The poetry of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) laid the groundwork for the entire modern Italian language by establishing the Medieval Tuscan dialect as evocative for high poetic utterance. Despite his achievement, however, and despite the immense popularity of his poetry among sixteenth century madrigalists, composers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seemed to shy away from his poems. A prominent biographer of Guillaume Dufay has noted that Dufay's three-voiced cantilena setting of Petrarch's Vergine bella is probably only the second time in 50 to 75 years that any composer had dared approach the powerful imagery of Petrarch's lyrics. Dufay, characteristically, chose a sublime and famous passage from Petrarch; characteristically, he also gave it a subtle, evocative, and completely successful treatment.

The text Dufay chose from all of the lines of Petrarch available was an intensely personal one for the poet. The text Vergine bella opens the intimate prayer to the Virgin Mary with which Petrarch concluded his Canzioniere. The two Italian stanzas praise her as Queen of heaven, in many lavish images of her radiant light. Her light, indeed, is described as the light in which Christ himself hid his light. Though the poet was publishing a secular collection of sonnets to his beloved Laura, he explicitly expressed his devotion to the higher beauty of the Blessed Virgin in Vergine bella. In a similar manner, though the majority of Dufay's secular works treat of courtly love, in his Vergine bella he expresses his own take on the late medieval male fascination with simultaneous love of the fleshly mistress and heavenly devotion to Mary.

Though Dufay gives Vergine bella a slower, more prayerful pace than much of the rest of his non-Latin music, he manages both to craft a convincing formal arch and to insert many close musical reflections of the text. For the overall form, Dufay uses an archaic rhythmic pattern, alternating sections in different triple meters. Yet despite the rigidity he imposes upon the piece in this form, his music responds to many subtleties of Petrarch's text. A partial list of words that Dufay's music reflects could include "crown" (Dufay implies a fermata), "stars" (a plentiful melisma as if embodying a constellation), "love" (the melody takes an improvisatory riff), "I do not know" (the uncertainty shows in unstable rhythms), "I cry to thee" (the singer struggles through an incredibly long melisma), "misery" (all voices are in a low range), and "queen" (which takes another stellar melisma).

© All Music Guide