oa Crosscurrents of Venetian Style and Patronage in Adrian Willaert’s Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde

Adrian Willaert’s madrigal Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde appeared in Rore’s third book of five- voice madrigals in 1548, eleven years before Willaert’s famous Musica nova madrigals were published but well after they were composed. As Martha Feldman has shown, the text of Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde was written by Lelio Capilupi as a tribute to Helena Barozza, likely by commission of her husband, the Venetian patrician and numismatist Antonio Zantani. Antonio and Helena were prominent personages in Venice with multiple ties to the arts and literature. Antonio’s failed attempt to publish madrigals from Musica nova, his documented interactions with Willaert’s circle, and the presence of certain technical affinities I find between the Musica nova madrigals and Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde raise interesting questions concerning the relationship between Zantani and the social context of Musica nova. The essay examines what the madrigals’ similarities and differences tell us about the private and privileged status of Willaert’s Musica nova style in connection with Venetian society and artistic patronage. Overall Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde adopts a more widely approachable style than the serious academic weightiness that characterizes the Musica nova madrigals. Yet it includes a harmonic language and expressive musical codes developed for, and prized by, the elite Venetian cultural circle for which Musica nova was intended, and apparently meant to speak specifically to Zantani, Ne l’amar’e fredd’onde’s probable patron, as well. Some technical features of the intensely private style Willaert cultivated in the Musica nova madrigals later became emblematic of Venetian madrigal style more generally.