The rhythms of Hebrew funereal verse pattern give pattern to the plangent poetry of the prophet Jeremiah's lament over the holy city of Jerusalem, fallen through sin to the Babylonians. The Catholic Church appropriated verses from Lamentations for the mournful and most penitential sacrum triduum, the Holy Days leading up to Easter. The tripartite night office of Matins for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday consists of three nocturns, each containing three chanted psalms, and three Lessons selected from the Lamentations. The affective texts and solemn liturgical occasion attracted composers through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Morales, Victoria, Isaac, La Rue, Palestrina, and Tallis all composed at least one setting. Orlando de Lassus set a selection of these texts for four vocies in the early 1580s and published a rich five-voiced setting in 1585, written for the monastery of Benediktbeuern.

Lassus chose three verses from each Lesson, creating a structure of interlocking "perfections": three services, three lessons, three verses each. This structure is framed by "punctuation" texts, which function like formal rhetorical devices. Each Lesson begins with an incipit, to introduce the mode and "to render the ears and mind of the listener attentive to the song" (in Burmeister's words); each concludes with a refrain from Hosea, "Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God," reiterating the pentitential drive of the liturgy. Each verse, furthermore, opens with a single Hebrew letter: the original text was an acrostic poem (Aleph, Beth, Gimel), and Jerome's Vulgate translation (as well as some modern English ones) retained the acrostics at the head of each verse. Lassus, conventionally, provides related introductory musical passages rich in imitation and invention for each acrostic. These serve both the musical purpose of modal introduction and the aesthetic one of solemnity and ornamentation—much like the illuminated capitals in a lavish presentation manuscript.

Though this work is less exhuberant in text painting than his madrigals and less chromatically daring than the Prophetiae Sibyllarum, Lassus carefully wields his tonal weaponry for powerful rhetorical effect. He generally holds to full five-voiced textures, allowing harmonic progressions to bear the weight of textual representation. A descending harmonic sequence at the end of the "vigilavit iugum" section, for instance, evokes the text's powerless descent ("hands from which I am unable to rise"); other examples include the subtle poignancy of sudden bass descents in "O vos omnes" and at the word "silence" in "Bonus est Dominus." Though the vocal tessituras do not noticeably change over these progressions, a sense of motion is unavoidable; the motion is not a linear melody, but, in a sense, linear harmony within Lassus' modal system. His peregrinations (via accidentals) from extremely "sharp" harmonies (E major) to extremely "flat" (E flat) are always anchored, however, by a firm cadential structure, which favors the more "sorrowful" plagal motions, until the Lessons begin to speak of mercy in texts for the hours just before Easter sunrise. Without recourse to the mannered experimental style popular among the madrigalists of his day, Lassus fashions a Lamentations cycle that poignantly evokes the austerity, the pathos, and the hidden hope of Holy Week.

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