Fifth Book of Madrigals (“I Tatti”)

The choice of 16th century texts, by Bronzino and Battiferri, reflects the interests of the dedicatee of these sonnets - Craig Hugh Smyth, a fine art historian and former director of the Villa I Tatti, who was a specialist in Bronzino and Pontormo. Bronzino's sonnet is a lament on the death of Pontormo, his teacher; Laura Battiferri's poem is a direct response to that of Bronzino. As I was also asked to set sonnets by Petrarca, I chose two of his closely linked sonnets, numbers 229 and 230 in the Rime Sparse. I had written a work for I Tatti some five years earlier setting Petrarca (“A qualunque animale”, the first in my Fourth Book of Madrigals) and was familiar with the context. However, through correspondence with Kathryn Bosi, Music Librarian at I Tatti and, through her, Craig Smyth's family, I became increasingly aware of his unusual and quite special character.

From his undergraduate days at Princeton and indeed throughout his life, although a great scholar and writer, he was at the same time an aficionado of jazz, loving above all Louis Armstrong, being photographed with Duke Ellington, taking his children to see Thelonious Monk, listening to Ben Webster and playing the tenor saxophone himself. Indeed, he had told Kathryn Bosi that he had been proud to walk in procession at the funerals of black musicians in New Orleans. In some ways his life was almost an obverse mirror image of parts of my own - I was a professional jazz musician but found myself teaching art history for a time. As Fiorella Superbi of I Tatti has said: Craig was a maestro di vita. I raise a glass in his memory and dedicate these sonnets to him.

Gavin Bryars