The poetry of Francesco Petrarca has inspired many composers over the centuries. His sonnets and stanzas are highly musical in effect and appeal directly to the imagination.

Petrarch’s muse Laura was his continual and lifelong source of inspiration; his unrequited love for her throughout his life resulted in an ecstasy that reverberates throughout his literary works. The techniques of ornamentation that we have applied follow closely the ways in which melodies were decorated; we have also taken sources from the period that deal explicitly with ornamentation as our basis in this. De Rore’s contemporaries and followers often took his music as a source of inspiration; his most renowned madrigal Ancor che col partire is an excellent example of this.

De Rore took great care, however, that his use of the diminution technique did not affect the comprehension of the words and of the text in general. One of the madrigals is ornamented throughout in a most virtuoso manner and is here performed on the recorder, whilst the harpsichord presents the original vocal parts. For the better comprehension of the text and of Petrarch’s poetry in general, we have chosen to precede each madrigal with a reading of the Italian text by speakers who have full mastery of the subtleties of the language, thereby reinforcing the link between Petrarch’s splendid poetry and de Rore’s setting of it. Such a reading of the text, an artform in itself, also found its place in the project as a whole.

The combination of all of these techniques ensured not only that this cycle of eleven works is presented as an homogeneous whole, but also that the mood of each individual madrigal does not swiftly disappear after three minutes, with the listener now being surrounded by each piece’s musical and expressive frame for a longer period. This cycle when performed a cappella under normal circumstances lasts some thirty minutes; here, under these conditions, it involves almost one hour.