Contrafacta of Italian madrigals in Polish musical sources

In the music sources of today’s Poland one can find not only madrigals copied in its original form, but also stored as contrafacta – pieces equipped with new sacred texts, thanks to which they served for religious purpose. Such ‘spiritual reworking’ (travestimento spirituale) was used often after the Council of Trent, because the madrigal fulfilled the humanistic ideal of the intelligibility of the text. Apart from some missae parodiae, composed on the basis of the musical madrigals, there are some examples of parody Magnificats, used especially in the catholic societies. But the most often form are showing sacred contrafacta of madrigals, adopted to the Psalm texts written in Polish, German and Latin. Those pieces shows that procedure of spiritual reworking has been made in a very conscious way, considering not only its formal and microformal structure, but also the semantic level, the dramatic qualities of the text, its rhetorical entourage and even linguistic and phonic figures, such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, paronomasia and epanalexis.