YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

THE TWO EDITIONS OF
LASSO’S SELECTISSIMAE CANTIONES, 1568 AND 1579
Peter Bergquist
University of Oregon
Orlando di Lasso was by far the most widely published composer of his time. Collections
of his motets, madrigals, chansons and other works were frequently issued and
reprinted throughout Europe. Most of these contained twenty or so compositions, the
usual size of such music books at the time, but some were much larger, gathering
older and newer works together in retrospective compilations of Lasso’s music. These
large books were in effect collected editions published during his lifetime, and his
motets were the first genre to receive such attention. In this article I will examine one
of those large collections of motets, the two-volume Selectissimae cantiones issued
in Nuremberg in 1568 by Theodor (Dietrich) Gerlach, and show how its expanded
and corrected reissue made substantial improvements in the first edition.
The earliest examples of such compilations of Lasso’s motets are Le Roy and
Ballard’s Paris motet books of 1564 and 1565, and Antonio Gardano’s numbered series
of Lasso motet books that began in 1565 in Venice (see Table 1 for a list of sources
referred to in this article). Gardano’s Lasso motet books were of standard size,
but considered as a whole, the series is a collected edition in the same sense as the
others mentioned here. Gerlach’s Selectissimae cantiones was an even more ambitious
undertaking. The ninety-six motets included in Gerlach’s collection comprise
almost all of Lasso’s production in the genre up to that time, with the exception of
forty-two pieces that the same house had previously published. Adding these fortytwo
motets and another twelve that Gerlach omitted or did not know of to the ninetysix
in Selectissimae cantiones gives a total of 150 Lasso motets published between
1555 and 1568, a remarkable production by any standard. It is of course only part of
Lasso’s output during those years, during which he also wrote masses, magnificats,
chansons, madrigals, lieder, the Penitential Psalms, the Lectiones from Job, and the
Prophetiae sibyllarum. Gerlach planned the Selectissimae cantiones as a unit, which
the title page of the tenor book of RISM 1568a makes clear when it mentions ‘four,
five, six and more voices’. 1 The collection was in fact divided into two parts, with the
motets for six or more voices in RISM 1568a and those for five and four voices in
RISM 1568b. The title page accurately describes the contents as ‘partly completely
new, partly never published in Germany’. The twenty completely new motets that this
collection published for the first time are listed in Table 2.
1 Afacsimile of this page appears as Plate 1 in O. DI LASSO, The Complete Motets, 6, (Recent Researches
in the Music of the Renaissance, 110), ed. P. BERGQUIST, Madison, Wisconsin, 1997, p. xxxiii.
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