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‘Per mia particolare devotione’: Orlando di Lasso's Lagrime di San Pietro and Catholic Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Munich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Alexander J. Fisher
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Abstract

In his magisterial Lagrime di San Pietro (1595) Orlando di Lasso composed a cycle of 20 madrigals on texts by Luigi Tansillo on the theme of St Peter's denial of Christ and his subsequent remorse, capped by a Latin motet (‘Vide homo‘) representing the rebuke of the crucified Christ. The Lagrime may be seen as a penitential gesture on Lasso's part, but a textual and musical analysis also suggests numerous parallels with contemporary Catholic spiritual exercises, particularly those of Ignatius of Loyola and Luis of Granada. The cycle thus takes its place in a broader Counter-Reformation discourse of meditation and penance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 132 , Issue 2 , 2007 , pp. 167 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2007

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References

1 ‘AL SANTISSIMO PADRE, NOSTRO SIGNORE CLEMENTE OTTAVO, PONTEfice ottimo, massimo. Considerando io, beatissimo padre, e clementissimo signore, la sublimità del grado, nel quale Iddio, per beneficio del popolo christiano, ha posta la S.ta V. & insieme risguardando la bassezza della persona, e fortuna mia, non prenderei, ardire di inuiare à V. S.ta questi miei canti, temendo, che nō mi fosse dal mondo ad impudentia, e temerità attribuito, l'offerir’ vn dono di cosi poco valore, al più degno e più eccelso personaggio che viua in terra, se non mi fosse da più persone di fede degne stato riferto, come la S.ta V. non solamente non disprezza i concenti musicali mà bene spesso le sante orecche sue à quelli porger suole, che con graue e decente harmonia, le lodi di dio, e' delli santi suoi esprimono, e lamente, dalle sollecitudini, e cure mondane ritirandola, à maggior deuotione inuitano. Onde ponendo io giù il timore, con ogni riuerenza maggiore à V. S. ta mando, e dedico le lagrime di S. Pietro, rime composte vn tempo fa dal signor luigi Tansillo, e' da me, per mia particolare deuotione, in questa mia hormai graue età vestite di armonia, le quali, mi gioua sperare nella somma bontà di V. Beatitudine, che da lei saranno benignamente accettate, e forse ancora volentieri vdite, se non per che cosi meritino, al meno per il soggetto loro, che è di S. Pietro principe degl' Apostoli, del quale V. S. ta è il vero e legitimo successore, supplico V. S. ta humilißimamente, che, à guisa di chi d'vn suo chiarißimo lume, per mette, ch' altri, vn piccolo lume accenda, non si sdegni che queste mie fati che, portando in fronte il chiarißimo, e santißimo nome di V. Beatitudine, e riceuendo da quello alcun splendore, si acquistino appresso i buoni, credito, & openione d'esser degne che si, cantino, e semino. la M.ta del signor Iddio conceda à noi miseri mortali, che alli santißimi pensieri, e sapientißimi consigli di V. S. ta questi trauagliati tempi tanto necessarij, corrisponda sempre il desiato essito. Co'l quai fine à V. S. ta bacio con ogni humilità i santißimi piedi, e prego felicità perpetua. Di Monacho alli 24. di Maggio, nel 1594. di V. S.taGoogle Scholar

Humilißimo e deuotißimo seruoGoogle Scholar

Orlando Lasso.’Google Scholar

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/jrma/fkm006Google Scholar

2 ‘Wie er dann die selbig zeit so vil vnd streng komponirdt hat […] das er ain mal wie ich pin von geising haim kumen mich nit hat wöllen kennen oder mit mir oder schir mit niemandt wellen Ratten […] vnd den her dockhtor merman etlichmal zu im geschickht der in mit götlicher hilf nach ötlich tagen widerumben zu im selber hat gepracht ist aber nit mer wie var Recht freiig warn alzeit stil vnd vil von seinem dot geredt […] nacher ist im wider ain mal ain fandasey kumen er welle sein dienst gar lassen […] aber got sey mein Zeug nach dissem ist er gleich mer so selzam warn hat nit schlaffen kinen das ich mich hoch pesorgt es kume die varig melangolley wider an ihn.‘ Munich, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Personenselekt Cart. 198, Lasso; quoted in Horst Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1976–7), i, 309–11.Google Scholar

