YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

154 PETER BERGQUIST
The category of omitted or incorrect accidentals is somewhat flexible. Some of the
accidentals omitted in the two early sources occur at places where they would be
understood even if not notated, such as a leap from B-flat to E-natural or at a cadence
point where the leading tone would be raised. Quite a few omissions occur, however,
in places where the need for alteration is not self-evident. Afew accidentals are clearly
errors, for instance, a passage in O crux splendidior (RISM 1568a) in which two
voices make a standard cadence on D, with the upper voice proceeding C-D and the
lower E-D. In the 1568 source the C that leads to D is raised to C-sharp, but the E
that leads to D in the lower voice is also lowered to E-flat. 10 The augmented sixth that
results is of course not in Lasso’s vocabulary, and Lechner removed the C-sharp in
his 1579 edition. Omitted or incorrect accidentals are found in five motets from the
1568 group, with sixteen omissions found in one piece alone, Salve festa dies. Lechner
added these accidentals in 1579. The situation is similar in the 1564 source, with thirteen
omitted or incorrect accidentals in eight motets, and an additional twelve in one
motet alone, In te Domine speravi.
The most common error by far involving text underlay in both the 1564 and
1568 sources is placing a syllable under the ‘wrong’ note, by which I mean text
underlay that is clearly in conflict with the norms that Lasso follows whenever he
sets a Latin text. The 1568 source has nineteen examples of faulty placement, the
1564 source has twenty-three. The larger number in 1564 is perhaps owing in part to
the crowded layout of almost every page in that source. Both the music and text are
crowded closely into every line, and the alignment of text with music is not always
clear at a glance. The result is often that after the intended alignment has been discovered,
syllables come out in the wrong place. A smaller number of errors in text
underlay result from wrongly placed or missing signs for repetition of text, or from
incorrect or omitted words.
I would like to examine one example of an especially large concentration of
errors in text underlay, from Dixit Joseph undecim fratribus suis, a six-voice motet
from Thesaurus musicus (see Example 1). In that edition this motet has some twenty
errors of pitch or underlay, perhaps the largest total in either of the two early sources.
The example shows the last twelve measures of the first of its two parts. For each
voice the upper text shows the 1564 version, the lower text the changes Lechner made
in 1579. Only the tenor and bassus 2 are free from errors in 1564. In the cantus,
measure 43, a new word begins on a longer note following two semiminims. This is
highly unusual in Lasso’s motets; he rarely changes syllables on a note that follows
two or more semiminims. The same thing happens again in measure 45. In measure
47 only one syllable is provided for a repeated pitch. Lechner cleaned up this mess
very nicely by extending syllables past the semiminims and thereby eliminating the
10 LASSO, The Complete Motets, 6, p. 28, m. 90, altus 1 and bassus 1.