One thing is certain: in Orlando di Lasso we are dealing with one of the most important composers of the second half of the 16th century, perhaps even the greatest musician of his time. There is no doubt that a composer of his stature deserves a complete edition. The edition supervised by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities was completed in 2021. It can look back on a long and complex, sometimes difficult, but for this very reason also exciting history of its creation, a success story overall, which we will report on below. It also provides an insight into the work, the workshop so to speak, in which such an edition is created and the sometimes fascinating results that can be achieved.
About his life
As court conductor to the Bavarian dukes Albrecht and Wilhelm, Lasso made Munich a city of music of European standing for the first time. Let us begin with a brief introduction to him; Horst Leuchtmann published a biography in 1976 that is still valid today. We do not know Lasso's year of birth; it may have been 1530 or 1532; occasionally 1531 is also given, as in Annie Coeurdevey's biography of Lasso from 2003.
His youth was an adventurous one. He was probably already an excellent singer as a child, which is why he was abducted three times from the choir boys' boarding school in his home town of Mons in Wallonia. Incidentally, this was a procedure that was often practised; Lasso was by no means the only one to be abducted. Wilhelm V, Lasso's second "boss" at the Munich court, advised his counsellor Anselm Stöckl to procure choirboys in precisely this way. Lasso himself was twice recaptured by his parents; on the third abduction - in 1544, when he was 12 or 14 years old - he stayed with his kidnapper, the Viceroy of Sicily and imperial commander Ferrante Gonzaga, and followed him to Palermo and Milan.
From 1549, he lived in Naples for around three years. In 1551, at the tender age of 19 or 21, he became chapel master at San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome. He gave up this post in 1554 to visit his sick parents, whom he never found alive. He then travelled to France and probably also to England before settling as a freelance artist in Antwerp, where he moved in the circle of wealthy families and was certainly dependent on their patronage and goodwill. This period also saw the first prints of his music: motets, madrigals and chansons, demonstrating his versatility right from the start of his career.
Freelancing in Antwerp was of course not a long-term prospect. Lasso needed and sought a permanent position. His first print of motets, published by Johannes Latio in Antwerp in 1556, was dedicated to the Bishop of Arras Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, a personality of whom Friedrich Schiller drew a not exactly flattering portrait in his history of the secession of the United Netherlands from the Spanish government. Lasso probably intended to use it to apply to the choir of Arras Cathedral; perhaps he was even aiming for a position with Philip II of Spain. This did not happen; contact was established with the Munich court via Granvelle and the Fuggers; from autumn 1556 Lasso lived in Munich, as Ignace Bossuyt was able to prove.
He was paid his first salary in 1557; he received 180 guilders, which was more than the court music director Ludwig Daser, who had to be content with 150 guilders. This indicates that Lasso was in a prominent position right from the start. Nevertheless, he does not seem to have felt really comfortable in Munich at first, as various exchanges of letters testify. He was certainly not the preferred candidate of Duke Albrecht V, whose favourite composer was Cipriano de Rore.
Lasso must have soon settled in, however, as he married Regina Wäckinger, Duchess Anna's maid, as early as 1558. Albrecht will also have quickly recognised Lasso's genius; he commissioned him to compose various works, including the setting of the Seven Penitential Psalms, which are preserved in a two-volume choir book in the Bavarian State Library, lavishly illustrated page by page. A poem presumably referring to the duchess, Anna, mihi dilecta, veni, can probably also be understood as a commissioned composition by Albrecht in Lasso's early Munich period; influenced by Cipriano de Rore's style, it is composed in a highly chromatic style. And it is striking that Lasso only published the motet after Duke Albrecht's death in 1579; Albrecht therefore presumably reserved the piece for use only at court, which was quite common at the time. Incidentally, the penitential psalms were also reserved for the Munich court; nevertheless, the scribe who entered the music into the aforementioned richly illuminated choir book managed to smuggle parts of it out of the court. To the fury of the duke, who wanted the escaped offender to be punished.
