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Lasso was already internationally renowned by the time he was in his early thirties, and his earliest biography, by Samuel van Quickelberg, appeared in the Prosopographia heroum atque illustrium virorum totius Germaniæ (Depiction of the heroes and illustrious men of all Germany) published in Basel in 1566. It was translated into German in the Teutscher Nation Heldenbuch (Hero-book of the German Nation, also Basel, 1578). According to Burton’s Silva Rhetorica (rhetoric.byu.edu) a prosopographia (from prosopon, face or person) is a “vivid description of someone’s face or character”, and both the Prosopographia and the Heldenbuch include both portraits and text about their subjects. Lasso must certainly have been one of the most vivid characters. His companions seem to be parish priests, abbots, etc., robed, hooded, with faces turned discreetly away from the viewer. Lasso, in contrast, is dressed in the latest style, his tailored clothes close-fitting, with a ruff, what seems to be a gold chain or two around his neck, bearing a cameo, his eyes wide-open, looking as if he is about to speak. Although he is only in his thirties, his hairline has receded considerably (the charitable artist has given him a little more hair than he has in the portait—age 28—in a tenor part-book of the Prophecies of the Sibylls).
According to Quickelberg’s biography (many of the other biographies in the volume are not signed), Orlando di Lasso was born in 1530 in Berga (Mons, in the region of Hainaut, in present-day Belgium), went to a boarding school where he lived with other choirboys, and because of his fine voice was stolen away from the school three times by potential employers, and twice brought back to the school by his “diligent and honest” parents. The life of a choirboy could be a dangerous one, since then as now, they might be molested or abused by the musicians and clerics who had them in their charge. Recent scholarship has exonerated the English composer John Shepherd, and hung the misdeeds previously blackening his name - keeping a schoolboy in chains (punishment for the adult – no dining privileges for a week - on a Richard Shepper . And closer to home, Nicolas Gombert, from La Gorgue in southern Flanders, Master of the Children for the traveling chapel of Emperor Charles V, was sent to the galleys for violating a boy in the Emperor’s service.
In fact the third time that Lasso left the choir school, in the early 1540’s, it was with Ferrante Gonzaga, who knew Gombert from their mutual service to the Emperor, both having served him from a young age (a letter sent by Gombert to Gonzaga in 1547, after the former’s term in the galleys is in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York). Gonzaga was a younger son in the ducal family from Mantua, an able general who served as viceroy in Sicily from 1533-1546, moving to Milan as governor in 1546. It would have been about this time that Lasso’s voice changed (after six years in Gonzaga’s service, when he would have been about sixteen—late by contemporary standards, but normal for earlier centuries). At eighteen he went to Naples and stayed for three years with the Marquis della Terza. Next he moved on to Rome, where he took over the music at St. John Lateran.
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