Two things distinguish Lassus among the great composers of the high Renaissance: his extraordinary creativity (his list of individual compositions runs to something like two thousand) and his equally extraordinary diversity. Some degree of fluency is natural to any genius born into a thriving tradition, of course; Lassus had the advantage of being born in the county of Hainault, which, lying between the episcopal cities of Cambrai and Liège, had supplied Europe with some of its finest composers for three generations and more. Gilles Binchois had come from Mons, its capital; Josquin Desprez had spent the last years of his life a few miles down-river at Condé; and only a year or two before Lassus’s birth at Mons in about 1532, another of the greatest composers of the period, Claude Lejeune, had entered the world only twenty miles away at Valenciennes.
We can assume, then, that Lassus’s early training as a chorister at the parish church of St. Nicholas was as good as any he could have obtained in Europe, but he was not able to enjoy it for long. At the age of only twelve or so, he was pressed into the service of Ferdinand Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua’s younger brother and Charles V’s commander-in-chief - and also a keen music-lover who maintained his own chapel. As soon as his military duties in the north were finished, Ferdinand set off for Sicily, where he was the Imperial Viceroy. Other composers had made the journey southwards in their maturity, but Lassus was plunged at an unusually early and impressionable age into the most dynamic and cultivated artistic environment in Europe. He stayed in Italy some nine or ten years - first briefly at Palermo, then at Milan, where Ferdinand was appointed Governor; later, after his voice broke, he spent a couple of years at Naples, in the household of another aristocratic music-lover, and finally at Rome itself, where he was appointed choirmaster at the Lateran basilica in his early twenties.
After two years in Rome Lassus received word that his parents were ill and hurried north to see them, but they were both dead on his arrival. Talent gravitates towards prosperity, and for the next year or two we find him at Antwerp, the Venice of the north and, like Venice, a centre of the new business of music-publishing. Here he attracted the attention of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria’s agent, and in the autumn of 1556 he moved to Munich, which was to be his home for the rest of his life - nearly forty years, for he died there in June 1594. But his early travels hatl alreatly marked him with his chameleon gift of mimicry: the volume he brought out with the Antwerp printer Tilman Susato contained serious antl popular Italian madrigals, French chansons, Latin motets both sacred and, more surprisingly, secular in the new chromatic style of Rore, almost as if Lassus, still only in his early twenties, wished to call attention to his mastery of all available styles. lt is a trait of character very understandable in a young composer, perhaps less so in an older one. Lassus continued, throughout his Munich years, to compose in these diverse genres, even adding to them that of the German secular song. His mastery of each is unquestionable, but his polyglot ability takes on a manic quality in the Rabelaisian letters he wrote to the young Duke Wilhelm, and a psychologist might well diagnose in this fragmentation of his identity the roots of the religious melancholy with which his last years were increasingly afflicted.
On this record, though, we are concerned only with that section of Lassus’s music - by far the largest - which was devoted to the church. The earliest surviving edition of his famous setting of the seven Penitential Psalms Was published by the Munich printer Adam Berg in 1584, but there is some evidence that there may have been an earlier one in 1579, the year in which Albrecht died and was succeeded by his son Wilhelm. That, however, is not the date of the psalms themselves; Lassus’s dedicatory letter to the Bishop of Regensburg tells us expressly that they had been composed some twenty-five years previously and reserved for the Duke’s private use. It was he who had commissioned them in the first place, and been so impressed by their beauty that he ordered them to be copied in the great parchment choirbooks, illuminated by the court painter Hans Mielich, which still survive as one of the treasures of the Bavarian State Library. As the humanist Samuel Quickelberg put it in his accompanying commentary: “Lassus has so matched the sound to the sense of the words, expressing the force of each affection and presenting the subject-matter almost visibly, that it is impossible to say whether the sweetness of the emotions more enhances his plaintive music, or his music the emotions”.
Quickelberg goes on to equate this style with “that kind of music which is termed musica reserzvata” - one of the key passages for the definition of that much-debated term. It might seem to mean no more than a connoisseur’s style, in which clarity of declamation and subtlety of expression take priority; in this case, though, it stems rather from the religious convictions of Lassus’s patron than from any merely aesthetic preference. Albrecht was keenly interested in the movement for the reform of Roman Catholic church music, at a time when the whole existence of polyphony was threatened (not for the first or the last time) by radical members of the clergy. The matter came up for discussion at the Council of Trent during 1562-63, with further deliberations by a Commission of Cardinals in Rome during the two following years. We can be quite sure that Lassus’s recently composed settings of the Penitential Psalms represent, in their combination of dignified restraint and subtle expressiveness, the ideal of a purified polyphony that helped Albrecht and his party to carry the day.
O mors, quam amara est was one of the three new pieces contained in a Parisian collection of Lassus’s five- and six-part motets published in 1564; it therefore belongs to the same general period as the Penitential Psalms, and shares with them both its air of sober, not to say sombre, reflection (the grimly moralising text is taken from Ecclesiasticus 41, 1-4) and its specific musical language. Its six voices give Lassus more scope for textural variety (a variety he achieves in the Psalms by reducing the number of voices for certain verses), and he permits himself more variety of rhythm, with a slowing-down for “viro quieto” and a speeding-up for “et adhuc valenti accipere cibum”. But it is worth noting that he avoids the illustrative strokes that would become commonplace in the next generation, such as sharp dissonances for “amara” in the opening phrase, or any overt eccentricity at “qui perdit sapientiam”.
The two remaining pieces on this record, both Marian antiphons, were composed some twenty years later, to judge by the dates at which they were copied into the Munich chapel choirbooks. Neither makes use of the well-known plainsong melodies, though Lassus uses those in other settings; both show him in a freer, less austere guise. Ave regina caelorum is an exquisite miniature for four voices, unified by its delicate cadential ornaments and restrained melismas; the rhythmic vitality of “gaude” and the gentle pathos of
“vale, o valde decora” are particularly worth noting, as well as the climactic rise to “Christum exora” and its resolution in tenderly descending scales. Salve regina is utterly different in character, rich and homophonic where the other is transparently contrapuntal. Lassus divides his six voices here into blocks of contrasting sound, very much in the Venetian manner (he was well acquainted with both the Gabrielis). Here too there are touches which we might almost regard as “madrigalisms”: the run on “vita”, the caught breath before “suspiramus”, above all the melodic inflections that underline the pathos of words like “lacrimarum”, “misericordes”, with the flat sixth degree (E flat), and the sweetness of “dulcis virgo Maria” with a shift from B flat to B natural.