Lasso's previously rather unsettled life ended with his appointment in Munich, as he lived here until his death on 14 June 1594. He was always travelling: He accompanied the Duke several times with musicians from the court chapel to imperial diets and similar political events. He also travelled alone on the duke's behalf: in 1573 to Vienna to visit Emperor Maximilian II to present him with gifts from Albrecht V, or to recruit singers and musicians for the Munich court. And in 1571, Lasso went to Paris; however, he had to promise the Duke that he would return to Munich. An increase in his salary will probably have made Lasso's return easier. The last major journey of the composer, who had become very devout in his old age, was probably a pilgrimage to Loreto in the autumn of 1585, from which a votive tablet with a canon on Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis has survived, which was only discovered a few years ago but could still be included in the complete edition (vol. 11, p. 195 and p. CXIV).
Despite his many travels, Munich was the centre of Lasso's life. The aforementioned marriage to Regina Wäckinger, which also produced two children, Ferdinand and Rudolph, who later became musicians, bears witness to this. Lasso's friendship with Hereditary Prince Wilhelm, which is documented in numerous letters to the prince, also bears witness to this. He became court conductor in 1562 or 1563. In 1567, Lasso acquired his first house on the Platzl in the Graggenau, followed by a second house in 1581; both stand on the site where the Orlando House was built in 1899/1900. When he was offered the position of court conductor in Dresden in 1580, he turned it down. He was getting old, the 48- or 50-year-old told the Saxon Elector Augustus, and he also owned land. In fact, Lasso owned properties in Schöngeising and Putzbrunn in addition to his two Munich houses. So it is safe to say that he was a wealthy man.
In 1590 or 1591, he suffered a health breakdown, perhaps a stroke. He survived and was able to continue composing because the ducal personal physician Thomas Mermann treated him; some of his most important compositions, such as the Lagrime di San Pietro, date from the time after this. However, his wife Regina reported in a letter to William V in 1595 that he had "not always been as cheerful as var Recht frelig warn alzeit stil vnd vil geredt von seinem dot". Lasso's cheerfulness was therefore over; in his last years he must have been melancholic, if not depressed; he was obviously facing imminent death.
To the work
Lasso was extraordinarily productive. The complete edition comprises an impressive 47 volumes. The catalogue of works lists 1197 compositions first printed between 1555 and 1622 and 162 contemporary works that have only survived in manuscript form; Lasso's authorship can only be doubted for a few movements. 1197 printed compositions, which have survived in a total of 483 currently known prints from the years 1555 to 1687 - not counting the many instrumental arrangements - that is immense. His works were published in Munich, Nuremberg, Paris, Antwerp, Venice, Rome, Milan, Strasbourg and elsewhere. Some of his plays were printed in 25 or more editions; as Leuchtmann writes in his biography, publishers fought lawsuits over his works. The manuscript distribution of Lasso's œuvre is also exorbitant; the Orlando di Lasso database, his works in manuscript transmission, currently lists over 1500 sources.
Lasso covered all the main contemporary musical genres: he composed more than 500 motets, as well as around 175 madrigals and other compositions with Italian texts, around 150 French chansons, almost 100 German songs and psalm settings. 70 masses have been attributed to him; some are not demonstrably by him, while the authorship of a number of them is unclear. His oeuvre also includes over 100 Magnificats, four Passions and many smaller church works such as chants for the Mass Propers and hymns. Lasso specialised in cycles such as the Prophetiae Sibyllarum and the Penitential Psalms, as well as the Lagrime di San Pietro, plus readings for Christmas and from the biblical Book of Job and Lamentations according to Jeremiah.
He had all the stylistic means of his time at his disposal. He mixes different styles and movements within one work; he relies on contrasts: sophisticated imitation stands next to block-like homophonic compositional style; performance on long note values is set against rapidly descending phrases; syllabic declamation and broadly swinging melismatics can be juxtaposed; extremely high pitches can be set against very low pitches; expressive voices are synchronised with calm voices, etc. In view of these findings, my predecessor in the Lasso edition, Horst Leuchtmann, described Lasso's music as "soulful madness".
The stylistic variety serves not least the interpretation of the text, for which Lasso was highly regarded by his contemporaries - the composer and theorist Michael Praetorius praised him for this. He also often transcended the stylistic boundaries of contemporary genres. In motets, for example, stylistic devices borrowed from the madrigal can be found time and again: in the madrigal, the text is usually set to music in a very emotional way; so-called "madrigalisms" intensify the interpretation of the text in the motet. In addition, he also arranged German songs in the style of simple French or Italian movement types. He thus became a pioneer of the internationalisation of the style in the period around 1600.
