Roland de Lassus

It is more than twenty-five years since the last comprehensive, up-to-date biography of Lassus appeared. Horst Leuchtmann's Orlando di Lasso: Sein Leben (Wiesbaden, 1976) and its companion volume that collected Lassus's correspondence, Orlando di Lasso: Seine Briefe (Wiesbaden, 1977), were definitive when they were published, and their ample documentation and commentary remain the essential foundation for any serious study of the composer. Leuchtmann did not attempt a life-and-works study, in part because the Lassus collected edition was still in progress, with a large quantity of his music still unedited at the time. Such a comprehensive study had previously been ventured by Wolfgang Boetticher in his Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit (Kassel, 1956). Boetticher's work on sources and bibliography was and is indispensable, but the biographical parts of his study were often incorrect, as Leuchtmann demonstrated, and Boetticher's style study and attempted chronology of the music were frequently questionable if not demonstrably wrong. A new edition of his book (Wilhelmshaven, 1999) is little more than an unaltered reprint (see my review in Musik in Bayern, 59 (2000), 188-94).

Lassus studies have of course moved on since Leuchtmann and Boetticher. The collected edition is now complete, and revisions of the older volumes are well under way. Other substantial editions of the music have been published, and innumerable special studies have appeared, many of them as the result of conferences held in the anniversary years of 1982 and 1994. These conferences took place in Germany, Belgium, and the United States, where much of the current work on Lassus has been carried on. It is in a way surprising, then, that a new life-and-works study should come from France, which, despite the estimable contributions of scholars such as François Lesure, has not previously been in the forefront of Lassus scholarship.

Annie Coeurdevey's Roland de Lassus changes that picture decisively. Here we have in Lassus's native tongue an account of his life and music that takes into consideration all of the latest research and synthesizes it into a connected, coherent picture. Coeurdevey divides her book into two main sections. The first, titled 'A Man, an Oeuvre', is a chronological account of Lassus's life, interspersed with discussions of the music composed or published in each period. The second, 'The Musical Language', is a more detailed examination of the elements of Lassus's musical style. A comprehensive bibliography, a detailed list of works, and indexes of names and compositions round out the volume.

Annie Coeurdevey has been a research associate at the Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours for some years, and her publications include Bibliographie des œuvres poétiques de Clément Marot (Paris, 1997), Histoire du langage musical occidental (Paris, 1998), and the online Catalogue de la musique vocale de langue française (ca. 1480-1600) (www.cesr.univtours.fr/Ricercar/sbd/index.htm). From these studies to a book focused on Lassus is a logical progression. Her book demonstrates an extensive, detailed knowledge of all of his music, as well as full command of the secondary sources, old and new.

Roland de Lassus is not addressed solely or even primarily to specialists in music, though they will find much of value in it. It is implicit in the book itself, and the author has also told me more directly in personal communications, that the first section especially is aimed at an intelligent, cultivated general reader. It discusses the music frequently, but not in a technical way, and it contains no music examples. These are used copiously in the second section, the detailed discussion of Lassus's musical language, which may go beyond a general reader's abilities or interests if that reader does not read music.

We know Lassus's personality and character much more intimately than those of any of his contemporaries, thanks especially to the remarkable series of letters he wrote in the 1570s to the heir apparent to the dukedom of Bavaria, who reigned as Wilhelm V from 1579 until his abdication in 1597. Coeurdevey has skilfully used these revealing letters to present a portrait of Lassus the man, taking them in conjunction with the known facts about his life. The earliest biography of him appeared in Heinrich Pantaleon, Prosopographiae heroum atque illustrium virorum totius Germaniae, pars tertia (Basle, 1566). It was written by Samuel Quickelberg, at the time court librarian to Lassus's patron, Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, and Lassus himself was presumably Quickelberg's source. The first part of Coeurdevey's biography parses Quickelberg word by word, expanding that account with information about Lassus's early years from other sources and commenting on it in the light of recent studies as well as what we know about the later turns Lassus's life took. A good example of her approach is her discussion of Quickelberg's phrase 'ex scola ter furto sublatus' (three times he was secretly abducted from the school), referring to the kidnapping of Lassus in 1544 from the cathedral school at his birthplace, Mons (now in Belgium), on account of his beautiful voice. Ferdinand (Ferrante) I de Gonzaga, Viceroy of Sicily, took the boy with him to Italy, where Lassus spent the next ten years before returning north to Antwerp and then to Munich, where he served the Bavarian court from 1556 to his death.

