Another jokey piece is the one shown in Ex. 17-12 that begins “Audite nova” (“Hear the news!”) in
the solemn manner of a Latin motet, but that quickly shifts over to a preposterous tale about a dimwitted
farmer (“Der Bawr von Eselskirchen,” literally “The farmer from Ass-Church”) and his honking goose,
the latter rendered musically in the manner we have come by now to expect. The song comes from a
volume of miscellaneous items in various languages that Lasso published in Munich in 1573. German
songs suffered the most precipitous decline in tone between the heyday of the Tenorlied, about a half or
quarter-century earlier, and the rustic, mock-homespun Lieder of Lasso’s time, which were really
villanelle set to German words. The nobler Tenorlied, as we will see in the next chapter, had gone out of
the secular tradition into a new sacred domain.
Finally, as if to atone for representing so imposing and varied an output as Lasso’s with fluff (albeit
the kind of fluff no one else could have composed), it is time to consider a serious Latin setting. But here,
too, there were genres in which Lasso stood virtually alone by virtue of his wit and intellectual elan. One
of them was the setting of classical or classicistic texts, the latter being the work of humanist writers in
imitation of the classics. His most notorious work in this category was the Prophetiae Sibyllarum (“The
sibylline prophecies”), published posthumously in 1600 but perhaps written as early as 1560. (They were
performed before King Charles IX of France, whom they astonished, in 1571.)
EX. 17-12 Orlando di Lasso, Audite nova