The Office of Matins during the celebration of Holy Week includes a singular liturgical penitence: a series of lessons from the Book of Lamentations, traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah. Early in the morning on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, the Church memorializes Jesus' Passion by singing the Lamentations, a passionate complaint for the city of Jerusalem left desolate for her sins. Yet the message of Easter hope also inhabits this liturgy, as the penultimate lesson recalls the mercy of God and the peace of the soul that waits for His salvation. Numerous composers during the European Renaissance, attracted by the high liturgical occasion and the powerful imagery of the texts, wrote cycles of Lamentation motets.

The Lamentations attributed to Pierre de la Rue, as is often the case in such somber liturgical items, present a restrained and introspective stylistic face. Much of the music proceeds in simple chordal textures, with straightforward cadences. The plainchant recitation melody bounds the harmonic progression at every moment; the soprano and tenor (sometimes the bass) in alternation paraphrase its gentle oscillation between F and A. This does not, however, prevent the composer from varying the texture, either in imitative duo passages or expansions to five and six voices, or from inserting periodic harmonic surprises (such as a jarring change of harmony when the text speaks of Jerusalem's dead children).

Large-scale symmetries provide much of this cycle's beauty. The liturgy itself contains a series of interlocking "perfections" of three—three days, with three Lessons each, and three verses to each Lesson. The specific texts set here diverge somewhat from the modern Liber Usualis; some verses are used out of order, apparently for thematic reasons (linking, for instance, verses of the tribulation of mothers and suckling children, of the perfidy of lying prophets, or of the soul's hope in God. Each verse begins with a short melisma upon a Hebrew letter, as if embodying the historiated capitals in an illuminated manuscript. These highlight the Hebrew acrostics in the original text, and the composer has here ignored the shifting text to give the musical letters in alphabetical order. Each verse ends with a refrain "Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God"; each is crafted in turn to occupy increasing multiples of seven breves (another symbolically charged number): 4 x 7, 5 x 7, and 6 x 7 (five-voiced); each repeats in the Lessons for subsequent days.

Unfortunately, the cycle comes through history by a torturous route: until 1988, only a four-Lesson portion of the cycle was known, and that in a late German print anthology. This fragment, thought to be excised from the complete work for Protestant use, was partially confused with the Lamentations of Antoine de Févin. The complete cycle of 27 motets bears a conflicting attribution to the German Stephan Mahu; neither the surviving sources nor the style of the setting can resolve the conundrum. The final Lesson, setting Jeremiah's prayer (Lamentations 5 : 1 - 6) may not even belong to the same cycle.

© Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide