1532–1594 · Baroque
Orlando di Lasso was a Franco-Flemish composer and maestro di cappella. He was born in Mons, died in Munich on 14 June 1594 and lived mostly in Bavaria. He wrote only vocal music: masses, motets, chansons and madrigals. The site offers his choral piece "Sibylla Samia" for mixed choir.
Lasso's birthplace was Mons, in what is now Belgium, and as a boy he probably sang in the choir of the church of St Nicholas. Little is known about his early years, but some uncorroborated stories survive. The most famous claims that, because of his remarkable voice, he was abducted on three occasions.
Thanks to his lovely voice, in 1544 he entered the service of the condottiere Ferrante Gonzaga and followed his court for several years. This took him to Palermo, Mantua, Milan and other Italian cities. In Milan he met the madrigalist Spirito l'Hoste da Reggio, who shaped his early style. It was during these years that Lasso began to compose.
After leaving Gonzaga, Lasso worked in Naples as a singer and composer in the early 1550s. Later he went to Rome and directed the music at the Basilica of St John Lateran as its maestro di cappella.
A post like this in Rome shows that he was already recognised as a composer, even though he was still very young. Palestrina worked in Rome at the same time, and the two are thought to have known each other.
In the mid-1550s Lasso returned to the Low Countries. In 1555 he lived in Antwerp and worked with the well-known music printer Tilman Susato. That same year Susato brought out a large collection of his works: Italian madrigals and villanellas, French chansons and Latin motets.
Thanks to these publications the composer's fame spread far beyond the Low Countries.
Lasso's early works were printed in Antwerp in 1555 and 1556.
In 1556 Lasso was invited to Bavaria, to the court of Duke Albrecht V, who was known as a patron of the arts. At first Lasso served there as a singer, a tenor, and from 1563 as maestro di cappella, taking the post after Ludwig Daser.
Albrecht consciously tried to build in Munich a musical establishment that could stand beside the great Italian courts. Lasso was one of several Netherlanders working there, and by far the best known of them.
Under his direction the ducal chapel became a highly professional ensemble, and Munich gained a reputation as one of the musical centres of Europe. Lasso evidently liked life in Munich and chose to make his home there. Albrecht V kept him in his service, and after Albrecht the post stayed with Lasso under the heir Wilhelm V until Lasso's own death.
In 1558 the composer married Regina Wäckinger, a Bavarian. They had several children, among them two sons, Ferdinand and Rudolf, both of whom became musicians. The painter Hans von Aachen became Lasso's son-in-law.
Lasso also taught. His pupils included the German composers Leonard Lechner and Johann Eccard. In the 1570s the Italian Giovanni Gabrieli possibly studied with him as well, and Andrea Gabrieli went to Munich in 1562.
Lasso was widely famous by the 1560s. Emperor Maximilian II raised him to the nobility in 1570, an unusual honour for a composer, and Pope Gregory XIII made him a knight. The French king Charles IX asked him to visit in 1571 and once more in 1573.
The German publisher Adam Berg devoted five volumes of his collection Patrocinium musicum to Lasso's music; they came out between 1573 and 1580.
When Albrecht died in 1579, his devout son Wilhelm V cut spending on court music. But Lasso did not want to change the way of life he had grown fond of, and he turned down the honourable post of maestro di cappella at the Saxon court. Munich remained his home until his death.
Several journeys to Italy fell in the 1570s and 1580s, and in 1585 he visited the d'Este court in Ferrara, a centre of musical avant-garde. Yet his style, fully formed in the 1560s, did not change radically after that. As he grew older it became simpler and more refined.
Lasso stayed Catholic in an age of religious strife. This did not stop him from writing worldly songs, or from using in his Magnificats and masses melodies that originally carried racy texts.
Late in the sixteenth century the Counter-Reformation grew strongest in Bavaria, helped by the Jesuits, and it clearly affected Lasso's late output. You can see it in his Roman Rite liturgical music, in ever more Magnificats, in music for the Catholic Ulenberg Psalter of 1588 and, above all, in the large penitential cycle of spiritual madrigals Tears of St Peter.
In the 1590s Lasso's health declined and he was treated by a doctor named Thomas Mermann, yet he could still compose and travel now and then. His last work is considered to be the spiritual madrigals Tears of St Peter, a cycle dedicated to Pope Clement VIII. The cycle was published in 1595, after the author's death.
Lasso's death came in Munich on 14 June 1594. That day his employer had resolved to let him go to save money, but the letter never reached him. His burial place was the Franciscan cemetery next to the Salvatorkirche. His grave was marked by a red marble monument made by Jan Sadeler, with a bas-relief and a long epitaph in verse. The monument also showed the composer and his widow Regina Wäckinger, as well as the Lasso family's coat of arms, and the bas-relief depicted the entombment of Christ.
The Franciscan cemetery was later destroyed. The monument was saved by an admirer of the composer, the local actor Heigel, who set it up in the garden of his house. What became of it after 1830 is unknown.
Lasso is regarded as one of the most prolific composers in the history of music, and many of his works were published in his lifetime. He wrote only for voices: no instrumental music by him is known, and apparently there never was any. Yet he worked in all the vocal genres of his time, in Latin, French, Italian and German.
In church music these are the masses, many of them built on secular chansons and motets, a requiem, four Passions, one for every evangelist, over a hundred Magnificats, hymns and motets. The largest collection of motets appeared after the composer's death, in 1604, under the title Magnum opus musicum. His secular works include about 150 French chansons, Italian villanellas and canzonas, German songs and madrigals. The chansons were especially popular and were arranged for lute and keyboard more often than any of his other works.
Most of Lasso's masses are parody masses: they take melodies from secular or sacred works, his own and other composers', from chant to madrigals of his day. He fitted the style of a mass to the style of its source. For days when the duke went hunting he wrote short masses. He also wrote three masses for double choir, and in some masses the influence of the Venetian school can be heard.
Lasso wrote motets both for church and for ceremonial occasions such as visits of dignitaries, weddings and treaties. The manuscript of the Penitential Psalms of David is decorated with illustrations by H. Mielich; they give valuable information about life at the Bavarian court, including its musical entertainments.
Lasso's style combines Italian and Franco-Flemish features. He was a master of flawless counterpoint, and in the motet cycle Prophetiae Sibyllarum he created his own experimental model of the chromatic Italian style. Otherwise he kept to the system of eight modes. Lasso worked on texts with great care, and in secular music he was not averse to humour, as the Latin drinking songs show, and the song Matona mia cara, in which a German soldier sings a serenade and mangles the Italian words.
The site has Lasso's choral piece "Sibylla Samia" for mixed choir (SATB), at an upper-beginner level.