A German music publisher in the middle of the sixteenth century said of Josquin Desprez, "He produced more [music] after his death than during his life." Josquin, in a way, was the world's first musical superstar: his European fame was so great that unscrupulous publishers could sell more copies of music if they said it was by him. Unfortunately, this has left a lot of music—however fine—mistakenly published and performed in our own time as if it were Josquin's. The well-loved Latin motet Absalom fili mi is no longer understood to be by Josquin, and serious doubts have been cast upon the French chanson Mille regretz. Likewise, it now seems unlikely that Josquin actually wrote the five-voiced motet-chanson Cueurs desolez par toute nation/Plorans ploravit. The main testimony to Josquin's authorship is an unreliable French printer's attribution many decades after the composer's death. The chanson may instead have been written by another composer at the French royal court of Louis XII, either Hilaire Penet or Hilaire Daleo. (There also exists a four-voiced setting of the chanson text alone that has been attributed to Josquin; it is similarly not really his, but rather the work of Benedictus Appenzeller.)

Whoever composed Cueurs desolez, Josquin or one of the Hillaires, gave the piece a fascinating blend of musical characters. The French text is a lament, probably by poet Jean Lemaire de Bruges; it mourns the 1503 death of Louis of Luxembourg. It calls for "desolate hearts throughout the nation," which cannot even seek consoling harmonies in the mythic Lyre of Orpheus. Two versions of the text call upon Josquin and Hillaire to compose music to the lament. The composer of Cueurs desolez gave the French lament text to four voices, while a fifth intones a long-note cantus firmus on "Plorans ploravit in nocte," an excerpt from the liturgical Lamentations of Jeremiah. This lament is similar to that in Josquin's lament for the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois. Unlike Josquin's other known motet-chanson laments, however, Cueurs desolez uses a somewhat higher and brighter vocal scoring and a more rapid melodic style. It also lacks his characteristic tightness of melodic motives and care with harmonic progressions. Cueurs desolez, rather, takes a powerful harmonic journey from the opening plagal and "minor" areas, to a series of solid (if still often plagal) cadences on F, the final of the cantus firmus melody.

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