3 Leuchtmann, ibid., 208–10, discusses at some length the exaggerations of Lasso's condition made by François-Joseph Fétis (‘Découvertes sur le célèbre musicien belge Roland de Lassus’, Revue musicale, 9, Vme année (1832), 239–41), Henri-Florent Delmotte (Notice biographique sur Roland de Lattre, connu sous le nom d'Orland de Lassus, Valenciennes, 1836, 47) and Edouard Fétis (Les musiciens belges, 2 vols., Brussels, 1859–60, i, 173–4), whose assertion of Lasso's complete loss of his mental faculties in the last years of his life is belied by the successful completion and publication of his Cantiones sacrae (1594) and the Lagrime di San Pietro (1595). Following upon Regina di Lasso's 1595 supplication and the diagnoses of Dr Thomas Mermann, published posthumously by Franz Ignaz Thiermair (Thomæ Mermanni […] consulationes ac responsiones medica, Ingolstadt, 1675), Adolf Sandberger saw in Lasso's condition evidence of melancholia hypochondriaca, a suggestion that has found wide acceptance in the modern literature (see Sandberger's foreword to Orlando di Lasso, Kompositionen mit italienischem Text, iii: Die beiden Madrigaldrucke Nürnberg 1585 und 1587, ed. Franz Xaver Haberl and Adolf Sandberger, 2nd edn, rev. Horst Leuchtmann, Wiesbaden, 1990, p. xii); Wolfgang Boetticher equated this condition with palsy ('Schlagfluß'; see his Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit 1532–1594, Kassel, 1958, 665–6). Since none of Mermann's diagnoses can definitively be linked with the composer, the precise nature of his physical affliction remains an open question. Yet it is difficult to argue with Leuchtmann's assessment (see his commentary in Lasso, Kompositionen mit italienischem Text, iii, p. xxii) that ‘Die Angst vor einem drohenden Nachlassen der Kräfte, vielleicht vor dem nahenden Ende, die ihn vermutlich schon nach Loreto getrieben hatte, und die Sorge, noch soviel wie möglich zu komponieren; Gott mit seinen Werken zu versöhnen; und seine Familie finanziell und durch den Beistand von Gönnern zu sichern – all das ist aus Lassos Aktivitäten in diesem Zeitraum nur allzu deutlich erkennbar.’Google Scholar

4 David Crook, Orlando di Lasso's Lmitation Magnificats for Counter-Reformation Munich (Princeton, NJ, 1994).Google Scholar

5 Luke xxii. 54–62, New Revised Standard Version.Google Scholar

6 Orlando di Lasso, Lagrime di San Pietro, Sämtliche Werke, neue Reihe, 20 (Kassel, 1989); see also Fritz Jensch, ‘Orlando di Lassos Lagrime di San Pietro und ihr Text’, Musik in Bayern, 32 (1986), 43–62. For an analytical study of mode in the Lagrime, see Robert G. Luoma, Music, Mode and Words in Orlando di Lasso's Last Works (Lewiston, NY, 1989).Google Scholar

7 Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia (Rome, 1548).Google Scholar

8 The prominence of these Spanish methods reflects the peaking of Spanish cultural influence at Maximilian I's court more generally. Perhaps the most potent political symbol of union between the Spanish Habsburg and Bavarian Wittelsbach houses was the Order of the Golden Fleece, conferred by Philip II on Duke Wilhelm V in 1585, surely in recognition of the latter's prosecution of the Cologne War two years previously; Maximilian I received the Fleece in 1602. Franz Körndle, in ‘Orlando di Lasso's “Fireworks” Music’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 97–116, has traced Lasso's motet ‘Ergo rex vivat’ to the occasion of Wilhelm's admission to the Order in 1585. On Spanish influence at Maximilian's court in general, see Albrecht, Dieter, Maximilian I. von Bayern 1573–1651 (Munich, 1998), 646–7.Google Scholar

9 The tension between the desire for contemplative withdrawal and for pious action in the world, in fact, characterizes Christian writing on meditation going back at least to Origen, John Cassian and Gregory the Great, whose Moralia in Job attempts to balance the demands of contemplation and action; see, for example, Robert A. Markus's commentary in Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge, 1997), 17–26. For the sixteenth century it is crucial to recognize the difference between the rational meditative schemes of Ignatius and Luis, on the one hand, and the mystical contemplation of divine union that was especially prominent among the Alumbrados and Carmelite mystics like Teresa of Ávila or John of the Cross, on the other. To borrow a framework from Klara Erdei, who has written extensively on meditation in the early-modern era, the aim of contemplation was spiritual union with God, embodied in Teresa's writings, for example, in the imagery of bridal mysticism. Meditation, by contrast, is a discursive process harmonizing feeling and intellect, and has a rational aim. The meditating subject does not lose him- or herself in union with the Divine, but employs reason, imagination and the senses to arrive at a conviction that may in turn guide one's thoughts and behaviour in the everyday world (Klára Erdei, Auf dem Wege zu sich selbst: Die Meditation im 16. Jahrhundert. Eine funktionsanalytische Gattungsbeschreibung, Wiesbaden, 1990, esp. p. 47). Granted, Teresa also described a meditative process, but one that was a means toward the end of contemplation. For the Carmelites action may grow out of the contemplative awareness of Christ's presence in everyday life (note Teresa's own deep involvement in the reform and administration of her order, for example), but ministry in the world was not their primary vocation. In the missionary context of the Society of Jesus contemplation was of little use, and indeed might have had heretical overtones in the atmosphere of Tridentine orthodoxy. The intense persecution of the Illuminati or Alumbrados by the Inquisition from the mid-sixteenth century onward could not have been far from the mind of Ignatius, who himself had been briefly imprisoned by a Spanish inquisitor in Alcalá in 1527. The nexus of mysticism and heterodoxy, of course, had a very long history reaching back at least to the religious movements of the twelfth century and their partial domestication under the papacy of Innocent III (r. 1198–1216); see especially Herbert Grundmann's foundational study, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame, IN, and London, 1995). Whether meditation could lead to contemplative mysticism was an individual matter. One must also stress that the drive toward self-reform, discipline and pious behaviour in the world was a principal goal of the Tridentine sacrament of penance as well; see W. David Myers, ‘Poor, Sinning Folk’: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1996), 202.Google Scholar