To the complete edition of Lasso's works
In the early 19th century, the music of the 16th century began to be studied intensively; Palestrina's works in particular were regarded as the ideal church music at the time. There is still an unbroken performance tradition for Palestrina in Rome today and he has never been forgotten; this is probably one of the reasons why his music was recognised as exemplary and why a complete edition was finally dedicated to him, the 33 volumes of which were published between 1862 and 1907. Lasso did not experience a continuous performance tradition. However, he was never completely forgotten. Numerous works have survived well into the 17th century; the last print of one of his masses dates back to 1687. Compositions from his pen are used as examples in many works of music theory; in 1765, nine years after the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Paolucci described a two-part movement by Lasso in a textbook. And as early as the 18th century, compositions by the Munich court Kapellmeister that had been handed down in individual parts were written in score by interested musicians for study purposes.
The first ideas for a complete edition emerged in the middle of the 19th century, but all of them failed. The doctor, clergyman and musicologist Carl Proske wanted to edit Lasso's motets; in 1842, he wrote scores of almost all of the more than 500 pieces from individual parts. The original sources for the music of the 16th century consist almost exclusively of individual parts; contemporary scores are the great exception. Proske used the Magnum opus musicum as a model for his scores. This print is a kind of "complete edition" of Lasso's motets, which his sons Ferdinand and Rudolph had published in 1604 with the Munich publisher Nikolaus Heinrich in six books with the individual parts.
Proske was one of the central figures of the church music reform movement in the 19th century, which regarded the music of the 16th century as ideal for the liturgy. To write around 500 motets in score within a year: that is a tremendous achievement when you realise that the motets in the now completed complete edition comprise 11 volumes and a total of around 2000 pages of music. Proske himself was only able to publish a few pieces. Franz Xaver Witt, who was also a supporter of the reform movement, made an attempt to publish the complete Lasso edition with Breitkopf und Härtel in 1863, but the publisher saw little chance of success.
Further initiatives failed, including that of Julius Joseph Maier. He was the curator of the music collection of the Royal Court Library (now the Bavarian State Library) and in 1858, like Proske before him, had plans for an edition of Lasso's motets. It was not until 1881 that the publishing house Breitkopf und Härtel showed interest, as the Palestrina edition begun in 1862 by this same publishing house was apparently successful. However, financing Lasso proved to be difficult: calls for subscriptions for a planned complete edition met with little interest. A letter from Maier to the publisher dated 11 February 1882, which is now kept in the Bischöfliche Zentralbibliothek in Regensburg, states that the task could not be carried out without help from the Bavarian government. However, the government could not be won over to the plan. And in Maier's letter, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences was brought into play for the first time in connection with a Lasso edition. But here, too, Maier took a dim view: he wrote to the publisher: "The funds available to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences are so meagre that they are hardly sufficient for the purely scientific endeavours that this institution alone can undertake." So in 1882 there was no chance of getting the Academy on board.
It was not until 1894 that a complete edition could be started. Maier's successor as curator of the Royal Library's music collection, Adolf Sandberger, who would later become the first full professor of musicology at Munich University, and the founder and director of the Regensburg Church Music School, Franz Xaver Haberl, were able to begin the edition in 1894, the 300th anniversary of Lasso's death, in agreement with the publisher. By 1927, 21 volumes had been published, the so-called Old Lasso Complete Edition.
Four corpora of works were published: Sandberger published the compositions with Italian texts in five volumes, the French chansons in three volumes and finally the German songs in two volumes. Haberl, a pastor by profession, musician and musicologist and, like Proske and Witt, a representative of the 16th century orientated church music reform, edited ten of the eleven volumes of motets. He was able to draw on Carl Proske's scores; his work was therefore not in vain after all and Haberl praises Proske's achievement in the introduction to the first volume of motets. Sandberger published the eleventh volume after Haberl's death. With the 21 volumes, about half of Lasso's works had been published. The edition was cancelled for financial reasons. From today's perspective, this marked the end of a bold endeavour, as the edition plan contained in the second volume of the edition shows that, ultimately, there was still no complete overview of Lasso's entire oeuvre.
