Orlande de Lassus was hailed by a worldwide audience for the vivid perfection of his musical expression. A contemporary credited him with being able to make subjects literally appear before the eyes when one listened to his music; a famous music theorist writing just after Lassus' death compared his music to the rhetorical power of classical speeches. Throughout his massive ouvre of music in four European languages, Lassus remained ever careful to depict every nuance of his text: not only rhythm and structure but also subtle shades of meaning and allusion. His well-known motet for five voices, Tristis est anima mea, offers a particularly rich example. First published in 1565, the intensity of the motet's text expression gained it enough popularity to warrant re-publication in a posthumous 1604 publication by Lassus' two sons.

In Tristis est anima mea, Lassus was responding to the intense drama inherent in his Biblical text. The text, liturgically appropriate to be sung on Maundy Thursday, reports some of Jesus' words to his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemene, prior to his Passion (Matt. 26:38 and Mk. 14:34). Just Lassus the madrigal composer might react to the pathos inherent in a dialogue between parting lovers, he employs every musical gambit possible to embody the emotional content of this sacred dialogue in his motet. Imitation based upon the saddest musical interval of them all, a half-step, dominates the motet's opening; harmonically, frequent suspensions (and suspensions that behave in musically surprising ways) characterize the progression. As Lassus brings the first musical phrase to a conclusion ("unto death"), he does so on a "mournful" plagal cadence and reaches a chord missing its third and thus sounding quite empty. Jesus' words ask the disciples to wait and watch with him, and the composer reflects these verbs in upward suspensions (a pun on sustinete) and more active melismas (vigilate). A dramatic and rhetorical change of texture announces "You will see the crowd," and the crowd's action of "encircling" Jesus (circumdabit me) appears in Lassus' serpentine melody here. Two more musical puns complete the motet: Lassus sets Jesus' words "you will flee" (fugam) to 11 statements of a musical fugue, one for each of the disciples except Judas. The increased melodic activity of the final phrase has been interpreted as evoking the ceremonial sprinkling of seeds of wheat (mola) over Jesus the sacrificial victim who goes to be "immolated."

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