Orlando di Lasso
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Orlando di Lasso (
Name
Lasso's name appears in many spellings, often changed depending on the place in which his music was being performed or published. In addition to Orlando di Lasso, variations include Orlande de Lassus, Roland de Lassus, Orlandus Lassus, Orlande de Lattre and Roland de Lattre.
Since these various spellings or translations of the same name have been known and accepted for centuries, and since there is no evidence that he stated a preference, none of them can be considered incorrect.
Life and career
Orlando de Lasso was born in
He then worked as a singer and a composer for Costantino Castrioto in
No solid evidence survives for his whereabouts in 1554, but there are contemporary claims that he traveled in France and England. In 1555 he returned to the Low Countries and had his early works published in Antwerp (1555–1556). In 1556 he joined the court of Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, who was consciously attempting to create a musical establishment on a par with the major courts in Italy. Lasso was one of several Netherlanders to work there, and by far the most famous. He evidently was happy in Munich and decided to settle there. In 1558 he married Regina Wäckinger, the daughter of a maid of honor of the Duchess. They had two sons, both of whom became composers, and his daughter married the painter Hans von Aachen.[1] By 1563 Lasso had been appointed maestro di cappella, succeeding Ludwig Daser in the post. Lasso remained in the service of Albrecht V and his heir, Wilhelm V, for the rest of his life.
By the 1560s Lasso had become quite famous, and composers began to go to Munich to study with him.
In the late 1570s and 1580s Lasso made several visits to Italy, where he encountered the most modern styles and trends. In
Music and influence
One of the most prolific, versatile, and universal composers of the late Renaissance, Lasso wrote over 2,000 works in all Latin, French, Italian and German vocal genres known in his time. These include 530
Sacred music
Lasso remained
Masses
Almost 60 masses have survived complete; most of them are
Several of his masses are based on extremely secular French chansons; some of the source materials were outright obscene.
In addition to his traditional imitation masses, he wrote a considerable quantity of missae breves, "brief masses", syllabic short masses meant for brief services (for example, on days when Duke Albrecht went hunting: evidently he did not want to be detained by long-winded polyphonic music). The most extreme of these is a work actually known as the Jäger Mass (Missa venatorum)—the "Hunter's Mass".
Some of his masses show influence from the Venetian School, particularly in their use of polychoral techniques (for example, in the eight-voice Missa osculetur me, based on his own motet). Three of his masses are for double choir, and they may have been influential on the Venetians themselves; after all, Andrea Gabrieli visited Lasso in Munich in 1562, and many of Lasso's works were published in Venice. Even though Lasso used the contemporary, sonorous Venetian style, his harmonic language remained conservative in these works: he adapted the texture of the Venetians to his own artistic ends.
Motets and other sacred music
Lasso is one of the composers of a style known as musica reservata—a term which has survived in many contemporary references, many of them seemingly contradictory. The exact meaning of the term is a matter of fierce debate, though a rough consensus among musicologists is that it involves intensely expressive setting of text and chromaticism, and that it may have referred to music specifically written for connoisseurs. A famous composition by Lasso representative of this style is his series of 12 motets entitled Prophetiae Sibyllarum, in a wildly chromatic idiom which anticipates the work of Gesualdo; some of the chord progressions in this piece were not to be heard again until the 20th century.
Lasso wrote four settings of the
As a composer of motets, Lasso was one of the most diverse and prodigious of the entire Renaissance. His output varies from the sublime to the ridiculous, and he showed a sense of humor not often associated with sacred music: for example, one of his motets satirizes poor singers (his setting of Super flumina Babylonis, for five voices) which includes stuttering, stopping and starting, and general confusion; it is related in concept if not in style to Mozart's A Musical Joke. Many of his motets were composed for ceremonial occasions, as could be expected of a court composer who was required to provide music for visits of dignitaries, weddings, treaties and other events of state. But it was as a composer of religious motets that Lasso achieved his widest and most lasting fame.
