Orlande de Lassus earned an influential position among Europe’s leading composers with the shining invention of his masses, motets and madrigals. Born around 1530-32 in the borderlands of today’s Belgium and France, he absorbed the music of an earlier generation of Franco Flemish composers, perhaps as a boy chorister, before joining the itinerant household of a member of Italy’s powerful Gonzaga family. Lassus progressed to briefly become choirmaster at Saint John Lateran in Rome in 1553 before resuming his travels. His reputation was reinforced in the mid-1550s with the publication of weighty anthologies of madrigals and motets, and again in 1556 with his appointment to the court of Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria. Lassus remained in Munich for the rest of his life, gracing the ducal chapel with around 60 masses, including the haunting Missa Pro Defunctis, and an enormous quantity of other sacred pieces, among them a sublime collection of penitential psalms and his magnum opus, the Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of San Pietro), completed just weeks before his death in 1594.