About the psychological results of the kidnapping Coeurdevey says:

There are certainly shadowy zones in these few words, perhaps spilled out willingly, about a wound—the kidnapping from his native land—never truly healed, but about which the man, matured by the fluctuations of an adventurous youth and the snubs due to his social position, will not let a word escape. What he will allow afterwards to be glimpsed of himself, one would be tempted to describe as a shell [carapace], but itself with two sides: on one side an extroverted character, pleasant conversation, lively humour, sometimes destructive, a real gift as a comedian, exuberance pushed to burlesque, but also, on the other side, haughty pride, self absorption, bitterness, anxiety, and finally depression—the cracking of the shell?

(p. 28).

This all rings true with what we know of Lassus in his later years, as Coeurdevey goes on to demonstrate in detail. Others have reached some of the same conclusions about his personality, but nowhere have they been presented and documented more concisely and effectively. I should emphasize that Coeurdevey does not simply summarize the work of others. She also puts forward new ideas and interpretations, for instance when she discusses the reasons for Lassus's acceptance of the position in Munich. She suggests that he responded to the challenge posed by Albrecht V's ambition to make his chapel one of the most brilliant in Europe, and that this motive might be balanced with Leuchtmann's hypothesis that he was motivated by financial need and his inability to find a patron in Antwerp (p. 81).

Through the biographical section Coeurdevey, when continually referring to Lassus's compositions from each period, assesses their significance in his life and their impact on the world at large. She notes the continued success of his early madrigal books even after his departure from Italy, and she points out that 'it is incontestably Lassus who introduced madrigalism into the French repertory' (p. 65). When she discusses the music of his early years in Munich, she suggests that along with Albrecht's appreciation of his gifts and the honour paid him by inscribing the Penitential Psalms, the Lectiones ex propheta Job, and the Prophetiae sibyllarum in elaborately decorated manuscripts, there came his chagrin and annoyance that his best work could not circulate publicly because Albrecht reserved it for his own private use. Coeurdevey reasonably suggests that this could be one of the reasons for Lassus's discontent during this period, which recently discovered letters have documented (see Ignace Bossuyt, 'Lassos erste Jahre in München (1556-1559): Eine "cosa non riuscita"?', in Festschrift für Horst Leuchtmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Tutzing, 1993), 55-67).

Coeurdevey proceeds in this manner through Lassus's entire life and musical production, noting how his style and practice in the various genres developed over time, and frequently discussing individual compositions as examples. She also traces the development of his personality to the extent that this is possible. In the brief 'Interlude' that separates the biography and the style study, she notes that drawing a psychological portrait of Lassus is hazardous, even though thanks to his letters we know him much more intimately than any of his predecessors. One can at least see the development from the proud youth into the morose man avid for money and honours to the old man anxious about his soul. She specifically disavows any possibility of explaining the man by his music, since even in Lassus's time any kind of artistic production was seen as the work of a craftsman, in which the artist's life had no part. Individual styles nonetheless became markedly developed in the sixteenth century, Lassus's more than anyone else's, and the great diversity of his style is the subject of the analytical portion of the book.

The style study itself is divided into three chapters: 'The Management of the Musical Material', 'The Management of Time', and 'Relationship to the Text', illustrated with over a hundred music examples. A brief introduction to this section notes that we know nothing about Lassus's musical apprenticeship, but that his earliest published works already show a skilled composer of enormous talent. The first chapter deals with all aspects of the relationship of voices in polyphony, beginning with a brief introduction to the subject for the uninitiated. Coeurdevey first develops the distinction between homophony and independent contrapuntal lines, which Lassus exploited for expressive purposes as well as for variety in almost all of his music. She continues with a discussion of the motet style, in which change of texture is one of Lassus's important rhetorical devices. She points out that Lassus followed tradition in building his motets on points of imitation and voices with individual profiles, but that he moved towards a freer treatment in some of his later works (such as the second set of Lectiones ex propheta Job, 1582) that went beyond the bounds of motet style. Such freedom, she observes, also may be seen in Lassus's approach to imitative and cantus firmus techniques. With regard to the deployment of voices within the total range available from bass to treble, she suggests that Lassus is the source of Andrea Gabrieli's responsorial technique, specifically in the way that Lassus divides a single chorus of six or more voices into two groups that respond to each other at short intervals of time. This practice, she observes, is well established in motets he published in 1564, just after the time when Gabrieli was an organist at the Munich court. Gabrieli's style clearly had other antecedents in addition to Lassus, but it is appropriate to note Lassus's contribution.