Lasso's 1584 setting of the seven
Among his other liturgical compositions are
Secular music
Lasso wrote in all the prominent secular forms of the time. In the preface to his collection of German songs, Lasso lists his secular works: Italian madrigals and French chansons, German and Dutch songs. He is probably the only Renaissance composer to write prolifically in five languages – Latin in addition to those mentioned above – and he wrote with equal fluency in each. Many of his songs became hugely popular, circulating widely in Europe. In these various secular songs, he conforms to the manner of the country of origin while still showing his characteristic originality, wit, and terseness of statement.
Madrigals
In his madrigals, many of which he wrote during his stay in Rome, his style is clear and concise, and he wrote tunes which were easily memorable; he also "signed" his work by frequently using the word 'lasso' (and often setting with the solfège syllables la-sol, i.e. A-G in the key of C). His choice of poetry varied widely, from Petrarch for his more serious work to the lightest verse for some of his amusing canzonettas.
Lasso often preferred cyclic madrigals, i.e. settings of multiple poems in a group as a set of related pieces of music. For example, his fourth book of madrigals for five voices begins with a complete sestina by Petrarch, continues with two-part sonnets, and concludes with another sestina: therefore the entire book can be heard as a unified composition with each madrigal a subsidiary part.
Chansons
Another form which Lasso cultivated was the French chanson, of which he wrote about 150. Most of them date from the 1550s, but he continued to write them even when he was in Germany: his last productions in this genre come from the 1580s. They were enormously popular in Europe, and of all his works, they were the most widely arranged for instruments such as lute and keyboard. Most were collected in the 1570s and 1580s in three publications: one by Petrus Phalesius the Elder in 1571, and two by Le Roy and Ballard in 1576 and 1584. Stylistically, they ranged from the dignified and serious, to playful, bawdy, and amorous compositions, as well as drinking songs suited to taverns. Lasso followed the polished, lyrical style of Sermisy rather than the programmatic style of Clément Janequin for his writing.
One of the most famous of Lasso's drinking songs was used by
German lieder
A third type of secular composition by Lasso was the German Lied. Most of these he evidently intended for a different audience, since they are considerably different in tone and style from either the chansons or madrigals; in addition, he wrote them later in life, with none appearing until 1567, when he was already well-established at Munich. Many are on religious subjects, although light and comic verse is represented as well. He also wrote drinking songs in German, and contrasting with his parallel work in the genre of the chanson, he also wrote songs on the unfortunate aspects of overindulgence.
Dutch songs
In the preface to his collection of German songs, Lasso states that he had composed Dutch songs. However, no Dutch song has been preserved.[5]
References
- ^ daughter of "de Lasso" in Karel van Mander's 1604 dictionary of biographies called Schilder-boeck
- ^ "The woman at the well: Divine and earthly love in Orlando di Lasso's parody masses / by Barbara Eichner". RADAR, Oxford Brookes University. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
- ISBN 978-1406523751.
- ^ From the illuminated Codex (1559-70) of the Penitential Psalms,vol. 2 p. 187 (Bavarian State Library Munich, Mus.ms. A) - The codex consists of two volumes (ca. 60 x 44 cm) with 400 pages and is currently under renovation and digitization. Vol. 1 is already online: https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0011/bsb00116059/images/ See the homepage of the Bavarian Academy of Science: https://lasso.badw.de/lasso-digital.html
- ISBN 978-90-6550-545-3, p. 23
Sources and further reading
- ISBN 1-56159-174-2
- Haar, James. L. Macy (ed.). Orlande de Lassus. Grove Music Online. Archived from the original on 13 January 2011. Retrieved 29 October 2010.(subscription required)
- ISBN 0-393-09530-4
- ISBN 0-89917-034-X
- Jean-Paul C. Montagnier, The Polyphonic Mass in France, 1600-1780: The Evidence of the Printed Choirbooks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 (Chapter 5, "Lassus as Model").
External links
- The Orlando di Lasso-Gesamtausgabe
- List of compositions by Orlande de Lassus at the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music
- Free scores by Orlando di Lasso in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
- Free scores by Orlande de Lassus at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
- The Mutopia Project has compositions by Orlando di Lasso
- Recordings of Lassus by the Umeå Academic Choir
- Database of Orlando di Lasso manuscripts