Pierre de la Rue’s five-voice ‘Missa de Septem doloribus’ is a somewhat enigmatic composition. Its sources, style and liturgical context have confounded scholars from the beginning: All sources were exclusively copied in the Alamire workshop, the mass is modelled on unidentified chants, and it was created for a newly established Marian feast in the Low Countries, to which it seems to be – with the single exception of one anonymous mass – the solitary contribution in the entire history of the polyphonic mass. And although we might assume that La Rue composed this Marian mass originally for Margaret of Austria, whom he served at the Habsburg-Burgundian court in Mechelen between 1508 and 1516, we have no evidence that the mass was sung in the newly established ‘Septem Doloribus’ confraternities, or, indeed, anywhere in the Low Countries. Finally, it is not helpful that all sources of the mass have supplementary texts in red above the Tenor voice: a compilation from different texts on the Seven Sorrows, but without connection to the Office of the Seven Sorrows. This paper, which reflects the effort of several years since I first published on the work, follows La Rue’s ‘Septem Doloribus’ mass through the known troubled paths and some new ones. My aim is not only to save colleagues and future researchers from fruitlessly treading the same ground, but also to place several of the dead ends into a broader setting, which may shed new light on this extraordinary work.