Coeurdevey's discussion of Lassus's modal language includes a number of cogent observations. After noting the inherent paradox in applying a concept developed for a single melodic line to a polyphonic complex, she surveys theories of mode from the sixteenth century to the present. She seems to find the notion of 'tonal type' developed by Harold S. Powers ('Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 428-70) the most persuasive and useful in examining Lassus's music. She suggests that the reduction to three modal types proposed by Cristle Collins Judd ('Modal Types and Ut, Re, Mi Tonalities', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 45 (1992), 428-64) obscures the sensitivity with which Lassus distinguished the various tonal types. In connection with his modal practice, Coeurdevey brings up such issues as register, cadences, and 'modal ethos'; she asserts with good reason that the latter is not to be found in Lassus. The entire section on mode, though brief, is carefully thought through and well supplied with appropriate music examples.

Consideration of mode leads to the complementary idea of harmonic language. Coeurdevey confronts this thorny notion head-on, asserting that while harmonic progressions do not establish a tonal centre in late sixteenth-century music, they are indisputably present at the surface level, so much so that one must conclude that a composer such as Lassus was thinking in those terms. Basses that move in ascending or descending fifths are common in his music, and they alternate with progressions best described as contrapuntal, that is, generated by stepwise movement. Once again Coeurdevey provides well-chosen examples. Chromaticism is the final topic in the chapter on Lassus's musical language. Here her basic observation is that direct chromaticism (e.g. G-G# in the same voice) is less common than indirect (the false relation of G and G| in two different voices in successive chords). Lassus in fact used chromaticism sparingly, and pieces like the Prophetiae sibyllarum are exceptional in his large output.

The chapter on 'The Management of Time' considers two basic elements, rhythm and form. The opening section on 'Rhythm, meter, and tempo' surveys later sixteenth-century practice in these areas and Lassus's particular usages. Coeurdevey's examples of his ternary metre within notated binary and of the independent metric organization of individual voices agree with Horst Leuchtmann's observations in 'Correct and Incorrect Accentuation in Lasso's Music' (Orlando di Lasso Studies (Cambridge, 1999), 227-46). Both authors observe that modern editions with regular bar-lines obscure the rhythmic freedom and metric independence of the separate voices. Coeurdevey continues with remarks about symbolism in ternary metre, the energy supplied by dotted rhythms, and the rhythms that are characteristic of specific languages. In the latter connection, she notes the penetration of the villanella style into a number of motets. The question of musique mesurée à l'antique also arises. Lassus met the practitioners of this style in Paris in 1571, but he never applied it rigorously in his own chansons. The same is largely true of some motets in which he echoed the metrical rigour of the settings of Horatian odes by composers like Petrus Tritonius from the early sixteenth century. Coeurdevey notes the theatrical associations of some of these motets, especially those that we know Lassus composed for Stefano Tucci's Christus judex.

Under the rubric 'Form' Coeurdevey first considers how Lassus, like many of his contemporaries, uses the initial motif of a polyphonic work as an element that can be recalled, not in the sense of development so much as varied repetition. She goes so far as to suggest that Lassus's use of motifs foreshadowed the later motivic work of the Baroque and Classical eras. Her examples give some support to this notion, though a full justification would require exploration at greater length. She observes that larger periodic structures, such as strophic and refrain forms, are found mainly in Lassus's vernacular settings, though the 1585 offertory cycle has many repetitions of final sections because of the nature of its texts. On a larger scale, cantus firmus and parody structures in multi-movement compositions impose a structural unity of their own. The last section of this chapter succinctly explores some of the possibilities Lassus takes up in his masses, Magnificats, and Nunc dimittis settings based on polyphonic models. In conclusion she states: 'One would be tempted to affirm that all of the procedures of parody, that is, working out from a structure, do not differ fundamentally from what Beethoven, seizing on Diabelli's little waltz, did in his Thirty-three Variations, Op. 120' (p. 491)—a seemingly extravagant claim, but one that on further reflection has a lot of truth in it.

