The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France. (Composers).

The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso: Music, Piety, and Print in Sixteenth-Century France. By Richard Freedman. (Eastman Studies in Music, 15.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001. [xxiv, 259 p. ISBN 1-58046-075-5. $75.]

Richard Freedman points out at the beginning of this book that "Lasso's chansons were among the most widely circulated and beloved musical works of sixteenth-century Europe" (p. xiii). The book's subject, however, is not simply Lasso's chansons but also their reception by French Protestants. The Huguenots, like other listeners throughout Europe, found Lasso's music highly expressive and inspirational, but the worldly, even ribald texts set in some of his chansons disturbed them deeply. In order to reconcile the music with their own theology and make the chansons acceptable to pious ears, Protestant publishers issued collections of Lasso's chansons with many of the texts "purified" for their readers. Three of these collections of contrafacta are at the center of Freedman's study: Thomas Vautrollier's Receuil du mellange d'Orlande (London, 1570), Jean Pasquier's Mellange d'Orlande de Lassus (La Rochelle, 1575 and 1576), and Simon Goulart's Thresor de musique d'Orlande ([Geneva], 1576, 1582, and 1594). These co llections were based primarily on the anthologies of Lasso's chansons published in Paris by Le Roy & Ballard and authorized by the composer, the Mellange d'Orlande de Lassus (1570) and its expanded reissue, Les meslanges d'Orlande de Lassus (1576).

The core of Freedman's study is contained in chapters 2-6, in which he examines over twenty chansons in considerable detail, comparing Lasso's original versions to the contrafacta, for all of which he supplies full texts and translations. Most of the discussions are accompanied by scores of the chansons, either complete or in substantial excerpts. He transcribed the scores from Le Roy & Ballard's collections with the original note values halved and the poetic texts included in each voice part. The contrafacta texts are given only under the bassus parts, sometimes with two such texts stacked beneath the original. This is a convenient method of presentation that, as Freedman says, avoids cluttering the score while allowing direct comparison of the original and the contrafacta, since the placement of the latter in the other voices is clear enough from what is shown in the bassus. The scores are cleanly printed and carefully edited.

The discussions of the chansons themselves are very perceptive. Freedman notes to begin with that not every chanson text was altered in the Protestant editions. For instance, the themes of Lasso's nature picture, "La nuict froide et sombre," were congruent with Calvinist thought, so Freedman needs only to provide his lucid analysis of how Lasso responds to the text. Indeed, his comments on the Lasso chansons themselves are some of the best parts of the book. Through most of the study, however, his aim is to compare Lasso's originals to the contrafacta. This process highlights the differences among the Protestant editors. Simon Goulart appears to have been much more imaginative than the others in emending and reshaping the original poems into new versions that remained congruent with Lasso's musical rhetoric while at the same time expressing Protestant values. This emerges in almost every comparison of the chansons that both Goulart and Pasquier reset. One notable example of ...