10 Myers, ‘Poor, Sinning Folk‘.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 193.Google Scholar

12 Louis M. Martz makes this observation in The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (rev. edn, New Haven, CT, 1962), 34–5, 38.Google Scholar

13 The actual length of the exercises in practice was left to the discretion of the spiritual director. The full four weeks of exercises may have been reserved for those individuals (members of religious orders, for example) who were in a position to make such a lengthy commitment. Lay persons normally contented themselves with the first week of meditations on sin only. See Duhr, Bernhard, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge in der ersten Hälfe des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 4 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau and St Louis, MO, 1907–28), i, 464–5.Google Scholar

14 Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, ed. Michael Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises: Text and Commentary (Leominster and New Maiden, 1998), 46–7.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 62.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., 48.Google Scholar

17 For a discussion of the connection between ruminatio and meditatio, see Carruthers, Maty, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1993), 164–7; see also Janette Tilley's discussion of ruminatio in ‘Dialogue Techniques in Lutheran Sacred Music of Seventeenth-Century Germany’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2003), 179fr. We may also see traces here of the ‘complete’, specific confession of sin demanded by the Tridentine sacrament of penance; see Myers, ‘Poor, Sinning Folk‘, 162–8.Google Scholar

18 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2002).Google Scholar

19 Günter Butzer, ‘Rhetorik der Meditation: Martin Mollers “Soliloqvia de Passione Iesu Christi” und die Tradition der eloquentia sacra’, Meditation und Erinnerung in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Gerhard Kurz (Göttingen, 2000), 57–78 (pp. 61–2), describes the high-medieval transition from ‘meditative dialogue’ to ‘dialogic meditation’ in the hands of mystical writers like Bernard of Clairvaux: ‘Nicht mehr die antike Dialogtradition, sondern die chrisdiche Form der “Confessiones” wird nun zum literarischen Muster.‘Google Scholar

20 Third Annotation, quoted in Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, 4.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 53.Google Scholar

22 Ibid. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, 96, notes that the aspect of ‘God the Punisher’ is by no means absent from medieval treatises and poetry on Christ's Passion, but ‘these aspects of the Godhead […] are underplayed: overwhelmed by pity and love for the manhood’. In the politically, economically and religiously turbulent seventeenth century, the consolatory function of meditation naturally would have taken precedence.Google Scholar

23 See especially the work of Hartmut Lehmann, e.g. ‘Frömmigkeitsgeschichtliche Auswirkungen der “Kleinen Eiszeit”‘, Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Scheider (Göttingen, 1986), 31–50; also the more recent collection Im Zeichen der Krise: Religiosität im Europa des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Lehmann and Anne-Charlotte Trepp (Göttingen, 1999).Google Scholar

24 ‘Die Verwendung des Begriffs der Krise ist dabei näher zu spezifizieren. Es handelt sich nicht um eine allgemeine, alle Schichten der Bevölkerung erfassende elementare Krise, wie sie durch Klimaverschlechterung, Hungersnot oder Krieg verursacht wird. Als krisenhaft stellt sich die kirchliche Situation des 17. Jahrhunderts in erster Linie im Bewußtsein der kirchlichen Theologenschaft dar, nicht notwendig zugleich im Bewußtsein des “Kirchenvolks”, dessen Zustand als kritisch beurteilt wurde.’ Udo Sträter, Meditation und Kirchenreform in der lutherischen Kirche des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1995), 32. See also his ‘“Wie bringen wir den Kopff in das Hertz?” Meditation in der Lutherischen Kirche des 17. Jahrhunderts’, Meditation und Erinnerung in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Kurz, 11–35.Google Scholar

25 Luis's Book of Prayer and Meditation was part of a broader and quite venerable tradition of meditation on specific religious texts. Summarizing his argument on the relationship of meditation and reading, Butzer (‘Rhetorik der Meditation’, 73), writes: ‘Die Meditation stellt ein psychomotorisches Verfahren dar, das bestimmten textuellen Präzepten (Meditationsanleitungen wie den “Exerzitien” des Ignatius) folgt, das in seinem Ablauf sprachlich – häufig durch Lektüre – vermittelt ist und das Texte hervorbringen kann, die wiederum selbst Gegenstand meditativer Übung werden. Die kulturelle Technik, die diese Verschränkung von Literatur und Praxis herstellt, ist die Rhetorik.‘ Louis Martz notes in The Poetry of Meditation, 5–6, that the popularity of Luis's manual, in the translation of Richard Hopkins (1582), outstripped even that of Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises in seventeenth-century England. He goes on to observe a similar sevenfold structure in other works of Spanish meditation by San Pedro de Alcantara, Caspar Loarte and Juan de Ávila, all of which achieved some popularity in that country (pp. 26–7).Google Scholar

26 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación, ed. Alvaro Huerga, Obras completas, 1 (Madrid, 1994), 45. The English translations in this article of quotations from Luis's manual are adapted from those of Richard Hopkins, in Of prayer, and meditation. Wherein are conteined fovvertien deuoute meditations for the seuen daies of the weeke, bothe for the morninges, and eueninges. And in them is treyted of the consideration of the principali holie mysteries of our faithe. Written firste in the Spanishe tongue by the famous religious father. F. Lewis de Granada (Paris, 1582).Google Scholar