It was only after the Second World War that the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities took up the Lasso edition. The musicologist Rudolf von Ficker, Sandberger's successor as professor of musicology at Munich University, was elected to the Academy in 1949 and subsequently founded the Music Historical Commission, and as early as 1951 the Academy's yearbook reported on endeavours to continue the Lasso edition, but this was not possible with Breitkopf and Härtel. This is why we read in the 1955 Academy Yearbook about negotiations with the Bärenreiter publishing house, which finally published the so-called New Series in 26 volumes from 1956 to 1995, comprising everything that was missing from the Old Complete Edition, i.e. the 70 masses, the more than 100 Magnificat, the various cycles, etc. The New Series is based on the complete printed catalogue of Lasso's works. The New Series is based on all the printed and important manuscript source material. Each volume contains an introduction to the works included, the editorial guidelines, an index and a description of the sources, a critical report and finally an illustrated section. It thus fulfils the requirements of a modern critical complete edition.
However, the old volumes produced between 1894 and 1927 did not meet these standards, as only one (and usually not the best) source was used for each edition. A revision of the old edition was therefore considered in order to raise it to a level that meets today's requirements. This new edition was then included in the Breitkopf und Härtel publishing house's programme. Horst Leuchtmann began preparatory source research in 1958, as the Academy's yearbook reports. This work ultimately led to the publication of a three-volume bibliography of Lasso's printed music in 2001.
Between 1968 and 1990, Leuchtmann published eight revised volumes of the old edition; only two volumes with works in Italian were not written by him. Leuchtmann also wrote the definitive biography of Lasso and edited his letters to Prince Wilhelm, to name just two of his most important publications. In 1996, it became my task first to finalise the bibliography of Lasso's prints and then to edit the eleven volumes of motets in the old edition. The first volume of motets was published in 2003, and the eleventh and final volume will be available in print in spring 2022.
Scientific approach
How do you create a scholarly edition? In principle, the process is simple: the first step is to collect the sources for a piece. Then you compare the sources and select the best one from the prints and manuscripts, and finally you edit the piece using this source. This can be the oldest print; if this is not of good quality, you go back to a later print or manuscript. In Lasso's case, we are fortunate that there is performance material in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek that he used himself, in which he also entered corrections to the text underlay himself in one case. The image below right shows the "Et Dum fleret monumentum" written in small, delicate handwriting. Unfortunately, we do not have any autograph scores by him.
Once the musical text has been compiled, a critical report is written which lists the various differences between the sources. This is done by making an exact comparison of all the sources consulted. Under certain circumstances, the critical report can be quite extensive. As Lasso is extremely widely known, it could happen that up to 30 sources had to be worked through for one piece. This was the exception, but more than 20 sources, occasionally quite poor ones, were not uncommon.
Finally, an introduction is to be written, which usually reports on special features of pieces or their use, as well as on groups of pieces, questions of sources and transmission, etc. The text section of the volumes also contains an exact and often extensive list of the sources consulted; some pages contain facsimiles; the introductions of the original editors are printed and annotated; at the end of each volume there is an index of pieces and a bibliography.
Here is an example of how the work is carried out and the often exciting results it can lead to. The illustration on the bottom left of the next page shows an excerpt from a Salve Regina from Mus.ms. 2748 of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; the piece is dated 14 August 1581, so we are looking at the oldest source for the composition. The manuscript belongs to the performance material of the Munich court chapel, the piece is preserved here without errors apart from minimalia, the source is the basis for the edition in volume 13 of the Complete Edition.
But let's take a closer look at the manuscript. The text begins with "Salve Regina, mater misericordiae", which is the Latin Salve Regina text still in use today. In the first line of each part, however, it is noticeable that the text is very closely underlined in places, and the writing also appears pale in these places. The notes are also tighter there and paler than usual. Obviously corrections have been made. Originally there was probably a different, shorter text and also fewer notes in this place; less space was therefore needed.
When viewing the source in the original, it was possible to recognise what was originally written: instead of "Salve Regina, mater misericordiae", it read "Salve, Regina misericordiae", "mater" was missing. How did this come about? At the Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, a liturgical reform was decided upon, which was implemented in the dioceses over the following decades - not always without problems. Various liturgical texts were changed, including the Salve Regina, at the beginning of which the word "mater" was added. The new liturgy was introduced at the Munich court at the behest of Duke Wilhelm V between 1581 and 1583. As part of the liturgical reform, Lasso had to provide numerous new works in order to adapt the music to the new liturgy.
