The Council of Trent is famously (and falsely) thought to have stipulated sobriety and intelligibility for all Roman Catholic liturgical music. And whereas Palestrina's music most often embodies just these characteristics, he can, on occasion, write music with a little more fire and passion. One set of liturgical texts that seem to have inspired him to stretch his own musical style are the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah, sung during the Sacrum triduum, the three days before Easter into which the Catholic Church has invested its most solemn liturgical rites. All told, Palestrina wrote four or perhaps five complete liturgical sets of Lamentations, a four-voiced set that he published in 1588, and several others that use textures of up to five and six voices. All of his various Lamentations share a vibrant awareness of their plangent texts, though still within his highly restrained musical style.

Superficially, Palestrina's Lamentations reflect the hallmarks of his music: balanced phrases and arched melodies, frequent recourse to lucid homophonic passages, and utter regularity of meter (governed by his careful handling of dissonances). At the same time, these motet cycles contain some of his most adventurous writing. No other music of Palestrina so often spices its melodies with sharps and flats, nor does he anywhere else pierce the harmonic fabric with such frequent cross-relations and proximate occurances of, for instance, C sharp and E flat. In addition, Palestrina tends in the Lamentations to oscillate between different vocal textures in response to very local passages of text. His shifts between imitation and homophony and between different groups of voices, highlight the text word by in word in a near-madrigalian fashion.

The liturgy within which this most restrained of Renaissance composers chose to cautiously experiment is among the most passionate of the entire Catholic calendar. The Lamentations of Jeremiah are sung in three groups of three lessons, during the night office of Tenebrae on the days before Easter. The office gets its name from the liturgical practice of gradually snuffing out the altar candles during the service. The prophetic texts of weeping over the recalcitrant and devastated city of Jerusalem all conclude liturgically with the refrain, "Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God"; in addition, acrostic letters from the original Hebrew poetry ornament each successive verse. Palestrina in all four Lamentation sets observes these punctuations with florid melismas and the refrains with heartfelt cries.

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