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Orlande De Lassus
Birth at
1 January 1530
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The late-Renaissance Franco-Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso left a bright mark on music. The number of works he composed is so great that his creative heritage is not fully appreciated until now. He was born in Mons, Belgium, around 1532. Little is known about the future composer’s childhood and youth, there is evidence that as a child he had a beautiful voice and probably sang in the church choir. Historians testify that at the age of 12 he left his home in Mantua, Sicily, and from there to Milan.
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The late-Renaissance Franco-Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso left a bright mark on music. The number of works he composed is so great that his creative heritage is not fully appreciated until now.
He was born in Mons, Belgium, around 1532. Little is known about the future composer’s childhood and youth, there is evidence that as a child he had a beautiful voice and probably sang in the church choir. Historians testify that at the age of 12 he left his home in Mantua, Sicily, and from there to Milan. Then he served in Naples with one of the noble masters, where he composed his first works, and then moved to Rome, where in 1533 he received an enviable composer for those times, especially for such a young (Lasso was only 21 years old), the post of Kapellmeister of the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano.
It is believed that in the mid-1550s he traveled to France and England, in 1555 he returned to Mons, and soon settled in Antwerp, where, thanks to his collaboration with the note printer Tilman Susato, his numerous works were published by that time, and the fame of the composer increased significantly.
In 1556, Duke Albrecht V, a well-known philanthropist at that time, invited him to the Bavarian court, where Orlando di Lasso was first a tenor, and from 1563 - a Kapellmeister, turning over the years of his work the local chapel into one of the best European musical centers. Here, in Munich, the composer married and lived happily until the end of his days, dying on June 14, 1594.
One of the most prolific and versatile composers of the late Renaissance, Lasso wrote more than 2,000 works in a wide variety of vocal genres known at the time – masses, madrigals, motets, requiems, German, Italian, French songs, a number of small plays, chanson.