Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Orlando di Lasso
Summary
Orlando di Lasso (various other names; probably 1532 – 14 June 1594) was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria as the leading composers of the later Renaissance. Immensely prolific, his music varies considerably in style and genres, which gave him unprecedented popularity throughout Europe.
Lasso's name appears in many spellings, often changed depending on the place in which his music was being performed or published. In addition to Orlando di Lasso, variations include Orlande de Lassus, Roland de Lassus, Orlandus Lassus, Orlande de Lattre and Roland de Lattre.
Since these various spellings or translations of the same name have been known and accepted for centuries, and since there is no evidence that he stated a preference, none of them can be considered incorrect.
Orlando de Lasso was born in Mons in the County of Hainaut, Habsburg Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). Information about his early years is scanty, although some uncorroborated stories have survived, the most famous of which is that he was kidnapped three times because of the singular beauty of his singing voice. At the age of twelve, he left the Low Countries with Ferrante Gonzaga and went to Mantua, Sicily, and later Milan (from 1547 to 1549). While in Milan, he made the acquaintance of the madrigalist Spirito l'Hoste da Reggio, a formative influence on his early musical style.
He then worked as a singer and a composer for Costantino Castrioto in Naples in the early 1550s, and his first works are presumed to date from this time. Next he moved to Rome, where he worked for Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who maintained a household there, and in 1553, he became maestro di cappella of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the ecumenical mother church of Rome and a spectacularly prestigious post indeed for a man only twenty-one years old. However, he stayed there for only a year.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.