YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

WHO OWNED LASSO’S CHANSONS?
How might all of this help us to understand the Protestant appropriation of Lasso’s
chansons? The books of contrafacta based on Lasso’s chansons, after all, are unlikely
to have posed a real threat to the composer’s authorial rights to direct the dissemination
of his music. In Geneva, Simon Goulart was not bound by commercial protections
that applied only in France, while the Haultin firm – Pasquier’s printer in
the besieged Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle – could hardly have cared at all
whether they violated ‘royal’ copyright or not. Instead, the significance of the
Huguenot versions of Lasso’s music may rest in a more open notion of the purposes
of music, and the ownership of spiritual texts. For instance, when Robert Olivétan
published the first French translation of the Bible in 1535, he dedicated the book not
to a temporal patron, but to the church itself. He regarded such holy books as gifts
from God, a kind of communal property in which all believers might have an equal
share. So too, the compilers of the spiritual contrafacta of Lasso’s chansons regarded
music as a gift, beyond the claims of personal property and thus beyond claims of
either ownership or theft. In reforming the texts of these errant songs, Jean Pasquier
‘returned them to their true and natural subject, namely to sing of the power, sagacity,
and goodness of the Eternal’. 25 This view seems in many ways quite opposite to the
one articulated in the authorial privileges held by Lasso and Ronsard. At the heart of
all of these projects, in sum, is a growing recognition about the ethical dimension of
creative work, and of the power of printed texts to shape how those works are understood.
25 From Jean Pasquier’s dedication (to Catherine de Parthenay, Duchesse de Rohan) in the Mellange
d’Orlande de Lassus contenant plusiers chansons, à quatre parties desquelles la lettre profane à este
changée en spirituelle, La Rochelle, 1575: Je les remettois sur leur vray et naturel suject, qui est de
chanter la puissance, sagesse et bonté de L’eternel.
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