LASSO: THE COSMOPOLITE SUPREME
Real literary music—indeed a virtual literary revolution in music—is looming up on our horizon, but
before immersing ourselves in it and becoming absorbed in its consequences, there is a loose end to tie
up. “Loose end” hardly does justice to a composer thought by many of his contemporaries to be the most
brilliant musician alive, but Orlando di Lasso is a blessedly unclassifiable figure who sits uncomfortably
in any slot. It was his unparalleled versatility, the very quality that makes him retrospectively a loose end,
that made him such a paragon in his day.
One of the last of the great peripatetic Netherlanders, Lasso was born in Mons, now an industrial
town in southern (French-speaking) Belgium, in 1532. His baptismal name was Roland de Lassus, but by
the age of twelve he was already a professional chorister in the service of the Duke of Mantua, where he
adopted the Italian name by which he was and remains best known. By the 1570s he was the most famous
composer in Europe, hailed by the French poet Pierre de Ronsard as “the more than divine Orlando, who
like a bee has sipped all the most beautiful flowers of the ancients and moreover seems alone to have
stolen the harmony of the heavens to delight us with it on earth, surpassing the ancients and making himself
the unique wonder of our time.”^8 From a humanist there could scarcely be any higher praise.
FIG. 17-3 Orlando di Lasso in an engraving published in 1599 by a printer who did not know that the composer (described as
being “in the 67th year of his age”) had been dead for five years.
From 1556 until his death in 1594 (the same year as Palestrina’s), Lasso served faithfully as court and
chapel musician to the Dukes of Bavaria in Munich. Thus he was born a French speaker, was educated in
Italy, and reached his creative maturity in Germany, making him the very model of the cosmopolitan
musician of his age. But whereas the earlier cosmopolitan ideal—the ideal of the ars perfecta, brought to
its peak by Palestrina—had been ecumenical (that is, reflective of religious universalism and hence
nation-transcending), Lassus was brought up in the age of music-printing and was an eager and ambitious
child of the burgeoning age of worldly music-commerce. Thus his brand of cosmopolitanism was not
ecumenical but polyglot. He and Palestrina were complementary figures, and in many respects
incommensurable ones; between them they summed up the contradictory ideals and leanings of a musical
world in transition.
Lasso’s appointments were secular, though they did entail the writing of huge quantities of service
music, and his allegiance was always a dual one: to his patrons (with whom he was on terms of
unprecedented familiarity and from whom he actually received a patent of nobility in his own right), and