YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

THE TWO EDITIONS OF LASSO’S SELECTISSIMAE CANTIONES, 1568 AND 1579
Neuber firm during the preparation of Thesaurus musicus. In that collection the new
Lasso motets for eight, seven, and five voices have relatively few errors, but some of
those for six or four voices have a great many indeed. As for the Selectissimae cantiones,
since all the other motets in its two volumes are meticulously copied from
their sources without change, it seems likely that Gerlach also copied the new motets
literally from their exemplars, making no attempt to correct their errors. Would Lasso
have sent his work to a publisher with so many mistakes? One would like to think
not. Lasso’s direct involvement with the 1568 Selectissimae cantiones must remain
an open question.
In 1579 the Gerlach firm, now under Katharina’s direction, issued a revised and
expanded version of Selectissimae cantiones, with the second volume for five and
four voices now renamed Altera pars selectissimarum cantionum (RISM 1579a/b).
The expansions raised the number of motets in the first volume to 57, compared to
46 in 1568, while the second volume includes 71 motets in 1579 as against 50 in 1568.
Since one motet from each volume of the older edition was omitted in the reissue, the
total of motets newly added is 12 in the first volume and 22 in the second. The motets
from the 1568 collection appear in their original order, with the added pieces inserted
among them seemingly at random. The only principle that appears to govern their
placement is that the inserted motets are always placed adjacent to another motet with
the same tonal type. Only five of the added motets are first editions, all in the second
volume; the remainder are almost all motets that were not included in the first edition
but were composed before 1568. Among them, as the title page of RISM 1579a
indicates, 3 are all of the Lasso motets from the 1564 Thesaurus musicus, which by
this time was no doubt out of print. Various other motets that had previously escaped
Theodor Gerlach’s notice were gathered in, and a few later pieces were added. Except
for six pieces, the new Selectissimae cantiones thereby remained a large and now
more comprehensive collection of Lasso’s motets from the 1550s and 1560s. The
twenty-five motets first published in the 1562 book were still excluded, since Gerlach
continued to put out separate reprints of that collection, most recently in 1575.
The title pages of both 1579 books indicate that the contents have been corrected
as well as expanded; RISM 1579a describes the edition as ‘all of it edited again much
more correctly than before’(omnia denuo multo quam antehac correctius edita). This
task was accomplished by Leonhard Lechner, whose preface appears in each partbook
of RISM 1579a. 4 Lechner (c. 1553–1606) was one of the most important German
composers of his time. He described himself as a student of Lasso, and this study
must have occurred during the years 1564 to 1568, when Lechner is presumed to have
been a member of Lasso’s Hofkapelle. He would have been one of the boy choris-
3 A facsimile of this page appears as Plate 3 in LASSO, The Complete Motets, 6, p. xxxv.
4 A facsimile of this page with an English translation appears as Plate 4 in LASSO, The Complete Motets,
6, p. xxxvi.
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