YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

152 PETER BERGQUIST
ters, and he probably lived in Lasso’s house with the other boys. In 1579 he was an
assistant teacher at the St. Lorenz school in Nuremberg, a position he held from 1575
to 1583. While at Nuremberg he was active as a composer and performer, increasingly
recognized in Germany through a number of publications. It was no doubt his
standing as a musician and admirer of Lasso that caused Katharina Gerlach to engage
him to edit the reissue of Selectissimae cantiones, which he did in exemplary fashion.
His preface states that he ‘revised the previous edition from accurate and corrected
exemplars and … removed in the process obvious mistakes’. This suggests that he
received better texts from an outside source as well as exercising independent judgment
on his own. In any case, he thoroughly reviewed and corrected the errors in the
motets that had first been published in the 1568 Selectissimae cantiones, also in the
motets that were new in the 1564 Thesaurus musicus. His corrections are always sensible,
sometimes imaginative.
Lechner was a sufficiently accomplished musician and lover of Lasso’s music
that he was likely to have had a good sense of Lasso’s intentions, even if they were
not communicated to him directly, and his corrections are most probably in accord
with what Lasso himself would have wished. However, as with the 1568 edition, the
degree of Lasso’s involvement with the 1579 edition cannot be established definitively,
since Lechner does not identify the source of his ‘corrected exemplars’. The
Gerlach firm seems not to have published anything by Lasso between 1568 and 1579
except reprints. During those years Adam Berg in Munich had become Lasso’s main
printer in Germany. It would thus appear that direct contact between the Gerlach house
and Lasso had lessened, so the 1579 reprint may be the successful result of an attempt
by Katharina Gerlach to re-establish the relationship, especially since it contained
five new motets. If that is the case, the success continued to bear fruit, since two years
later Gerlach published a collection of Lasso’s masses, which was soon followed by
large collections of his motets and lieder that the title pages describe as published
‘with the author’s consent’. 5 Lechner continued to be involved in Gerlach’s publishing
program through editing the masses and also a 1583 motet anthology that contained
some works by Lasso. 6 Siegfried Hermelink has suggested that Lechner intended to
put out a collected edition of Lasso’s music, though he edited only the masses and
the 1579 motets for Gerlach. 7 Thus it appears that from 1579 Lasso resumed closer
ties with the Gerlach house. Whether this means that he took a role in preparing the
Selectissimae cantiones is not certain, but it is plausible that he may have been the
source of Lechner’s ‘corrected exemplars’ as well as the five motets that were first
editions.
5 RISM 1581a, 1582c, and 1583b respectively.
6 2 RISM 1583 .
7 O. LASSUS, Messen 18–23: Messen der Drucke Paris 1577 und Nürnberg 1581, (Sämtliche Werke.
Neue Reihe, 5), ed. S. HERMELINK, Kassel, 1965, p. vi.