It is tempting, given the circumstances leading to the Sack of Rome three years prior to the coronation and Charles’s documented embarrassment about it, to attribute the character of this mass to Charles’s regret. Its basis of the regretful chanson could channel Charles’s general regret about the political situation and the Sack in particular.
A more likely explanation is a particular predilection for melancholic music on Charles’s part. In Luys de Narváez’s 1538 anthology of intabulations for the vihuela—versions of polyphonic works for a guitar-like instrument popular in Spain at the time—a version of Josquin des Prez’s Mille Regretz bears the title “La Canción del Emperador.” Mille Regretz was the model for a mass by Cristóbal de Morales that appeared in a print bearing Charles’s coat of arms. In a 1995 article on allusions to Josquin’s Mille Regretz, Owen Rees noted Charles’s likely familiarity with a manuscript owned by his aunt that contained a number of similar “regret” chansons. While it may be difficult for modern listeners to distinguish between expressions of sadness and solemnity in this style of polyphony, this particular occasion seems to express the latter by redeploying counterpoint originally meant to express the former.
