His parents fell ill, and Lasso left Rome to visit them. They were dead before he arrived in Belgium, and Quickelberg says that Lasso went first to England, then to France with the Neapolitan bass Giulio Cesare Brancaccio, later to be well-known as part of the glittering ensemble of madrigalists at the Este court in Ferrara. This would have been in 1554 or 1555, during the brief reign of Mary I, when the Catholic religion was briefly restored, and elaborate religious music was back in vogue (e.g. the seven-voice mass for Christmas Puer natus est nobis by Tallis, probably written in hopes of a royal heir from the marriage of Mary and Philip of Spain). Perhaps the young pair of musicians had scented professional opportunities in the air. Then they went to Antwerp, where in 1555 Lasso published a collection showing off his professional skills— madrigals, villanescas, chansons, and motets. If this collection was to serve as a portfolio for prospective employers, it seems to have worked, for he was hired to join the musical establishment at the court of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria in Munich the next year in 1556. According to Quickelberg, Albrecht was a particular lover of music, and Lasso made himself beloved of the Duke not only because of his suavissimas compositiones, but most particularly because of his iucundissimos mores, apophtegmatum et iocorum ubertatem, and linguarum peritiam—his merry manner, his cornucopia of witticisms and jokes, and his skill in languages. These are exactly the qualities that are especially evident in Lasso’s letters to Duke Wilhelm in the early 1570s.
Albrecht’s son, Wilhelm, was born in 1548, and was thus considerably younger than Lasso. By his teens he went to study at the University of Ingolstadt, and his festive wedding with Renée of Lorraine took place in 1568. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Wilhelm “made a reputation by his strong religious opinions and devotion to the Faith, and was called the Pious”. He may have been a fervent adherent of the Counter-Reformation, but the portrait we see in Lasso’s letters is a rather more earthy one. There is a marvelous portrait of Lasso from 1570 in the Mielichkodex held in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich, where the composer is garbed in black, looking serious, with almost a sneer on his face. This is the ‘public’ Lasso. The private Lasso is another matter entirely, full of humor, puns, jests, scatological, earthy. One can only imagine the private glee that the Duke and he must have shared in hearing mass with an Oridnary by Lasso based on filthy French chansons—the most outrageous example being the Missa Entre vous filles on a song by Clemens Non Papa.
Entre vous filles de quinze ans,
Ne venez plus à la fontaine,
Car trop aves les yeulx frians
Tetin poingnant bouche riant connin mouflant
Le cueur plus gay qu’une mistaine
Entre vous filles de quinze ans,
Ne venez plus à la fontaine!
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