27 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación, ed. Huerga, 255.Google Scholar

28 The same phenomena may readily be observed in the nearby imperial city of Augsburg, divided between a Protestant majority and Catholic minority and governed, after 1555, by a biconfessional city council. By the end of the sixteenth century highly visible and provocative displays of Catholic identity – for example, theatrical processions on Good Friday evening, enlivened by bloody displays of self-flagellation – flourished with the support of the Jesuits, the Fugger and other Catholic patrician families, a reform-minded episcopate, and lay confraternities. See my Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580–1630 (Aldershot, 2004).Google Scholar

29 In the 1620s, for example, mother superior Maximiliana von Wittelsbach, influenced by Dominicus à Jesu Maria, imposed religious discipline based on the example of Teresa of Ávila on the Franciscan tertiary nuns of the Ridler convent. She faced considerable resistance, however, from a community that had only recently been fully enclosed. See Strasser, Ulrike, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, MI, 2004), 127–32.Google Scholar

30 Giel van Gemert, Die Werke des Ægidius Albertinus (1560–1620): Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des deutschsprachigen Schrifttums der katholischen Reformbewegung in Bayern um 1600 und seiner Quellen (Amsterdam, 1979); see also R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation, Central Europe 1550–1750 (London and New York, 1989), 92–3. One cannot overlook the fact that these cultural expressions, including the adoption of Spanish (originally Burgundian) court ceremonial, are ultimately related to the Wittelsbachs' efforts to ally themselves dynastically with the Habsburgs; recall Albrecht V's marriage to Emperor Ferdinand I's daughter Anne in 1546 and that of Maria Anna von Wittelsbach (daughter of Wilhelm V) to Ferdinand II in 1600.Google Scholar

31 Exercitia spiritualia Ignatij de Loyola (Dillingen, 1582). The Vienna Jesuits had also published a Latin edition of the method, Exercitia spiritvalia R admodvm in Christo patre nostro (Vienna, 1563).Google Scholar

32 Michael van Isselt's Latin translation appeared as R. P. Fr. Lodoici Granatensis Exercitia, in septem meditationes matutinas, ac totidem vespertinas, distributa (Cologne, 1586, 1591 and 1598); the locations of surviving exemplars (in Munich, Regensburg, Eichstätt, Augsburg, Passau and elsewhere) suggest that van Isselt's translation circulated widely in Bavaria. The titles of Philipp Dobereiner's German editions, published by Adam Berg in Munich, vary from one another slightly; that of 1597, for example, reads Exercitia Granatae. Das ist: Geistliche Ubung mit denen sich die andächtige Seel täglich speysen kan. Darinnen vierzehen Betrachtungen auff die siben Täg in der Wochen Morgens unnd Abends zu gebrauchen.Google Scholar

33 The duodecimo parchment book (Clm 1130) carries the inscription ‘Ex libris Sermi. Bau.æ Ducis Guilhelmi huius nōīs V.ti’ and consists of a series of exercises closely resembling the first week of Ignatius's method: meditations on the sins of others ('Exercitium de peccatis alienis'), meditations on one's personal sin ('Exercitium de peccatis propriis'), and meditations on death, judgment, hell and purgatory, followed by a ‘contemplation to arouse spiritual love in us’ (‘Contemplatio ad amorem spiritualem in nobis excitandum‘). Further devotional texts fill out the remainder of the book.Google Scholar

34 Albrecht, Maximilian I. von Bayern, 288–9.Google Scholar

35 See my edition of the print (RISM A/I, L1040): Rudolph di Lasso, Virginalia eucharistica (1615), Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 114 (Madison, WI, 2002).Google Scholar

36 The manuscript was penned by Wilhelm Fusban, resident at the German College in Rome between 1655 and 1662; the passages relevant to the introduction of the Roman Rite and its musical consequences have not been reproduced in their entirety, but excerpts may be found in Andreas Steinhuber, Geschichte des Kollegium Germanikum Hungarikum in Rom, 2 vols. (2nd edn, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906), i, 296–99; Thomas D. Culley, S. J., Jesuits and Music, i: A Study of the Musicians Connected with the German College in Rome During the 17th Century and of their Activities in Northern Europe (Rome and St Louis, MO, 1970), 90–2, 287–9; and Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso, i, 189–90. On this subject see also Crook, Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats, 34–8.Google Scholar

37 See Zager, Daniel, ‘Post-Tridentine Liturgical Change and Functional Music: Lasso's Cycle of Polyphonic Latin Hymns’, Orlando di Lasso Studies, ed. Peter Bergquist (Cambridge, 1999), 41–63.Google Scholar

38 P. Beda Stubenvoll, Geschichte des königl. Erziehungsinstitutes für Studirende (Holland'sches Institut) in München (Munich, 1874), 179–80; see also Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso, i, 192, who provides several archival references to the boarding of choirboys with the Jesuits and the names of court musicians who were engaged as music teachers at the college.Google Scholar

39 Franz Körndle, ‘“Ad te perenne gaudium”: Lassos Musik zum “Vltimum Judicium‘”, Die Musikforschung, 53 (2000), 68–71.Google Scholar

40 David Crook, ‘A Performance of Lasso's Penitential Psalms on Maundy Thursday 1580‘, Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte: Bericht über das Symposion der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften München, 4.–6. Juli 1994, ed. Bernhold Schmid (Munich, 1994), 69–77.Google Scholar

