Composers

GIACHES DE WERT (1535-1596)

Flanders

At about the age of nine, Giaches de Wert was brought to Italy to serve as a choirboy in the chapel of Maria di Cardona, Marchesa della Padulla, at Avellino near Naples. He may have been acquired in the Low Countries by the Marchesa’s husband, Don Francesco d’Este, a captain in the service of Charles V, who returned to Naples in 1544. (Orlande de Lassus, from Mons, Hainault, was likewise brought to Italy in 1544, but by Ferrante Gonzaga, a general involved in the same Flemish military campaign.) Wert, who invariably spelled his name “Giaches”, a transliteration of Jacques, was to spend his entire life in Italy. He is recorded at Mantua and Ferrara in the early 1550s (where he would have encountered Cipriano de Rore). From 1556 he was in the service of Count Alfonso Gonzaga at Novellara (where he married), and the Governor of Milan, Consalvo Fernandes di Cordova, Duke of Sessa. In 1565 Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga appointed him maestro di cappella at the newly-constructed Palatine basilica of Santa Barbara, Mantua, and director of the court’s musical establishment. In 1580 he was granted Mantuan citizenship. O primavera, gioventù de l’anno was published in Wert’s L’undecimo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (Venice: Angelo Gardano, 1595) and dedicated to Prince Francesco Gonzaga (1586-1612), Duke Vincenzo’s first-born son and eventual successor; a second “corrected” edition, lacking the original dedication, was issued by Gardano in 1600. The Eleventh Book, signed from Venice on 18 August 1595, was the last to be issued in the composer’s lifetime. On 6 May 1596, according to the Mantuan necrology, he died after fifteen days of fever, aged 60, and was given honorable burial in Santa Barbara.