Orlando di Lasso

Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594)

He served Ferrante Gonzaga of Mantua from circa 1544, accompanying him to Sicily and Milan (1546-9). He worked for Constantino Castrioto in Naples, where he probably began to compose, then moved to Rome to join the Archbishop of Florence's household, becoming "maestro di cappella" of St. John Lateran in 1553. After returning north, to Mons and Antwerp, where early works were published (1555-6), he joined the court chapel of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in Munich as a singer (1556). He married in 1558. Although a Catholic, he took over the court chapel in 1563 and served the duke and his heir, Wilhelm V, for over 30 years, until his death. In this post he consolidated his position by having many works published and traveling frequently (notably to Vienna and Italy, 1574-9), establishing an international reputation. The pope made him a Knight of the Golden Spur in 1574.

One of the most prolific and versatile of 16th century composers, Lasso wrote over 2000 works in almost every current genre, including masses, motets, psalms, hymns, responsorial Passions and secular pieces in Italian, French and German. Most of his masses are parody masses based on motets, chansons or madrigals by himself or others. The large number of Magnificats is unusual. His motets include didactic pieces, ceremonial works for special occasions, settings of classical texts (some secular e.g. "Prophetiae Sibyllarum," 1600), liturgical items (offertories, antiphons, psalms, e.g. "Psalmi...poenitentiales," 1584) and private devotional pieces. He issued five large volumes of sacred music as "Patrocinium musices" (1573-6), and after his death his sons assembled another ("Magnum opus musicum," 1604).

Admired in their day for their beauty, technical perfection and rhetorical power the motets combine the features of several national styles -

expressive Italian melody,
elegant French text-setting
and solid northern polyphony -
enhanced by Lasso's imaginative responses to the texts.

His secular works reveal a cosmopolitan with varied tastes. The madrigals range from lightweight villanellas to intensely expressive sonnets; the chansons include 'patter' songs and reflective, motet-like works; and among the German lieder are sacred hymns and psalms, delicate love songs and raucous drinking songs. This versatility and wide expressive range place him among the most significant figures of the Renaissance.

In many ways Orlando di Lasso was very different from Palestrina, with whom his is often linked. Both Lasso's career and his music contrast strongly with those of the Italian composer.

Whereas Palestrina spent his entire life in and around Rome, Lasso traveled widely.
Palestrina concentrated his attention almost exclusively on sacred music while Lasso displayed a dazzling virtuosity in mastering every style and genre of his time.
Lasso was passionately committed to the idea that music should heighten, enhance, and even embody the meaning of the texts he set. Short motives, suggested by the words and hence more often syllabic than melismatic, generate many of the thematic events in his motets, and these epigrammatic ideas, expanded and manipulated, take the place of Palestrina's long gentle arches of melody.
In building individual phrases Lasso relied less on imitation as a structural device than did many of the contemporaries. In its place he generally preferred textures that depend for their effect on varied and imaginative choral groupings; or he wrote a kind of non-imitative counterpoint; or he animated an essentially chordal texture by rhythmic imitations and other allusions of one voice to another.