William Byrd: A Celebration, edited by Richard Turget - MusicaSacra

“Blame Not the Printer”: William Byrd’s Publishing Drive, 1588–1591 — 23
Lamentations or some of his later motets such as In ieiunio et fletu can fail to realize that he must
have been deeply affected by the possibility of ordering technique in the service of new kind of
expression. Of course, Byrd had by now gone beyond Tallis’s technical resources, rooted as
these were in an earlier generation of English music as well as a perusal of the work of early sixteenth-century
composers such as Gombert. The anger and intensity that Tallis builds up as he
matches Jeremiah’s threnody for the fallen Jerusalem and the wonderful call for its return to the
Lord might well have been unforgettable to Byrd.
[Example 3: Lamentations II; see page 36]
The most obvious interpretation of these words, “All her portals lie in ruins, and her priests
cry in sorrow. Her virgins are defiled, and she is crushed with bitterness,” set to music of this
powerful kind is that it results from the anger of one who sees his religion forsaken, a musical
jeremiad for the contemporary situation in England. The initial disillusion for Roman Catholics
like Tallis and Byrd was the Pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570, the Ridolfi plot
the following year, and the resulting pressure on Catholics. All this destroyed the illusion of an
uneasy truce that the cautious queen might have sustained with Rome, and it forced Christians
in England to take sides.
The situation became more tense as the priests began to arrive from the English College
abroad in what became the largely Jesuit-inspired mission to re-convert England. Parliament
accordingly passed more and more repressive and punitive laws to counter the threat they
posed. Early in the 1580s came the execution of the Jesuit Edmund Campion. A Catholic poem
that circulated after this startling event met with stern censorship from the administration—its
publisher had his ears cut off. Byrd included a setting of the first stanza, beginning “Why Do
I Use My Paper, Ink, and Pen” in his 1588 songbook, together with two innocuous verses. No
one who knew the poem could miss the reference.
[Example 4: Why Do I Use My Paper, Ink, and Pen; see page 51]
This daring act causes a kind of hiatus in the normally “cool” song form. For a moment
here, and subsequently elsewhere, Byrd achieves almost declamatory rhetoric of a kind that
becomes more usual in the seventeenth century, what the music history books call “baroque.”
In the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones, however, passion spills out all over in the music that actively
shapes an interpretation of the words. Just listen, for instance, to the declamatory passage with
which Byrd begins the motet Haec dicit Dominus, another text from Jeremiah that in the context
of the contents of the two books as a whole can be—almost demands to be—interpreted
as a lament for the Catholic martyrs, as Byrd would have thought of them.
[Example 5: Haec dicit Dominus: Vox in excelsis audita est; see page 53]
Like this text, most of those which we take to refer to the contemporary situation are biblical.
But so many of them have to do with the captivities of the Jews in Babylon or Egypt, with
the Second Coming, or with dispossession or martyrdom that it was not difficult for Joseph
Kerman, following arguments already made by H. B. Collins and others, to propose successfully
that they addressed the plight of English Catholics in general, and those who favored the
Jesuits in particular. 7
7
Kerman, The Masses and Motets, pp. 40–54; also ibid., “The Elizabethan Motet: A Study of Texts for Music,”
Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), pp. 273–308.