Here too are the 374 motets of the Opus Musicum, which, in four books (1586-1590), forms Gallus’s great work. It would be difficult to find together anything which is at the same time more coherent in its conception, more carefully organised in its printed presentation (motets for the whole liturgical year arranged according to the time order) and more diverse in its realisation. When judging the mannerist author while listening to the chromatic motet Mirabile mysterium, numerous motets for two, three or four choirs lead one to suspect an adept of the Venetian polychoral style... But the list grows longer: to plunge further into the forest of this Opus Musicum is sufficient to avoid locating the unica too quickly. Does not Scio enim reveal a perfect mastery of an archaic style, close to Josquin’s penitential motets? Contrariwise, is not Hodie Simon Petrus the herald of the clear language of the Baroque? And the recourse to the direct style of declamation in Fratres, hospites non estis? And the audacious figuration of Dum aurora (whose first part evokes the march rhythm dragging Saint Cecilia to the scaffold)? One could multiply the examples of this singular musical polyglossia, which is used in the fashion of a palette of singular effects in the service of the text. < p/> Here finally are two collections of Moralia (1589, and the second published posthumously in Nuremberg in 1596, thanks to the composer’s brother) that prematurely terminated the cantor’s career in highly unorthodox fashion, in secular accents. Here too, nothing in these Latin madrigals allows formulations to be discovered that had already been heard elsewhere. The collection resembles those humanistic albums such as were loved in Erasmus’s time: venerable texts from antiquity (Virgil, Ovid) cheek by jowl with Latin proverbs borrowed from widely known contemporary books on courtesy. Latin acquires the robustness of a dialect in these couplets, feeling their soil, even their college benches. Animal cries, domestic scenes, counsels to avoid flatterers, melancholy reflections on passing time, Latin variants of La Bataille or of Petrarchian poetry: in these Moralia are found the condensation of a whole epoch. In his preface, Gallus indeed devotes some familiar words to protest the fact that, all the same, he had wished to write nothing contrary to good manners: it is truly a wind of characteristic liberty that blows on his work, a liberty so characteristic of the Prague in which he lived. < p/> The flowery Latin of Gallus’s prefaces is that of the most ornate prose of Renaissance scholars. Appearing there are named persons, who certainly help in retracing the outline of a biography, and notably three stages apparently having preceded his arrival in Prague: Melk in Austria, Zabrdovice (near Brno) in Moravia, finally Olomouc. It is known that in this last town Gallus was in the service of bishop Stanislav Pavlovsky, by whom he was much appreciated, and who was to show himself his principal supporter outside Prague once the composer was installed in that town in 1585. It is also known that he was bound in friendship with Caspar Schönhauer, the superior of the Premonstratensian monastery of Zabrdovice, to whom he refers several times in his work. It can equally be deduced that a stay in Melk, the powerful Benedictine abbey celebrated today for its Baroque architecture, must have taken place in the course of the 1570s. But nothing allows us to trace a precise itinerary of Gallus’s activities in the course of these long years, and particularly not a musical itinerary.