41 The document (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 9237), transmitting General Eberhard Mercurian's original 1575 ordinance on music along with more detailed annotations attributed to the Jesuit Provincial and former rector (1578–82) of the Munich college, Ferdinand Alber, makes reference to many composers, yet Lasso's music heads the lists of both ‘Cantiones probatæ’ (including the Penitential Psalms, Magnificat settings, and the 1587 book of spiritual madrigals), and ‘Cantiones quo ad textum et notas prohibitæ’ (the motets ‘Heu quantus dolor’, ‘Quid tarnen’, ‘Jam lucis orto sydere’, ‘Vinum bonum et suave’, and others); generically, Masses based on secular texts were also disallowed ('Missæ compositæ; supra textum vanū'). For pointing out the existence of this ordinance I am thankful to David Crook, who is currently preparing an essay on its contents and significance; see also his A Performance of Lasso's Penitential Psalms'. The date of the choirbook Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS 48, containing the imitation Nunc dimittis setting in fols. 18ov–188r, has not been precisely established, but is generally thought to fall between 1585 and 1590. The principal scribe of the manuscript (including that of this piece) is anonymous. It is possible that the setting was inscribed as early as 1585, but Lasso's statement in the Lagrime dedication that the music was recently composed would seem to suggest a later date of c.1590. See Peter Bergquist's discussion in ‘Orlando di Lassos Nunc Dimittis-Vertonungen’, Musik in Bayern, 33 (1986), 10–13, and the choirbook's description in Chorbücher und Handschriften in chorbuch artiger Notation, ed. Martin Bente, Marie Louise Göllner, Hellmut Hell and Bettina Wackernagel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Katalog der Musikhandschriften, 5/i (Munich, 1989), 174. My thanks also to Peter Bergquist for helping to clarify this question in a personal communication.Google Scholar

43 Sadeler's original copperplate engraving of 1593 had been captioned ‘AETAT. SVAE. LXI. AN.° 1593'; the image was reprinted the following year with the annotation ‘OBIIT AN.° 94'. The Lagrime woodcut reverses the orientation of Sadeler's image and amends the original caption to ‘AETATIS SVAE LXII A.° 1594'.Google Scholar

44 The examples of such ‘tears’ poetry can be multiplied: see Camillo Camilli (Le lagrime di S. M. Maddalena, Venice, 1583), Luca Guadagnoli (Le lagrime di se stesso, Venice, 1586), Scipione di Manzano (Le sette lagrime della penitenza, Cesena, 1593) and so forth; note also Lodovico Agostini's cycle of 20 six-voice spiritual madrigals, Le lagrime dal peccatore (Venice, 1586; RISM A/I, A410), which remain to be edited and studied in detail. Tansillo's cycle is the only one of these to focus on Peter, but there is a musical precedent for Peter's address to Christ in Giovenale Ancina's sacred transformation of Martinengo's poem L'amorosa Ero, which was featured in a 1588 anthology with settings by 18 different composers (RISM B/I, 158817). In Martinengo's original Hero addresses Leander, who has attempted to swim the Hellespont in an attempt to reach her, but drowns. Ancina (1545–1604), a priest, associate of S. Filippo Neri, and advocate for ‘cleansing’ Italy of profane canzoni, recast the text with Peter addressing Christ walking on water. See The Madrigal Collection L'amorosa Ero (Brescia, 1588), ed. Harry B. Lincoln (New York, 1968), vii–xiv, and Katherine Powers, ‘The Spiritual Madrigal in Counter-Reformation Italy: Definition, Use and Style’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara), 288–9; my thanks to David Crook for drawing my attention to Ancina's contrafacta. A specific Jesuit interest in the Lagrime may be seen in the example of the English Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell (1561–95), who translated portions of Tansillo's cycle and used it as the basis of one of his most ambitious poems, the 132-stanza Saint Peters Complaint, see The Poems of Robert Southwell, ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford, 1967), 75–100.Google Scholar

45 Richard Strier, ‘Herbert and Tears’, English Literary History, 46/2 (1979), 221–47 (pp. 222–3). In its fourteenth session in November 1551 the Council of Trent promulgated numerous decrees and canons on the necessity and nature of the sacraments of penance and extreme unction. With respect to the former, the Council resolved that ‘contrition, which holds the first place amongst the aforesaid acts of the penitent, is a sorrow of mind, and a detestation for sin committed, with the purpose of not sinning for the future’. In certain cases – here we might see the figures of Peter and Mary Magdalene – this contrition could be perfect despite the absence of true confession: ‘Although it sometimes happens that this contrition is perfect through charity, and reconciles man with God before this sacrament be actually received, the said reconciliation, nevertheless, is not to be ascribed to that contrition, independently of the desire of the sacrament which is included therein.’ From The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. James Waterworth (London, 1848), 95–6. On Peter and Mary Magdalene as penitential figures, Strier follows Émile Mâle in L'art religieux après le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932), 66. An art-historical study of tears in paintings of Mary Magdalene by Rogier van der Weyden, Enguerrand Quarton, Titian, Caravaggio and Picasso may be found in Diane Apostolos-Cappadone's ‘“Pray with Tears and Your Request Will Find a Hearing”: On the Iconology of the Magdalene's Tears’, Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Lmagination, ed. Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 201–28.Google Scholar

