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Sometimes they used themes of their own invention. In time musicians of small skill, undertaking to imitate these earliest secular songs, developed the popular form called frottola. Later we find some of the famous masters cultivating this music of the people. Adrian Willaert, who settled in Venice in 1516, wrote frottole and gondola songs in frottola form.

As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard." Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too.

At the time when such puerility was disturbing this cradle of freedom and cacophony, Bach and Händel were at work in their contrapuntal webs, the Scarlattis, Corelli and Tartini and Porpora were alive. Peri, Josquin and Willaert and Lassus were dead, and the church had had its last mass from the most famous citizen of the town of Palestrina.

Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote many wills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet, yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself a composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet's country where her Flemish father took her.

There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment, such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck, Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years' honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live.

The seed of beauty had been sown by the mighty Josquin des Prés what time he was a Roman singer and a Mantuan composer. The fruit blossomed in the Renaissance music of Willaert, Cyprian de Rore and others and came to its perfection in the later works of Palestrina and Lasso.

Adrian Willaert became chapel master of St. Mark's in 1527 and his influence in spreading the madrigal through Italy was so great that he has been called, as we have already noted, the father of that form of composition. Certain it is that, despite the earlier publications of Petrucci, the madrigal became dominant in Italy after the advent of Willaert.

The dialogues were connected by a series of dramatic actions, and the music was composed by Alfonso della Viola, a pupil of Willaert. Among the personages was a high priest who sang, like Poliziano's Orpheus, to the accompaniment of his own lyre.