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Orlando … like a bee has sipped all the most
beautiful owers of the ancients and moreover
seems alone to have stolen the harmony of the
heavens to delight us with it on earth, surpass-
ing the ancients and making himself the unique
wonder of our time.”
VISUALIZING THE POLYPHONY —
Into his
swan song,
Lagrime di San Pietro
, Lasso distilled
all of that wisdom, experience, and complexity.
“Polyphony of this kind of depth and detail is
totally sculptural,” observes Sellars. He notes
that
Lagrime
was composed only years a er
the death of another towering artist of the High
Renaissance: Michelangelo. “You also get this
muscular intensity in Lasso’s writing that is rem-
iniscent of this expressive language we know so
well, visually, from Michelangelo.” Both artists
convey visions of an “embodied spirituality: the
muscle of spiritual energy and striving against
pain to achieve self-transformation.”
“ e genesis of this project began in
when
Peter and I were working together on Vivaldi’s
Griselda
at the Santa Fe Opera,” recalls conduc-
tor Grant Gershon. “I’ve always been especially
moved by the way that he guides singers to con-
nect their deepest and most complex emotions
to the music.” Gershon imagined the potential
that could be tapped by having Sellars stage an
entirely
a cappella
work, “where there is no buf-
fer between the singers and the audience.
e
pure sound of the human voice would convey all
of the structure, the colors, the textures, and the
feeling of a major work.”
And
Lagrime di San Pietro
presented “the per-
fect piece” with which to try out this approach—
but also a set of formidable challenges. Explains
Gershon: “ e problem that the piece has had
over the years is that this highly emotional,
even anguished music has historically been
performed in a very buttoned-down, extremely
reverential style. [Frankly, there are several per-
fectly lovely recordings of the work that are also
unbelievably dull.] Peter and I felt that the truth
of this music could be unlocked with movement
and with an intense focus on the poetry.”
Lasso’s creation of this complex vocal cycle
clearly stands apart within his oeuvre with re-
gard to chronology and purpose. Widely ad-
mired and imitated by his contemporaries, that
oeuvre encompasses on one side sacred works
that are both traditional (Masses) and wildly
original (the celebrated motet cycle
Prophetiae
Sibyllarum
) and, on the other, heartily profane
compositions in multiple languages.
Lagrime di San Pietro
comes at the very end—
he completed the score with a dedication to
Pope Clement VIII on May ,
, and died
in Munich on June . In that dedication, Lasso
remarks that “these tears of Saint Peter … have
been clothed in harmony by me for my personal
devotion in my burdensome old age.”
A SPECIAL KIND OF MADRIGAL —
In terms
of genre, the numbers comprising
Lagrime
are
classi ed not as motets but as
madrigale spiri-
tuali—
a term that straddles the usual distinc-
tion between vocal compositions for the sacred
(motet) and secular (madrigal) spheres. Motets,
composed in Latin, were suitable for use in lit-
urgy; madrigals set words in the vernacular
language, frequently involving erotic and pasto-
ral topics, and were intended for private court-
ly or academic gatherings (much as the rst,
court-produced operas) or, when the topic relat-
ed to a public gure or occasion, for ceremonial
contexts. Yet while taking advantage of the inno-
vations (and lack of restrictions) of the secular
madrigal, “spiritual madrigals” were devoted
to religious topics.
ey were not suitable for
liturgical usage, however—by de nition, such
madrigals set vernacular rather than Latin texts.
For
Lagrime
, Lasso found his text in a devo-
tional epic by the Italian Renaissance poet Luigi
Tansillo ( – ), who came out of the great
Petrarchan tradition. (Like Lasso, incidentally,
the humanist Petrarch devoted his art to secu-
lar and sacred causes—his poetry praising the
Virgin Mary inspired Lasso’s contemporary Pal-
estrina to write a famous set of
madrigale spiri-
tuali
.) Tansillo, curiously, had been on the Vati-
can’s Forbidden Index. His
Lagrime
obtained an
o cial pardon from the pope. Although Tansil-
lo died before managing to complete the epic,
the published
Lagrime
is a lengthy collection of
eight-line stanzas in
ottava rima
(the rhyming
scheme
), from which Lasso chose
for his madrigal cycle.
PETER’S THREEFOLD DENIAL —
e dramatic
content centers around a topic that will be fa-
miliar to anyone who knows J.S. Bach’s Passions,
where it occurs as just one episode within the
long sequence of the Passion story (though it in-
spires one of the most moving moments in the
Saint Matthew Passion
—
the alto aria “Erbarme
dich”). It’s the topic of several masterpieces in
painting as well, by such artists as Rembrandt
and Caravaggio.
e Gospel narratives of the
Passion recount the Apostle Peter’s fearful reac-
tion to the terror of the night of Jesus’s arrest.
ree times he denies knowing the accused—
exactly as Jesus during the Last Supper had pre-
dicted Peter would do, “this very night, before
the rooster crows.”
is is, of course, the very
Peter who would be claimed as the founder of
the Catholic Church, the rst in its succession
of popes. Tansillo’s poem unfolds as a highly
wrought, emotional sequence of self-accusation
and remorse for what cannot be undone, as the
elderly Peter attempts to come to terms with his
anguish. e imagery is elaborate, its references
to mirrors and re ections revealing a charac-
teristic Renaissance preoccupation, and boldly
gures what transpires in the central image—
the communication through Jesus’s trans xing
glance on the cross—to the unspoken knowl-
edge shared by lovers.
e cycle Lasso fashions from this resembles a
psychodrama, a kind of psychological Stations
of the Cross that Peter endures internally: the
eternally present moment of betrayal and the
recollections of a man approaching and longing
for death intersect as he seeks reconciliation, re-
alizing he can never forgive himself but can rely
only on divine grace. Lasso gives Peter—and
us—no easy answers, and no easy way out. He
concludes the cycle of stanzas from Tansil-
lo’s poem with a st number [madrigal] from
another source: a Latin motet by the th-centu-
ry French poet Philippe de Greve representing
the nal word from Jesus himself (“Vide Homo,
quae pro te patior”—“See, O man, how I su er
for you”). Here Jesus only rea rms what has
been tormenting Peter: the knowledge that his
betrayal has caused more “inner agony” for the
savior than his outward su ering on the cross.
Even the repetitive rhyme scheme for all eight
lines enhances the sense of recursive entrap-
ment.
rough his overall tonal scheme using
the old church (i.e., Gregorian) modes, Lasso
further underscores the sense of irresolution
by omitting some of those eight modes as he
progressively cycles through them; for this nal
motet, he shi s to a mode outside the normal
system. You don’t have to understand the musi-
cological jargon to hear the remarkably austere
impact of the nal number.
Structurally,
Lagrime
also re ects the kind of
theological numerological symbolism that is
so all-pervasive in Bach’s masterpieces. Each
stanza is written for seven separate parts. (Some
performers opt to complement the voices with
instruments, citing performance practice of Las-
so’s era.) Seven is the number of perfection and
creation, but also a number with a dark side, as
in the Seven Deadly Sins. ree is the number of
the Trinity, but it, too, has a negative shadow in
the three times Peter denies Jesus. Lasso’s overall
cycle comprises × stanzas (yielding
lines
of poetry, a sum evenly divisible by ).
PARED-DOWN SIMPLICITY —
For this staging,
Gershon and Sellars decided to perform with
three singers on a part, resulting in an ensem-
ble of . “We wanted the size of the ensemble
Orlando di Lasso
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