Rudolph di Lasso. (Music Reviews).(Book Review)

Rudolph di Lasso. Virginalia Eucharistica (1615). Edited by Alexander J. Fisher. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 1114.) Middleton, Wisc.: A-R Editions, Inc., c2002 [Acknowledgments, p. vii; introd., p. ix-xiv; texts and trans., p. xv-xxii; 2 plates; dedication in Lat., Eng., p. 2; score, p. 3-263; crit. report, p. 269-72. ISBN 0-89579-498-5. $106.]

Here are yet more Lasso motets, but not by the prolific Orlando. Instead, these sacred concertos for one to eight voices, basso continuo, and sometimes instruments as well are by the great master's second son, Rudolph (born in 1563 and dying sometime after 1625). The young Lasso is today remembered (together with his older brother, Ferdinand) for his role in the preparation of a number of important posthumous editions of his father's sacred music. The Magnum opus musicum (Munich: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1604), a truly monumental gathering of over five hundred of the senior Lasso's motets assembled according to their presumed liturgical function, exerted a lasting influence on generations of musicians--and on musicologists, too, eventually serving as the basis for the old Lasso Samtliche Werke (ed. Franz Xaver Haberl and Adolf Sandberger, 21 vols. [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1894-1926; reprint, New York: Broude, 1973]). (For more on the legacy of that edition and its contrasts with the editorial priorities of mot et books prepared by Orlando himself, see my review of the many recently published volumes of Lasso's Complete Motets by A-R Editions in Notes 58, no. 3 [March 2002]: 670-75.) Thanks to Alexander Fisher's new edition of Rudolph's Virginalia Eucharistica (Munich: Nikolaus Heinrich, 1615), modern readers can now begin to assess the younger Lasso's own compositional abilities.

Rudolph apparently spent his entire career in Munich, serving as organist and composer to the Bavarian court. He may also have taught music at a local Jesuit college. All of this, according to Fisher, rings true with the prevailing character of the Virginalia Eucharistica (loosely translated as Eucharistic Devotions to the Virgin), which clearly embodies the increasingly Marian sensibilities that developed at the Bavarian court and its allied Jesuit institutions during the years around 1600. The majority of the nearly four-dozen sacred concertos found here set Marian antiphons (ten settings in all), texts associated with Marian liturgies, or texts that reflect upon the period of the church year from Advent through Epiphany. The last piece in the collection (also the longest and the most ambitious in terms of required musical forces) sets the Litany of Loreto, a long list of supplications framed by the Kyrie and Agnus Dei from the Mass Ordinary. At first glance, this choice of text might seem far removed from the Marian focus of the remainder of the volume. Rudolph's preface to the Virginalia Eucharistica, however, helps to explain the place of the litany here. In it, the composer relates the story of a personal journey: prompted by grave illness to make pilgrimage to a shrine in the Italian city of Loreto, Rudolph was eventually restored to health and to his native Germany. Whether we can take Rudolph's story as true, as Fisher notes, will remain something of an open question, for we know surprisingly little about the facts of his life. To that caution I would add another: the preface echoes the themes and rhetoric heard throughout the extensive literature of pilgrimage tales and conversion stories from the period. And even if Rudolph's story remains beyond the "truth" of documentary evidence, we should still remain open to the ideas ...