Donna, per salutarmi

Scipione Dentice sets words by Giovanni Battista Guarini in this Italian secular madrigal. The soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices are used with telling effect to depict the dramatic sentiments of the text. The poet describes being wounded by love when the lady reveals her face to greet him. He questions whether this greeting, which causes him a thousand wounds, can truly be called a greeting at all, lamenting that such a 'cruel greeting' offers no salvation. Dentice's setting captures the rhetorical questions and the underlying pain of the speaker in this expressive polyphonic work.