Lasso's Ritual Reading of De Rore's Scarco di doglia

Abstract

Despite the Council of Trent's supposed banning of the use of secular elements in the mass, many composers, including Orlando di Lasso, routinely based their masses and Magnificats on secular music. This situation challenges us to articulate more precisely what liturgical music based on secular models actually meant to the Christian communities that cultivated it. This paper considers this question through the lens of the mass Lasso based on Cipriano de Rore's madrigal Scarco di doglia. The madrigal, first published by Gardano in 1548, sets an anonymous sonnet that follows a familiar narrative: the male lover recalls a time when he was free from grief ('scarco di doglia') but then the absence of his beloved makes him complain and grow sad. The sestet brings relief: the beautiful thought of her lofty beauty comforts him, and he imagines her voice telling him that there was never so true a lover as he. This model might seem a strange choice to serve as the basis for a mass. But a close reading of Lasso's compositional decisions about what material from the madrigal to use and where to place it in the mass reveals an allegorical reading entirely appropriate to the Eucharist.