46 Ceri Sullivan, ‘The Physiology of Penitence in 1590's Weeping Texts’, Cahiers élisabéthains, 57/5 (2000), 31–47 (pp. 32, 36).Google Scholar

47 A broad overview of the history of visual theory up to this time may be found in David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976).Google Scholar

48 Erika Milburn, Luigi Tansillo and Lyric Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Naples (Leeds, 2003), 61–2.Google Scholar

49 Cristoforo Zabata, Nuova scelta di rime di diversi begli ingegni; Frà la quali ne sono molte del TANSLLLO non più per l'adietro impresse, e pur'hora date in luce (Genoa, 1573). Exemplar at Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, UBM 0001/8 P.ital. 328. See Fritz Jensch's extensive discussion of the sources of the poetry in ‘Orlando di Lassos Lagrime di San Pietro‘, 43–8.Google Scholar

50 Paraphrased from Milburn, Luigi Tansillo, 61.Google Scholar

51 Lasso, it should be noted, was not the only composer to set stanzas from Tansillo's Lagrime, although he was the only one to attempt a cyclical setting. Several stanzas of the Lagrime also appear in Antonio Dueto's Terzo libro di madrigali a quattro voci (Venice, 1594). See Powers, ‘The Spiritual Madrigal’, 294.Google Scholar

52 The ambiguity of the modal assignments of nos. 9–12, all in ♯-E-c1 (mode 3 or 4), may be related to the usually small difference in the ambitus between mode-3 and mode-4 pieces, which in turn would not necessarily have led composers to use different sets of clefs. See Crook's commentary in Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats, 110.Google Scholar

53 For useful discussions of mode in Lasso's works, see especially Harold Powers, ‘Anomalous Modalities’, Orlando di Lasso in der Musikgeschichte, ed. Schmid, 221–42; Peter Bergquist, ‘Modal Ordering within Orlando di Lasso's Publications’, Orlando di Lasso Studies, ed. Bergquist, 203–26; and David Crook, ‘Tonal Compass in the Motets of Lasso’, Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Dolores Pesce (New York, 1997), 286–306.Google Scholar

54 Extensive discussions of modal ordering in Lasso's publications may be found in Harold Powers, ‘Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 34 (1981), 428–70 (pp. 435–6, 446–53, 460ff.); and Bergquist, ‘Modal Ordering’, passim.Google Scholar

55 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oracióny meditación, ed. Huerga, 71.Google Scholar

56 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación, ed. Huerga, 72.Google Scholar

57 The importance of the faculty of sight here is reminiscent of Samuel Quickelberg's commentary on the expressive power of Lasso's Penitential Psalms in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Mus. MS AI-E, fols. iiiiv–vr: ‘Lasso expressed these psalms so appropriately in accommodating, according to necessity, thoughts and words with lamenting and plaintive tones, in expressing the force of the individual affections, and in placing the object almost alive before the eyes, that one is at a loss to say whether the sweetness of the affections enhanced the lamenting tones more greatly, or whether the lamenting tones brought greater ornament to the sweetness of the affections.‘ Translation by Albert Dunning, quoted in the preface to Peter Bergquist's edition of Lasso, The Seven Penitential Psalms and Laudate Dominum de caelis, Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 86–7 (Madison, WI, 1990), ix. My thanks to David Crook for pointing this out in a personal communication.Google Scholar

58 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación, ed. Huerga, 72.Google Scholar

59 Christ's rebuke in ‘Vide homo’ bears some resemblances to the reproaches, or Improperia, for the Adoration of the Cross in the Good Friday liturgy, although I do not believe the two texts to be directly related. The Improperia begin with Christ's reproach, sung by the cantors, ‘Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? responde mihi’, drawing the antiphonal choral response of the Trisagion in both Greek and Latin (‘Agios, o Theos’ – ‘Sanctus Deus’ – Agios athanatos, eleison imas' – ‘Sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis'). The reproaches continue in the first person ('Quia eduxi te per desertum quadraginta annis […]'; ‘Quid ultra debui facere tibi, et non feci? […]'), receiving the choral Trisagion in response each time. The second section of the Improperia, sung as long as needed for the adoration, involves shorter reproaches in the form of versicles, receiving choral responses on the text ‘Popule meus'.Google Scholar

60 Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1, fol. 437v. See Notre-Dame and Related Conductus: Opera Omnia, vi: 1pt Conductus Transmitted in Fascicule X of the Florence Manuscript, ed. Gordon A. Anderson (Henryville, PA, 1981), pp. lxx, 141–2.Google Scholar

61 On this early example of the medieval florilegium see Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979).Google Scholar

62 Extant at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, for example, are editions published at Lyons carrying the title (with minor variants between editions) Flores omnium pene doctorum, qui turn in philosophia turn in theologia hactenus claruerunt from 1553, 1554, 1558, 1567, 1575, 1577, 1580, 1593 and 1596; a detailed analysis of these exemplars' provenance, however, remains to be carried out.Google Scholar

63 Luis of Granada, Libro de la oración y meditación, ed. Huerga, 276–7. The first quotation is taken from Isaiah xlix. 4.Google Scholar

