This edition presents, in four volumes, the complete unaccompanied madrigals of Luzzasco Luzzaschi, director of music at the Ferrarese court at the end of the sixteenth century. Luzzaschi was among the most important and most admired musicians of the period, the teacher of Girolamo Frescobaldi, the mentor of Carlo Gesualdo, and the object of explicit admiration from Claudio Monteverdi, Claudio Merulo, Alfonso Fontanelli, Adriano Banchieri, and many others. Given Luzzaschi's importance, all surviving parts of his seven books of five-voice madrigals are transcribed. Given the importance of the Ferrarese school of literary madrigals, whose (otherwise usually unpublished) texts Luzzaschi was given to set, these texts have been transcribed and translated. Each setting by Luzzaschi is given a critical commentary by the editor, which often includes discussion of settings of the same texts by Luzzaschi's near contemporaries—settings which, if unpublished in modern edition are included in the present edition. Part 3 of the unaccompanied madrigals of Luzzaschi incorporates the madrigals of his Third Book, published by the commercial Venetian printer Angelo Gardano in 1582. One assumes that madrigals in this book were written in the years between 1576, the year of the publication of Luzzaschi's Second Book, and 1582, six years of great activity in the music establishment of the Ferrarese court, years that also saw the formation of the famous concerto delle dame. The edition also includes ten additional madrigals heretofore unavailable in modern editions, most of them settings by Luzzaschi's near contemporaries of texts set by Luzzaschi in his Third Book.