Coeurdevey begins the concluding chapter on 'Relationship to the Text' by noting that all the examples in the preceding chapters show that Lassus's music is determined by the texts he set, which has been a truism of Lassus criticism from his own time onwards. But this is an imprecise formulation of the situation, which Coeurdevey goes on to consider more carefully. Two main possibilities emerge, the first of which is the 'imitation of nature' by music. Looking or moving upwards or downwards are obvious possibilities that Lassus illustrates by ascent or descent in the music. In fact, any kind of movement, anything that flows, runs, or turns, can be suggested in music, and the author cites numerous examples of Lassus doing exactly that. The same is true for feelings that are elated or depressed, for laughing and sighing, all of which he expresses musically. In these situations, Coeurdevey states, the signified generates the signifier. The reverse of this process can also occur, when a musical figure can suggest intellectual or affective content to the listener, even when the figure has no inherent connection with such content. The melodic semitone often conveys anguish for Lassus and other composers, perhaps because of the precedent of the mi-fa-mi figure in Josquin's Miserere mei, Dei. The semitone, however, has no necessary relationship to that or any other emotion. Coeurdevey goes on to list many other instances in Lassus's music of specific musical devices or techniques used to suggest affective elements in the text. None of this is new, but Coeurdevey presents it clearly and concisely with well-chosen examples.

The penultimate section of this chapter is headed 'The discovery of humour in music'. In it the author suggests that although the earlier sixteenth century produced many lighthearted, playful pieces of music, 'the coherence of the musical material excludes everything that could be considered derision, even frivolity. It lacks that touch of perversity that produces the unexpected, the disconcerting, the uncommon' (p. 516). She then proceeds to cite a number of examples from Lassus's works which do just that. One may debate whether Lassus in fact 'discovered' humour in music, but Coeurdevey provides some excellent examples of that quality, drawn from all four languages that Lassus set. The chapter concludes with an appreciative survey of his settings of French texts.

The bibliography of works cited is both comprehensive and up to date. The only major omission was published too recently to have been included, the magisterial three-volume Lassus-Verzeichnis (LV), that is, Horst Leuchtmann and Bernhold Schmid, Orlando di Lasso in zeitgenössischen Drücken 1555-1687 (Kassel, 2001). If she had had access to this resource, Coeurdevey's work in preparing her own work-list would have been much easier. The information in LV was largely available to her from other sources, but it had to be laboriously compiled. Coeurdevey did this and presents a list that corresponds very closely to that in LV, with only a few trifling errors. Her list is organized somewhat like that of LV, with a chronological list of printed sources followed by a list of works that are transmitted only in manuscripts. Under each printed source the individual compositions are listed that were first editions in that source. The works in manuscript are sorted into categories, with approximate dates given for each work or manuscript. One cannot readily find a particular composition in Coeurdevey's list without knowing its publication date, but the list does give a clear picture of the wide circulation in print of Lassus's music in his own time, and it can also serve as a concise chronology of his works, since he appears to have published much of his music soon after it was composed.

It seems that a majority of books published nowadays are plagued by errors that should have been corrected during production, and this one is no exception. Here most of the errors are trivial, such as omitted or incorrect page numbers in the footnotes. Only a few affect the substance of their discussions, and these also are not major. On page 337 Coeurdevey states that the contents of Sacrae cantiones . . . quatuor vocum (Munich, 1585) are modally ordered. They are indeed grouped by tonal type (system, clefs, and final), but the resulting ordering is not in the numerical order of the modes. On page 382 she states that the Magnum Opus Musicum (Munich, 1604), the posthumous compilation of Lassus's motets by his sons, is the only source for seventy-six motets. It is indeed the only printed source, but fifteen of them also survive in manuscripts from Lassus's Hofkapelle now held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, so only sixty-one are transmitted solely in the Magnum Opus. A somewhat more serious misreading appears on page 510, where it is stated that Lassus wrote a succession of parallel fifths. The reference is to Example 87, from the motet Oculi mei semper ad Dominum (1585), bars 26-30. However, that example correctly shows not parallel fifths but parallel fourths in a succession of 6/3 chords in closed position. The author seems to have misread the transposed G clef on the second staff of the example. I am quite ready to believe that this was an inadvertent slip, of the sort that one looks back on and says, 'How could I have done something so absurd?'

To sum up, this is a valuable book that gathers in the most recent work on Orlandus Lassus and presents it in a coherent and readable summary. Annie Coeurdevey does not hesitate to offer interpretations and conclusions, sometimes provocative indeed, based on her synthesis of what we now know about Lassus. She deserves our thanks for undertaking such a large project and completing it so successfully, all the more so since nothing else like it is available. An English translation, please!