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Thomas Watson. Italian Madrigals Englished (1590). Transcribed and edited by Albert Chatterley. (Musica Britannica, 74.) London: Stainer and Bell, 1999. [Pref. in Eng., Fr., Ger., p. xix-xxi; introd., p. xxiii-xxvii; calendar on the life of Thomas Watson, p. xxviii-xxxiv; the source, p. xxxv-xxxvii; editorial method, p. xxxviii-xxxix; acknowledgments, p. xl; 6 plates, p. xli-xliii; score, p. 1-119; list of sources and abbreviations, p. 120-21; notes on the textual commentary, p. 122; textual commentary, p. 123-25; index of titles, p. 126-27. Cloth. ISMN M-2202-1953-5; ISBN 0-85249-850-0. £76.50.]
Albert Chatterley's edition of the First Sett of Italian Madrigalk Englished, compiled and translated from the Italian by poet Thomas Watson (ca. 1557-1592) and published in 1590 by Thomas East (Este) in London, has much to recommend it. This important anthology, consisting of twenty-eight four-, five-, and six-voice madrigals, twenty-three of which were composed by Luca Marenzio (1553/54-1599), played a significant role in making Italian madrigals accessible to English audiences and musicians (the other madrigals include one each by Girolamo Convcrsi [fl. 1572-1575], Giovanni Maria Nanino [1543/44-1607], and Alessandro Striggio [P1573-1630], and two settings of the original English text "This Sweet and Merry Month of May" by William Byrd [ca. 1540-1623]). As Chatterley notes in the preface (p. xix), Watson's goal was not a literal translation of the words but rather a text that reflected (or "read") the gestures in the music, or as Watson wrote in the title "not to the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the Noate." (For an excellent comparison of Watson's approach with that of Nicholas Yonge, the compiler of the two books of Musica transalpina published by East in 1588 and 1597, see Laura Macy, "The Due Decorum Kept: Elizabethan Translation and the Madrigals Englished of Nicholas Yonge and Thomas Watson," Journal of Musicological Research 17 [1998]: 1-21.)
In keeping with the high standards of Musica Britannica, this edition has a very helpful introduction, with a chronology of Watson's biography and literary works, as well as the customary critical apparatus. I would have welcomed, though, a section addressing the considerable secondary literature on Italian Madrigalls Englished, which...