The Ronsard Vogue

Virtually every polyphonist from France or the Low Countries from the second half of the 16th century wrote music to Ronsard texts. Between 1552 and 1600 musical settings of more than 200 Ronsard poem appeared, composed by over thirty musicians. Apart from De Castro no less than eight other composers devoted one or more volumes to the texts of the Pléiade poet.

De Castro set to music no less that thirty-eight Ronsard texts, twenty-one of which are contained in his Ronsard edition of 1576.

One of the most famous Ronsard texts set to music, is Bonjour mon coeur, from his Le second livre des amours (1555-6): simple pastoral poetry (inspired by the country girl Marie Dupin). Three years after the publication, in 1559, Goudimel set Bonjour mon coeur to music. Lassus' version of 1565 is probably the best known. De Castro used Lassus' model for his own version for three voices of 1569. De Monte used the text in 1575 and Pevernage in 1591.

Later, Protestant publishers made contrafacts of Lassus' and De Castro's version. A contrafact is a composition in which the original secular text was replaced by a moralizing, often religious text. Contrafacts were produced mainly in the context of the Reformation and Contra Reformation.