italy, Spain and France, before settling in the Spanish Netherlands. After Paget's death, Philips was employed as organist to the chapel of Albert VII, Archduke of Austria, where he was ordained a Catholic priest and met many of the most famous musicians of the day. He died in Brussels.

Surviving part books are extremely rare, due to their regular use, and most are fragmentary, since they were usually split up. Unrecorded in the US on OCLC; of the three identifiable works, USTC notes only a single copy in the US, at the Newberry, which holds the Philips.