Marian devotion increased considerably and he therefore composed numerous Marian antiphons such as the Salve Regina, especially during the period of liturgical reform at court. Apparently, however, Lasso did not yet have the new text, which had been changed at the beginning, at his disposal; he therefore set the old text to music and had it entered in the choir book. And after it was realised that the version did not correspond to the reformed text, corrections were made in the source. In the complete edition, I have edited Lasso's original version, i.e. the setting of "Salve, Regina misericordiae". Naturally, the second version is then reproduced as a musical example in the critical report. The additions to the original version are placed in brackets.
This Salve Regina Lasso in particular, apparently the most popular and widespread from his pen, has undergone a series of further changes. I will mention just two examples. In 1582, the Salve Regina was printed for the first time by Adam Berg in Munich; the text "Salve Regina, mater misericordiae" adopted at the Council of Trent is underlaid. Lasso's music was not only popular and widespread among Catholics, but also among Protestants. However, not all of the texts were adopted in the new denomination. Texts relating to Mary in particular were therefore changed. Pictured is the copy of the first printing of Lasso's Salve Regina from the Protestant Latin school in Saalfeld, Thuringia. The original Catholic text was deleted and replaced by hand with text that was suitable for Protestant services; at the beginning, "Salve regina, mater misericordiae" was changed to "O Domine Jesu, fons misericordiae".
However, Protestant rewordings are not only found handwritten in prints or even in manuscripts. In the Nuremberg printing house of Katharina Gerlach, our Salve Regina has a Protestant underlay of "Salve aeterne pater misericordiae". However, a copy of the Nuremberg print from 1588 shows a rewording of the originally Protestant text. It was in the possession of the Jesuit College in Hildesheim. As the Jesuits were not satisfied with the Protestant Salve aeterne pater, the Protestant text was re-catholicised. A total of seven text versions have survived for our piece: the older version and the reformed Catholic version, as well as five adaptations for use in Protestant church services, which ultimately shows that Lasso was highly valued across denominational boundaries.
The Salve Regina discussed here is certainly an outstanding case. But in other respects, too, one constantly encounters something new: time and again, one finds texts that in some cases deviate significantly from Lasso's original. Love songs are transformed into sacred motets. Parodies of liturgical texts are toned down. Hearty texts that talk about drinking can be replaced by liturgical texts, etc. The following thought process is often behind this: The music is good, but the text is bad. A "better" text makes the piece "better" overall.
When pieces are transformed by changing or replacing the text, as it were, a new field of reception naturally opens up. At the same time, however, the newly underlaid text often does not quite fit the music; this is a particular problem with Lasso, as he is a master of musical text interpretation. It is also often possible to trace the printing history quite precisely, when it becomes clear that a particular print is clearly based on one published in another city by another publisher. This can be seen not least in striking errors, although it must be said that the overall quality of the prints with Lasso's music is quite high, apart from a few outliers.
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What else do you do as a contributor to a complete edition? Of course, you publish results in scientific journals that have not been included in a complete edition volume. You give presentations at academic conferences and engage in dialogue with colleagues. I was able to help organise and host various conferences myself: In 1994, on the 400th anniversary of Lasso's death at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2017, also there, on the aforementioned richly illuminated codex with Lasso's penitential psalms. There were also opportunities to teach about Lasso at the universities of Munich, Augsburg and Vienna, as well as at the Munich University of Music and at the Department of Early Music at the University of the Arts in Bremen.
Finally, it is crucial to communicate the results of the work and its significance to a wide audience and thus bring it out of the ivory tower. I have written about Lasso several times in the in-house journal Akademie Aktuell of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and I have contributed to the Academy's media centre on various occasions. I also give public lectures. I have presented a volume of the Lasso edition in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the database Orlando di Lasso, his works in manuscript transmission. This took place in conjunction with concerts by the Munich vocal ensemble Die Singphoniker, who presented newly released CDs of Lasso's music in the Academy's packed plenary hall, where I worked in the background and provided contributions for the CD booklets.
When the daily press then reacts with articles to events such as those just described, or when reference is made to academic conferences on the radio - as happened before the 2017 Penitential Psalm Conference - then it becomes clear that you are not working for the bookshelf or even for the drawer. The aforementioned collaboration with practical musicians is also essential. You learn from each other through exchange; it becomes clear that theory and practice belong together.
Last year, 2021, the Lasso Complete Edition was finalised. I have to thank the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and above all the project leaders Theodor Göllner and Ulrich Konrad. The event was celebrated with a small symposium and a concert. It remains for me to wish that the edition fulfils the expectations placed in it.