64 I am grateful to Dr Louis Reith of the Rare Books Department at Georgetown University Library for examining on my behalf the 1598 edition of van Isselt's translation (Cologne: In Officina Birckmannica, sumptibus Arnoldi Mylij). The pseudo-Bernardine text appears here on p. 565.Google Scholar

65 Sträter, Meditation und Kirchenreform, 43–4, notes that the publication of Gerhard's manual in Latin ensured its dissemination beyond German-speaking regions. ‘Lætatur servus, dum pro delicto ipsius tarn graviter dilectus dolet filius: Irani Domini accumulat servus, dum pro lenienda & placanda Patris ira tantum laborat Filius. O infinitem Dei iram! ô furorem inestabilem! ô justitiæ rigorem inætimabilem! Qui in vnicum dilectissimum, suæq; essentiæ participem filium, sic sævit, non propter aliquod delictum proprium, sed quia pro servulo deprecatur; quid servo faciet, qui in peccatis & offensionibus securè perseverat? Timeat servus, & exhorrescat & contristetur de suis meritis, dum ob merita non sua punitur Filius: timeat servus, qui peccare non cessat, dum pro peccato sic laborat Filius: timeat creatura, quæ Creatorem crucifixit: timeat servus, qui occidit Dominum: timeat impius & peccator, qui pium & sanctum sic afflixit. Audiamus, diarissimi, clamantem, audiamus lachrymantem, clamat de cruce; Vide, homo, quæ pro te patior: ad te clamo, qui pro te morior: vide pænas, quibus afficior: vide clavos quibus confodior; non est dolor sicut quo crucior; Cum sit tantus dolor exterior; interior planctus est gravior, cum te tarn ingratum experior. Miserere, misereri nostri, Miserator vnice, & saxea nostra corda ad te converte.‘ See Gerhard, Johann, Meditationes sacrae (1606/7): Lateinisch-deutsch, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt, 2000), 34–7.Google Scholar

67 Gerhard must have meant Lamentations i. 12: ‘LAMED o vos omnes qui transitis per viam adtendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus quoniam vindemiavit me ut locutus est Dominus in die irae furoris sui’ (‘LAMED: Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow which was brought upon me, which the LORD inflicted on the day of his fierce anger‘). The first German edition of Gerhard's method appeared as MEDLTATLONES SACRAE Das ist GEistreiche Hertzerquickende und lebendigmachende Betrachtungen vornemer Heuptpuncten, welche gleich als das Geistliche Zündpuluer sein, dadurch Christliche andacht, wahre Gottesfurcht, und des innerlichen Menschens verstendniß vnd erkentniß fewrig gemacht und angezündet wird (Magdeburg, 1607); see Gerhard, Meditationes sacrae (1606/7), ed. Steiger, 366.Google Scholar

68 Sweelinck's Cantiones sacrae cum basso continuo ad organum quinque vocum (Antwerp, 1619; RISM A/I, S7252) and Du Mont's Cantica sacra II. III. IV. cum vocibus, tum et instrumentis modulata (Paris, 1652; RISM A/I, D3699).Google Scholar

69 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, ‘The Art of Salvation in Bavaria’, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John O'Malley et al. (Toronto, 1999), 568–99.Google Scholar

70 Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, 106.Google Scholar

71 Giovanni da Bologna's crucifix and Christ figure was presented to Wilhelm V by Archduke Ferdinand of Tuscany in 1594, while Giovanni's student Hans Reichle completed the Mary Magdalene figure in 1595. The group was originally intended to crown an elaborate bronze funeral monument for Wilhelm and his consort Renata – planned for the very heart of the church – that was never completed owing to the severe financial difficulties that eventually led to the duke's abdication in October 1597. The crucifixion group with Mary Magdalene was provisionally erected on the threshold of nave and choir for the festal consecration of St Michael in July 1597; in 1602 it was fixed in that location, and in 1819 the group was removed to the eastern transept, where it remains today. A survey of the early history of the church's decoration may be found in Lothar Altmann, ‘Die ursprüngliche Ausstattung von St. Michael und ihr Programm’, St. Michael in München: Festschriften zum 400. Jahrestag der Grundsteinlegung und zum Abschluss des Wiederaufbaus, ed. Karl Wagner and Albert Keller (Munich, 1983), 81–111 (see esp. pp. 82–9).Google Scholar

72 Trophaen Bavarica Sancto Michaeli Archangelo (Munich, 1597), iii, 5–6, quoted in the original Latin in Sabine M. Schneider, ‘Bayerisch-römisches Siegeszeichen: Das Programm der Münchner Michaelskirche und seine zeitgenössische Rezeption aus der Perspektive der Einweihungsfestschrift’, Rom in Bayern: Kunst und Spiritualität der ersten Jesuiten, ed. Reinhold Baumstark (Munich, 1997), 171–98 (p. 197).Google Scholar

73 ‘The bulk of the spiritual madrigal texts are somber, penitential prayers and as a result many spiritual madrigals were composed in a deliberately reserved or conservative style with some combination of slower note values, minor consonances, smooth melodicism, and little word painting.’ Powers, ‘The Spiritual Madrigal’, 316. One example discussed by Powers (pp. 331–4) is Lodovico Agostini's six-voice cycle Lagrime del peccatore (Venice, 1586), which, despite the composer's association with the luxuriant style of the Ferrarese concerto delle donne, is remarkably reserved in style.Google Scholar

