Orlando di Lassus published his first books of madrigals later in life, but obviously composed many either during, or in memory of, his travels in Italy in the 1540s and 1550s. He generally favored settings of Petrarch's poetry, using sensitive and starkly expressive musical gestures to convey a very close reading of his text. He published the Lagrime di San Pietro (the "Tears of St. Peter"), on the other hand, in the last year of his life, completing the cycle of compositions six weeks before his death and possibly thinking of death while writing this dolorous, but farsighted, cycle of Madrigali spirituali. This important madrigal sub-genre (pioneered by Palestrina) used the techniques of madrigal composition to set vernacular sacred texts, apparently for amateur performance in private chambers. The vernacular texts sometimes rearranged popular love songs, substituting the Virgin Mary for the Beloved, but were often freely composed devotional lyrics. A strong penitential cast to the entire repertory reflects the severity of Counter-Reformation piety. Lassus' cycle sets 20 ottave from a contemporary cycle of poems, followed by a single Latin stanza. The 20 stanzas of Italian poetry come from a longer (though incomplete) poetic cycle by Luigi Tansillo. The form of each is ottava rime, the classic eight-line Italian stanzaic form, with rhyme scheme ABABABCC; the severe and pessimistic set describes the contrition of St. Peter as an old man, as he remembers his betrayal of Christ. The first six stanzas use a variety of images to describe the old man's recollected painful moment (described in Luke 22:61-62) when, after Peter's denial, Jesus turned and their eyes met. Stanzas seven and eight quote the rebuke he imagined in Christ's gaze at that moment. The six following recall Peter's desperate escape from these eyes and the flooding of his own with tears. Stanzas 15 to 20 speak in the first person of the despair which he felt then and which still, near the hour of his death, makes him feel unworthy of salvation. Appended to this selection is a single Latin stanza, which serves the same function as a figure in an altarpiece painting whose eyes look outward—to make the drama personal for the viewer. The voice of Christ Himself is evoked in this final stanza, asking all who pass by to consider the suffering He endured, and His greater suffering at humankind's ingratitude. Lassus' cycle of three times seven stanzas, set for a lush seven-voiced texture, displays both an almost atomistic concern for local motifs and an innovative large-scale tonal arch over the entire cycle. The seven voices offer a variety of textures, often counterpoising antiphonal groups. In contrast to the floridity of his earlier madrigal style, these late pieces conjure up small images in the text by means of much smaller motifs and much subtler tonal motions. But at the same time, the Lagrime as a set build powerfully on one another through key relationships. The first 15 madrigali move gradually through related keys (each key thought at the time to carry its own intrinsic emotional affect) in glacially increasing intensity. Madrigals 16 to 20 in the cycle shift suddenly and affectively to the "flat" side of the tonal spectrum, the more mournful and despairing; the specific line of text upon which the shift occurs is "O vita troppo rea, troppo fallace" ("O wicked, deceptive life!"). The final Latin stanza receives the most evocative tonal treatment, even venturing into outright chromaticism in its dramatic concluding pathos.

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