YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

SELLING THE MADRIGAL:
PIERRE PHALÈSE II AND THE FOUR ‘ANTWERP ANTHOLOGIES’
Susan Lewis Hammond
University of Victoria
Pierre Phalèse II (c. 1550–1629) attempted to woo buyers by including a witty Latin
verse as a preface to his madrigal collection Melodia olympica (Antwerp, 1591). The
Latin verse composed by the northern poet Johannes Gheesdalius appears on folio 1
verso of the Tenore, Basso, and Sesto partbooks. Though not entirely new, it was still
an unusual strategy. In fact, only two other anthologies, compiled by Phalèse’s father,
Pierre the Elder, had included Latin poems as prefaces: Chansons a qvatre parties...
de Jehan de Latre (Louvain, Phalèse I, 1552) and the instrumental collection Hortvlvs
Cytharae (Louvain, Phalèse I, Antwerp, Bellère, 1570). 1 At the start of Phalèse II’s
collection, Gheesdalius’s poem honours the printer himself, Phalèse, and praises the
four madrigal anthologies Musica divina (1583), Harmonia celeste (1583), Symphonia
angelica (1585), and Melodia olympica (1591). Printed in Antwerp, these four
collections are among the earliest volumes of Italian madrigals to appear north of the
Alps. Together they transmit 268 Italian songs by at least 65 different composers of
Italian and northern descent. At the end of the laudatory poem, Gheesdalius’s play on
words transforms the titles of the four anthologies into the authors, commentators,
and performers of the music: Musicus [Musica divina] denotes Theorist, Harmonicus
[Harmonia celeste] implies Composer, Symphoniacusque [Symphonia angelica] a
Performer, and Melodus [Melodia olympica] a Singer. The change in font for the title
words of the four anthologies reinforces the connection (see Figure 1).
Phalèse continued to use Gheesdalius’s poem to promote reprints of the four
anthologies through the seventeenth century. It appears in extant partbooks from
Melodia olympica (1594, 1611, 1630), Harmonia celeste (1614), and Musica divina
(1614, 1623, 1634). In doing so, he encouraged consumers to purchase all four collections
of the madrigals as a set, as Gheesdalius instructs in lines 13–14 of the poem:
‘May the singer buy these four collections in one bundle, which Music tied with a
three-knotted bond.’
This use of Latin verse is an especially clear example of Phalèse’s attempts to
promote the Italian madrigal, a relatively new genre in the northern marketplace. Early
inventories of private, court, and institutional libraries suggest that this strategy met
with some degree of success: several buyers and collectors acquired complete sets of
1 See, respectively, H. VANHULST, Catalogue des éditions de musique publiées à Louvain par Pierre
Phalèse et ses fils, Brussels, 1990, no. 8, pp. 18–19, 353, and no. 148, pp. 162–168, 364. I would like
to thank Jane Bernstein for pointing out these examples.
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