Lassus, Orlandus

(Orlando di Lasso)

(1530 or 1532, Mons [modern Belgium] – 14 June 1594, Munich)

   Composer of about 60 masses, four passions, 101 Magnificats, over 500 motets, in addition to all manner of secular vocal works in many languages, Lassus was princeps musicorum, the most internationally famous composer of his age. He joined the service of the Gonzaga family of Mantua while they traveled through the Low Countries in summer 1544. He next joined the household of Constatino Castrioto (c. 1550?) of Naples, and then was appointed maestro di cappella at St. John Lateran in Rome in 1553. In 1555, he visited Antwerp and published there his first motets, for four voices. The next year he published motets for five and six voices and accepted an invitation to join the court of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in Munich, where he remained until his death despite many offers throughout his remaining years. He became maestro di cappella in 1563. His duties included providing music for a morning service and probably vespers, accounting for the large number of alternatim Magnificat settings. He also supervised the education of choirboys, and it is possible that he taught Andrea (c. 1562) and Giovanni Gabrieli (1570s). Emperor Maximilian II granted him a patent of nobility in 1571 and Pope Gregory XIII made him a Knight of the Golden Spur in 1574. In sheer numbers of publications and reprints, he outstripped every other composer of his time and his music was admired well into the 17th century, after which Lassus suffered the oblivion that obscured all high Renaissance composers save Giovanni da Palestrina. His contrapuntal technique was as accomplished as Palestrina’s, but his harmonic vocabulary in sacred music is more liberal. To express a text, an art for which Lassus was most famous, he did not hesitate to use the chromatic inflections of secular music, although his textures and rhythm rarely betrayed the sacred idiom.