As an aesthetic innovator in (almost) all musical genres of the 16th century, Orlando di Lasso is assured a prominent role not only in music historiography. Even during his lifetime, the composer moved in the highest circles of the cultural public, and under his chapelmastership the Munich Hofkapelle developed into one of the most important ensembles in the European musical landscape. In addition, the setting of ordinaries in the early modern period was of great importance. Although the polyphonic mass was oriented towards the liturgy, its rank in the Western hierarchy of genres remained untouched. It is therefore hardly surprising that the compositional examination of the Ordinarium Missae occupies the largest space in Lasso's œuvre, along with the Magnificat.
The focus of this volume is on an examination of this exceptional repertoire on the basis of a wide variety of historical sources. The methodological approach ranges from the investigation of institution-specific framework conditions to the analysis of genre- and liturgy-historical contexts to the embedding in contemporary music-theoretical and -aesthetic discourses.
