I languish to complain me

John Bennet was a composer of madrigals in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This example of the genre, I languish to complain me, is written for SATB choir. The English text expresses the singer's distress at causing his beloved discontent, to the point where he feels his own death would be preferable to increasing her sorrow. Bennet skilfully sets these words of anguish and resignation, using the four-part texture to articulate the emotional weight of the text. It is a fine example of English secular part-music from the period.