Orlando di Lasso

Flemish composer

• Born: 1532
• Birthplace: Mons, Hainaut, Flanders (now in Belgium)
• Died: June 14, 1594
• Place of death: Munich, Bavaria (now in Germany)

Lasso is often regarded as the most imaginative and influential of sixteenth century composers because of his mastery of virtually every Renaissance musical style, technique, and form, and because of his tremendous productivity, which included more than two thousand works.

Early Life

Born in Mons, situated in the region between France and the Spanish Netherlands, Orlando di Lasso was a singer of such skill and tonal purity as a child that myth says enterprising kidnappers targeted him three times to auction him to the highest “cultured” bidder.

Unlike so many obscure and impoverished composers throughout music history, Lasso became well known and affluent doing just as he pleased; that is, he traveled, enjoyed life, and composed music with enormous profusion and variety. His journeys across Europe and his rise to fame began at age twelve, when Ferrante Gonzaga, a Mantuan general in the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, recruited him into his retinue in 1544.

In 1545, Gonzaga took Lasso to Sicily, Milan, Naples, and Rome. In Rome in 1553, Lasso landed the post of maestro di cappella (choir master) at San Giovanni Laterano (Saint John Lateran). Under ordinary circumstances, gaining this post would have made the career of most musicians, but for Lasso, it marked the inauguration of his climb to preeminence. At Rome, he probably met Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, to whom he is often compared and with whom he is usually linked as one of the two greatest composers of the sixteenth century. Palestrina was master of the choir in the Julian Chapel and succeeded Lasso after his brief stint at San Giovanni Laterano.

Life’s Work

Lasso began composing sometime during his Italian voyages. From the start, he displayed the inventiveness and economy of expression that would mark nearly all his compositions, one of the most notable of which, the Prophetiae Sibyllarum (1600), may have been composed, but not yet published, during this period. At an early stage of his career, he grasped the financial and professional value of publication, so he went north to Antwerp in 1555 and had published some of his earliest pieces.

Almost simultaneously, he brought out his first book of madrigals in Venice. By the end of his life, thirty-nine years later, he had published more work than any other composer of the century, distinguishing himself as an uncompromising artist and a thriving musical entrepreneur.

In 1556, Lasso left Antwerp for Munich to sing tenor in the chapel of Duke Albert V of Bavaria. Two years after his arrival, he married a well-to-do woman, Regina Wäckinger, whose father was a court official. The couple produced two daughters and four sons, two of whom, Ferdinand and Rudolph, became important musicians in their own right, which established the family as a Bavarian musical dynasty. Also, Ferdinand and Rudolph assembled for publication much of the work of their father.

Some writers have claimed that Lasso also visited England shortly after his marriage, and while his music was undeniably the rage at the court of Elizabeth I, no evidence supports the story of a visit. When a Protestant left Albert V’s service in 1563, the duke placed Lasso, a Catholic, in charge of music for the chapel. From this time until his death in 1594, Lasso composed the greater part of his 60 masses, 4 passions, 101 magnificats, more than 500 motets and 200 madrigals, 150 French chansons, 90 German Lieder, and hundreds of other pieces. Erudite and well read, he composed vocal music in Latin, French, German, and Italian, choosing among the texts of the greatest poets of his day Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Francesco Petrarch and the finest poets of antiquity.

Of moderate religious disposition, he composed music of the profoundest spiritual sincerity; of boundless good humor, he spun out motets about compromised monks and nuns, the joys and repercussions of strong drink, and even a lamentation on flea infestation.

During the happy years of his employment in Bavaria, Lasso was free to compose much as he pleased and to travel widely to recruit musicians and perform diplomatic errands. In 1560, he searched for singers in Flanders and, in 1562, attended the coronation of Emperor Maximilian II in Frankfurt. After spending time in Ferrara and Venice in 1567, Lasso made the first of three trips to Paris (1570, 1573, 1574) and to the court of King Charles IX , where the worldly Valois courtiers reveled in both his sacred motets and his secular, often profane, chansons. Even the Huguenots, the enemies of the Catholic establishment, found his music irresistible.