74 Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, trans. Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions and Oliver Strunk (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 477.Google Scholar

75 This does not necessarily contradict the assessment of the 1585 and 1587 madrigal prints by Leuchtmann, who saw some degree of modernization in relation to Lasso's earlier work: ‘Allein der optische Eindruck vermittelt Lassos Bemühen um mehr Beweglichkeit, kleinere Notenwerte, mehr Oktavsprünge, stärkere Lebendigkeit. Alles ist noch ausdrucksbetonter geworden, ausdrucksstärker, nervöser, dramatischer’ (Lasso, Kompositionen mit italienischem Text, iii, ed. Haberl and Sandberger, rev. Leuchtmann, p. xxiv). I would agree with Leuchtmann that this music can indeed be vivid and expressive; yet in relation to contemporary examples of the genre it accomplishes this goal in a restrained and subtle manner.Google Scholar

76 Exceptions include the rapidly exchanged dotted figures representing the ‘thousand darts’ ('mille punte') that pierce Peter's breast in no. 1, ‘Il magnanimo Pietro'; and the brief melismatic runs for ‘his tears were neither brook nor torrent’ ('E non fu il pianto suo Rivo, o torrente') at the beginning of no. 11, ‘E non fu il pianto suo'.Google Scholar

77 Einstein, The Italian Madrigal 496.Google Scholar

78 Crook, ‘Tonal Compass in the Motets of Lasso’.Google Scholar

79 Ibid., 291. It should be noted here that high or low cleffing, one of the three criteria for Powers's tonal types, seems not to play a significant role in Lasso's approach to harmony and sonority, although it does tend to indicate contrasts of authentic and piagai modes.Google Scholar

80 For example, no. 9, bar 23 (use of B♭ in E durus), or no. 14, bar 26 (use of F♯ in F mollis).Google Scholar

81 Crook (‘Tonal Compass in the Motets of Lasso’, 298, 300) notes Lasso's ability to write affective chromaticism without violating tonal compass; for example, ‘Timor et tremor’ (♯-G-c1), famed for its chromatic expressiveness, contains only three instances of prohibited pitch positions (two D♯s and one E♭).Google Scholar

82 Specifically, one might discern a re-ut-mi organization in the 1585 book and in the five- and six-voice works of the 1587 book, and re-mi in the four-voice madrigals of 1587; whether these tonalities would be supported by specific melodic-contrapuntal modal types remains to be determined. See Judd, Cristle Collins, ‘Modal Types and Ut, Re, Mi Tonalities: Tonal Coherence in Sacred Vocal Polyphony from about 1500‘, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 45 (1992), 428–67; my thanks to David Crook for drawing my attention to Judd's thesis.Google Scholar

83 A handful of madrigals close on a pitch other than that prescribed by the tonal type, but in all cases these are confinais or closely related pitches, and such madrigals never close a group of pieces in the same tonal type: see no. 3 (♯-D-c1, final on A); no. 7 (&flat-G-c1, final on D); nos. 9 and 11 (♯-E-c1, finals on A); no. 14 (♭-F-g2, final on C); no. 17 (♭-F-c1, final on C); and no. 19 (♯-G-g2, final on D).Google Scholar

84 I rely here on Crook's discussion in Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats, 141–5. See also Bergquist, who concludes in ‘Modal Ordering within Orlando di Lasso's Publications’, 225–6, that, unlike works with finals on C, which can rather easily be made to represent one of the eight modes, A-final works ‘simply do not fit comfortably into his modal system’.Google Scholar

85 Crook, Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats, 143, and Powers, ‘Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony’, 449.Google Scholar

86 Crook, Orlando di Lasso's Imitation Magnificats, 144.Google Scholar

87 Bruce Smith, ‘Hearing Green’, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 147–68.Google Scholar

88 See Frangenberg, Thomas, ‘Auditus visu prestantior. Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de Bovelles's Liber de sensibus’, The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk (London, 1991), 71–89.Google Scholar

89 ‘Hearing thus advances the soul's progress away from the morass of emotions excited by the other senses and toward the concordant unity of the divine.’ Kate van Orden, ‘An Erotic Metaphysics of Hearing in Early Modern France’, Musical Quarterly, 82 (1998), 678–91 (p. 681).Google Scholar

90 Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, IL, 1993), esp. pp. 134–44.Google Scholar

91 Having described Lasso's previous condition, Regina goes on to state that afterwards, in 1592 ('Nach dissem des 92. jar'), the president of the privy chamber ('Kammerpräsident') had confirmed her husband's salary of 800 gulden annually. Quoted in Leuchtmann, Orlando di Lasso, i, 310.Google Scholar

92 Palestrina writes: ‘There are too many poems with no other subject matter than loves alien to the Christian profession and name. These poems, written by men truly carried away by fury, corrupters of youth, a great many musicians have chosen as the material for their skill and industry, and while they have been distinguished by the praise of their talent, they have equally given offence to good and serious men. I blush and grieve to admit that I was once one of their number. But now, when past things cannot be changed and things done cannot be undone, I have changed my purpose.‘ Dedication, Motettorum liber quartus (Rome, 1584), quoted in Source Readings in Music History: The Renaissance, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York and London, 1965), 133.Google Scholar