Lagrime di San Pietro

The Lagrime di San Pietro (Italian: Saint Peter's Tears) is a cycle of 20 madrigals and a concluding motet by the late Renaissance composer Orlande de Lassus. It is structured as three sequences of seven compositions in each sequence and is for seven voices. It was also his last composition, written in 1594, and published posthumously in Munich in 1595. He dedicated it to Pope Clement VIII on May 24, 1594, just three weeks before his death.

The Lagrime sets 20 poems by the Italian poet Luigi Tansillo (1510–1568) depicting the stages of grief experienced by St. Peter after his denial of Christ, and his memory of Christ's admonition (Matthew 26:69–75). The settings by Lassus are for seven voices, and numerical symbolism plays a part throughout: the seven voices represent the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary; in addition many of the madrigals are in seven sections. The total number of pieces in the set, 21, represents seven times the number of members of the trinity.

In addition, Lassus only sets seven of the eight church modes (modes I through VII), leaving mode VIII entirely out. The madrigals are grouped by successive mode, with madrigals 1 through 4 in mode I, 5 to 8 in mode II, 9 to 12 in modes III and IV, 13 to 15 in mode V, 16 to 18 in mode VI, 19 and 20 in mode VII, and the closing motet based on the tonus perigrinus, entirely outside the Renaissance scheme of the eight church modes. According to David Crook, writing in his 1994 book on the Lassus Magnificat settings:

Musically, the Lagrime are a summation of Lassus's style throughout his career, and he himself indicated in his dedication that they were recently composed. Within the cycle he uses techniques he learned early in his career as a composer of secular madrigals; chromaticism related to his much earlier musica reservata masterpiece Prophetiae Sibyllarum; and the concise, refined, almost austere language he developed late in his career, related to the Palestrina style, in which no note is superfluous. The music sets the text syllabically, with careful regard for diction, and contains pauses where a speaker would naturally stop for breath; and it is entirely through-composed, without repetition or redundancy.

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