Orlando di Lasso

Roland de Lassus, also known by his Italianised name Orlando di Lasso, was born in 1532 in Mons, Hainaut, now in Belgium. A choirboy at the church of Saint-Nicolas in his town, he had such a beautiful voice that, according to a later anecdote, he was kidnapped three times by recruiters of singers. The third time his parents agreed to let him go: at about twelve he entered the service of Ferrante Gonzaga, Viceroy of Sicily and a general of Charles V.

With his patron young Roland crossed Italy: Mantua, Sicily, then Milan. He discovered Italian music, the madrigal and Neapolitan popular song, which left a lasting mark on him. Around 1549 he was in Naples, then Rome. In 1553, aged only twenty-one, he became choirmaster of the basilica of St John Lateran, one of the most prestigious posts in Christendom. He left it the following year to visit his sick parents, then travelled, perhaps to England and France.

In 1555 he settled in Antwerp, a great centre of music printing, where his first collections of madrigals, chansons and motets appeared. His reputation was already great. The following year, 1556, he was engaged at the court of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in Munich. He stayed there for nearly forty years. In 1558 he married Regina Wäckinger, daughter of one of the duchess’s ladies-in-waiting, and in 1563 became master of the ducal chapel, an ensemble of some sixty singers and instrumentalists.

In Munich Lassus was a true European star. He travelled to recruit musicians and visited Italy and France, where King Charles IX received him warmly in 1571. Emperor Maximilian II ennobled him in 1570, and Pope Gregory XIII made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. His letters to young Prince Wilhelm, the duke’s heir, reveal a man full of humour, cheerfully mixing German, Italian, French and Latin.

His output is one of the largest in the whole history of music: more than two thousand pieces in every language and genre. There are about sixty masses, more than five hundred motets, Magnificats and passions, but also some two hundred Italian madrigals, a hundred and fifty French chansons and ninety German lieder. He moved effortlessly from the gravity of the Penitential Psalms, written for the duke in a magnificent illuminated manuscript, to the comedy of songs such as Matona mia cara, in which a German soldier clumsily sings a serenade in Italian.

Lassus was renowned for the expressiveness of his music: he coloured every word and image of the text. In the Prophetiae Sibyllarum, an early work, he used daring chromaticism, with strange chord progressions, to evoke the mysterious prophetesses of antiquity. He was also one of the most printed composers of his time: publishers in Paris, Antwerp, Venice, Nuremberg and Munich constantly issued his works.

His last years were darkened by deep melancholy. In 1594 he completed the Lagrime di San Pietro, a cycle of twenty spiritual madrigals on the tears of St Peter after his denial, dedicated to the pope. He died in Munich on 14 June 1594, a few months after Palestrina. In 1604 his sons published a huge collection of more than five hundred of his motets, the Magnum opus musicum. With Palestrina, Lassus is regarded as the summit of Renaissance polyphony.