Quire of Cheahs presents the final movement from William Byrd's exquisite Mass for Four Voices.
Nothing is more essentially Catholic than settings of the Mass, a point which would not have been lost on Elizabeth I’s secret police, dedicated as they were to tracking down and harassing believers in the old religion. No one had set these texts in England since Queen Mary’s reign some decades before (and would not do so again for three hundred years), so Byrd’s trilogy stands isolated in time. But the really daring part of the story is that he published this music, admittedly in small volumes without title-pages, but with his name clearly given. Having taken such risks it is not surprising to find that the music itself is deeply expressive. The Mass for Four Voices is perhaps the most personal as well as the earliest of the set, almost certainly written in 1592. It retains some techniques from the distant past such as blurring the boundaries between the tenor and alto parts. A special feature of the mass—which is true as well of the Mass for Five Voices—is the final clause of the Agnus Dei. Although text-expression is not generally a feature of sixteenth-century Mass cycles, Byrd clearly regarded the ending of the Agnus Dei text as an opportunity for an expressive treatment of the words. He almost certainly identified "nobis" as the persecuted Tudor Catholic community, as he had done with many of the motet texts which he had set during the 1580s. The final prayer for peace at the end of this Mass is one of the most admired passages in the whole of Byrd's output. It is built on a restless suspension figure, which generates a chain of overlapping entries, building to a climax before resolving onto a luminous final major chord.
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Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
