Lorenzo died unexpectedly in early April 1492 after suffering from long periods of ill health. The occasion required a commemorative motet in short order, and Poliziano provided the Latin text 'Quis dabit capiti meo aquam?'. For his part, Isaac turned to music from his four-voice Missa Salva nos, based on the chant for the last antiphon of the evening office of Compline, a translation of which reads thus: ‘Protect us, Lord, in our waking, and guard over us in our sleeping, so that we may keep vigil with Christ, and may we rest in peace.’ The plea for peace in the closing phrase (‘Et requiescamus in pace’) may have prompted Isaac to borrow the sections of the Mass that employ this phrase of the antiphon as the basis for the first, second and fourth sections of his lament. He added a new phrase at the opening of the first section, and it quotes the chant melody for ‘Et requiescamus in pace’ in the top voice. In fact, throughout the lament this chant melody sounds in each of the vocal parts in turn. Even though Isaac borrowed much of the music from one of his pre-existing works, the lament makes a highly unified impression on its own. His procedure resembles Bach’s method of borrowing and rewriting music from his previous compositions for his Leipzig church cantatas and the Mass in B minor.

Isaac provided entirely new music for the third section. Here, in a symbolic move, the tenor drops out, and an instruction states: ‘tenor laurus tacet’ (‘tenor, the laurel, is silent’). The laurel symbolizes Lorenzo, and the text mourns the fact that the laurel has been felled by lightning. Poliziano startled listeners with this depiction; ancient Romans believed wearing a wreath of laurel protected them from lightning. The bass stands out by singing, six times in a row, the chant melody and the text for the last phrase of the antiphon: ‘Et requiescamus in pace.’ It sounds each time on a progressively lower step of the scale. Isaac created this ritual keening and its plea for peace with good reason: Lorenzo was the peacemaker of Italy, who in 1481 successfully negotiated an end to war with Naples, and who continued for the next decade to broker peace among the fractious Italian states. His death opened the door to war, and in September 1494 King Charles VIII invaded the peninsula to enforce his hereditary claim to the throne of Naples.

from notes by Patrick Macey © 2022