Luca Marenzio - Influence

Influence

Luca Marenzio was hugely influential on composers in Italy, as well as in the rest of Europe, particularly in England, as his madrigals from the 1580s were among the favorites of English composers, who adapted his techniques of word-painting, textural contrast, and chromaticism to an English idiom. As an example, when Nicholas Yonge published his Musica transalpina in 1588 in England, the first collection of Italian madrigals to be published there, Marenzio had the second-largest number of madrigals in the collection (after Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder); and the second collection of Italian madrigals published in England had more works by Marenzio than anyone else. Some English composers who admired Marenzio's expressiveness and learned from him, gradually developing their own style from that seed, included Thomas Morley, John Wilbye, and Thomas Weelkes. Outside of England, Marenzio's madrigals also influenced composers as widely distributed as Hans Leo Hassler in South Germany and Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck in the Low Countries. In 1622 Henry Peacham wrote, "for delicious aires and sweet invention in madrigals, Luca Marenzio excelleth all others." This quote by Peacham illustrates the effect Luca Marenzio had on later development of the madrigal, and the admiration he elicited from other composers from that period. Even in the mid-sixteenth century, Italian and English commentators continued to extol the virtues of Marenzio's compositions; his music appeared in arrangements for viols late in the century; and his music has continued to be sung almost without interruption to the present day by madrigal groups – one of very few Renaissance composers for whom that is true.