YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

THE TWO EDITIONS OF LASSO’S SELECTISSIMAE CANTIONES, 1568 AND 1579
One more piece of evidence about Lasso’s involvement with the 1579 Selectissimae
cantiones remains to be considered. Two motets that had appeared in the 1568 collection
were omitted in 1579, Zachaee, festinans descende and Gloria Patri. These
motets were first published by Gardano in 1566 in his Liber II and Liber III respectively.
They were reprinted only in the 1568 Selectissimae cantiones and in reissues
of the two Gardano books. For stylistic reasons I believe that Lasso could not have
composed these pieces; they seem more likely to belong to an earlier generation. 8 I
consider that their omission in 1579 can be taken as an indication that Lasso himself
disowned them, or that Lechner concluded independently that they were not by Lasso.
Wolfgang Boetticher took a position in favor of their authenticity, and concluded that
their exclusion in 1579 indicates that Lasso was not involved in that edition. 9
Boetticher for that reason among others devalued the 1579 edition as an important
source for Lasso’s music. However, when one considers the number of publications
of Lasso’s music by Gerlach in the next few years after 1579, some of them explicitly
described as published with his consent, it is difficult to escape the conclusion
that Lasso approved of the reissued Selectissimae cantiones, whether or not he was
actively involved in its preparation.
Let us consider some of Lechner’s editorial work and see for ourselves. To begin
with, it would be useful to categorize the sorts of errors he found in the early editions
and corrected in 1579. A relatively small number have to do with rhythm. Lechner
several times combined repeated pitches into a single note when the earlier source
gave no syllable of text to go with the second note, or where a syllable placed on that
second note led to faulty underlay of the syllables that followed. He also emended
obviously incorrect note values, which are not frequent in either the 1564 or 1568
source.
Corrections of pitch or text underlay are more numerous. Errors in pitch can be
subdivided into two categories. The first occurs when a note is placed on the wrong
pitch, the second involves omitted or incorrect accidentals. Both the 1568 and 1564
sources contain a surprising number of wrong pitches, that is, pitches which are not
plausible alternatives but unequivocal mistakes, such as D in a sonority in which the
other voices sing C, E, and G. In the 1568 source only five of the first editions are
free of such errors; the remaining fifteen contain thirty-three wrong pitches. Of the
seventeen first editions in the 1564 source, twelve have no incorrect pitches and the
other five contain thirteen wrong pitches.
8 In O. DI LASSO, The Complete Motets, 5, (Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance, 109),
ed. P. BERGQUIST, Madison, Wisconsin, 1997, pp. xvi–xix, I discuss in detail the reasons why I
believe that these two motets are not by Lasso.
9 W. BOETTICHER, Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit, Kassel, 1958, pp. 451–452 and 455.
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