Great Composers and Their Lives

Here is a wonderful composer that did quite a bit. Not only had he composed a immense quantity of works, but he composed each of them with stunning quality. Due to his extensive travels throughout his life, he gained a lot of experience which he was able to intertwine into his music. Along with his own ingenuity, he was able to combine several styles of music including those originating from Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium, making his music full of variation.

Orlande de Lassus was born in the Franco-Flemish province of Hainaut located in present day Belgium. His hometown and birthplace was a city by the name of Mons. He was incredibly talented and had been blessed with a gorgeous voice. As a child, having been a choir boy at the Church of Saint Nicolas in Mons, his voice was so amazing that he had supposedly been abducted three times by people looking for talent to play in the courts of Europe. His parents were able to have him returned two of the three times. At the age of twelve, this time with the parents’ consent, he started working for Ferrante Gonzaga, a general to the emperor at the time, Charles V. It was through him that he had the opportunity to travel throughout Italy, experiencing it in its fullest in the higher classes.

Early on, he had spent a great deal of his youth in the service of many churches and princes. In his twenties, he travelled to Naples where he worked for a very well-to-do family as a singer and a composer, after which he travelled to Rome to work for the Archbishop of Florence who resided there at the time. It was shortly after this that his talent, along with the power of the church established him as choir director of the Basilica San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran Church), which was a pretty amazing position for someone in his twenties.

Only a few years later, he was forced to travel home to see his dying parents. Following their death, he stayed in Antwerp for a while, where he was able to publish several of his earlier works. It is interesting that up until his death at around the age of 60, he had published more than 2000 sacred and secular works.

He moved on to Munich, Germany, where he took a singing position in the chapel of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. He got married to a woman named Regina Wächinger, a noble’s daughter and eventually became choir master for the Duke. Part of his job had also been to recruit other musicians. It was for this reason that he had to travel throughout Europe extensively. His fame had grown and he had received a lot of job propositions (even from the King of France himself), yet he loved his family too much and stayed in Munich for the rest of his life. In spite of this, he still went down in history as the most famous and influential composer during the end of the sixteenth century. In fact, along with the composer I wrote about in a previous article, Palestrina, Lassus’s works are actually representative of polyphonic vocal music in the 16^th century.

To listen to music by this great composer click here