The Lagrime was to be Lassus’ last composition: he dedicated it to Pope Clement VIII on May 24, 1594, three weeks before his death, and it was published in Munich the next year.
Within the cycle he uses techniques he learned early in his career as a composer of secular madrigals; chromaticism related to his much earlier musica reservata masterpiece Prophetiae Sibyllarum; and the concise, refined, almost austere language he developed late in his career, related to the Palestrina style, in which no note is superfluous.
The music sets the text syllabically, with careful regard for diction, and contains pauses where a speaker would naturally stop for breath; and it is entirely through-composed, without repetition or redundancy.
The final piece in the set is not a madrigal, but rather a Latin motet: Vide homo, quae pro te patior (Behold, man, how I suffer for you).
Although sacred madrigals were a small subset of the total output of madrigals, this set by Lassus is often considered by scholars to be one of the highest achievements of Renaissance polyphony, and appeared at the end of an age: within 10 years of its composition, the traditional stile antico had been displaced in many centers by new early Baroque forms such as monody and the sacred concerto for few voices and basso continuo.