Capitalizing on his popularity and always on the spy for profit, Lasso made lucrative publishing deals with a Parisian printing firm before returning home. His enjoyable interludes in France inspired yet another of the apocryphal stories adhering to his career: He was said to have been lured away from Bavaria and to be on the road to Paris in 1574, only to turn away when hearing of the French king’s untimely demise.

True, however, are the stories that Emperor Maximilian IIII22IIII ennobled him in 1570 and that Pope Gregory XIII awarded him the dignity of knight of the Golden Spur in 1574. In this period when musicians, regardless of their level of accomplishment, usually were thought of as servants, noble titles and memberships in papal societies were remarkable endorsements for the man often referred to as “the divine Lassus.” With the Wars of Religion growing ever hotter and imperiling the roads and rivers of France, Lasso turned his attention south once more, and during the next five years, he journeyed to Italy (1574-1579), where he recruited the young and luminous Giovanni Gabrieli .

In 1579, Albert, the ideal Wittelsbach Dynasty patron with whom the composer enjoyed a close and productive friendship, died and was succeeded by his brother. More frugal than his predecessor, William V economized among his musicians, whose corps had once numbered seventy-three singers, keyboard players, and instrumentalists. Nevertheless, despite other offers, Lasso remained in Munich and continued to prosper, thanks to the late duke’s provision of life-time employment at full pay.

In his last years, Lasso fell into deep depression and obsessed excessively over the fate of his children, whom he feared would languish after his death. (In fact, two sons and a grandson eventually succeeded to his office.) Lasso’s productivity slowed with his declining health and the burden of age, but, despite his melancholia, the quality of his music reached a pinnacle of technical perfection and emotional depth, marked particularly by the astounding Lagrime di San Pietro , completed just three weeks before his death.

Significance

Drawing on the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and many other ancient authors, who claimed for music the power to produce powerful ethical effects in listeners, Lasso and other Renaissance composers defined music as not only a cultured form of entertainment but also as a means of moving the passions of the mind and soul. Lasso sought to re-create the reputed ethical effects of ancient music in his own audiences, to move them to sadness, happiness, bellicosity, piety, or any other state of mind.

To achieve this lofty end, Lasso transformed many of the classical rhetorical devices familiar to any orator of the period into musical declamation. Primarily, he sought a union of poetry and music, sometimes through musical imitation of words (musical pictorialism and word painting), and at others by matching poetic meter to musical rhythm, an idea then current among the poets of the French group La Pléiade, which tried to revive the French language by using words from classical literature. Lasso loved to set the group’s verse. The restoration of music’s ancient moral ascendancy was not just a theory in the background to Lasso’s music; both contemporary listeners and music theorists of later generations, including Joachim Burmeister and Marin Mersenne in the early seventeenth century, credited Lasso for carrying it off. He was, after all, “the prince of music.”

Bibliography

Bergquist, Peter. Orlando di Lasso Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. A renowned editor of Lasso’s works, Bergquist brings together eleven authors whose essays constitute the first English-language attempt to survey all Lasso’s music. Concentrating mainly on musical analysis, the essays also place Lasso’s corpus in the context of the high Renaissance style, examine its influence, and locate the composer in his social context.

Crook, David. Orlando di Lasso’s Imitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Argues that the musical sources of Lasso’s parody magnificats tend to accentuate Marian themes in line with the renewed veneration of Mary at the post-Tridentine court of Albert V.

Erb, James. Orlando di Lasso: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1990. Provides a brief biography, a compilation of Lasso’s works, a valuable annotated bibliography, and a list of recordings.

Freedman, Richard. The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Explores the phenomenon whereby Protestant publishers transformed the French secular songs of Lasso into sacred music in order to publish them in collections of Protestant music.

Haar, James. “Orlando di Lasso, Composer and Print Entrepreneur.” In Music and the Culture of Print, edited by Kate van Orden. New York: Garland, 2000. Examines the clever means by which Lasso managed to profit by the sale of his music in the days before the copyright protection of intellectual property.

Luoma, Robert. Music, Mode, and Words in Orlando di Lasso’s Last Works. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. A close analysis of Lasso’s musical and rhetorical techniques in the Lagrime de San Pietro, with the purpose of establishing authentic performance practice.