William Byrd [c. 1540-1623]: Ave verum corpus á 4 | Gradualia ac cantiones sacrae, 3–5vv [London, 1605].
Stile Antico.
Four parts to perfection.
Stile Antico.
Four parts to perfection.
Philip Brett wrote about Byrd and his Gradualia:
«William Byrd, the leading composer in Elizabethan England, appears to
have retired from active life at court around 1593, his fiftieth year.
He moved his family from Harlington (near the present Heathrow airport)
to a village on the other side of London deep in the Essex countryside.
His new home at Stondon Massey was a few miles from Ingatestone, the
more private of the two Essex seats of a landed magnate named Sir John
Petre, one of Byrd’s richest patrons. Like Byrd and his family, the
Petres were Roman Catholics, and Ingatestone was a protected centre
where the Roman liturgy could be celebrated with little interference
from hostile authorities. Byrd’s move also marked the beginning of a new
phase in his composition. Motets of protest and tribulation, written in
an expansive and often madrigalian style, and clearly aimed at the
situation of the Roman Catholic minority in England, had been
characteristic of the Cantiones Sacrae of 1589 and 1591. From 1593
onwards Byrd conceived and brought to completion an ambitious plan to
provide music for the Roman liturgy (and for extra-liturgical devotions)
in a more concentrated, terse style that in many ways suited the
requirements of the Catholic reformers, especially the Jesuits to whom
he seems to have been especially close.
The first works he
completed in this characteristically thorough scheme were three settings
of the Ordinary of the Mass, in three, four and five parts, published
between 1593 and 1595. But the culmination came a decade later with two
books of a collection entitled Gradualia and published in 1605 and 1607.
The principal contents of these volumes are the Propers of the Mass
(Introit, Gradual, Alleluia or Tract, Offertory, Communion, and
sometimes the Sequence) for each of the principal feasts of the Roman
Church year as well as for the votive Masses of the Blessed Virgin and
the Holy Sacrament. One of the most notable features of this collection
is that the texts are always those of the reformed Roman Missal of 1570.
Byrd makes no attempt to rehabilitate the Sarum rite which was observed
in most places in England before the Reformation and again during the
reign of Mary I—even though he had paid direct tribute to England’s
Catholic musical past by self-consciously making specific musical
references to a Mass by John Taverner (c1495–1545) in his own four-part
setting of the Ordinary. Characteristically for someone allied with the
Jesuit party, however, his Gradualia eschews religious nostalgia for a
rather strong dose of the militant spirit associated with Catholic
reform.
The opening fascicle of Book I, containing music for five
voices, is illustrative of this militancy. It opens with twenty-five
settings of Latin texts that comprise the entire material of those parts
of the Roman liturgy connected with the Blessed Virgin Mary. None of
the festivals associated with her (other than the Visitation and the
Purification, the latter renamed as the Presentation of Our Lord), and
absolutely nothing of what Protestants regarded as the idolatrous
devotion surrounding her, remained in the reformed English Church. After
this formidable block of pieces occur a song and two motets. The song,
Adoramus te Christe, is the setting of a text associated with the
worship of the Holy Cross, and the two motets, Unam petii and Plorans
plorabit, reflect the spirit of the ‘political’ motets of the 1589 and
1591 collections. The text of Plorans plorabit, which refers to a
‘captive flock’ and warns of the imminent downfall of a king and queen,
would surely have been regarded as treason had it not come from a
genuine biblical source. The fascicle concludes, moreover, with a
setting of the Propers for the feast of All Saints, the growing
significance of which for English Catholics was as a commemoration of
their ever-increasing number of martyrs.
The Marian Masses that
form the contents of this recording include not only the Marian Feasts
generally authorised in 1605, but also the votive Masses associated with
the Virgin. A votive Mass is a Mass offered for a particular intention
or purpose, either on behalf of a group of people, or, as in this case,
to a saint who was thought to possess special powers of entreaty at the
throne of heaven. The votive Mass of the Virgin, often called ‘Lady
Mass’, was traditionally offered on Saturdays and was not part of the
office of the day, though its texts always reflected the progress of the
church year.
The Feasts and votive Masses of the Virgin employ a
revolving cycle of texts which come from a limited number of sources
(Psalms 14, 23, 44 and 47, Luke chapters 1, 2 and 10, and single
passages from Isaiah and Numbers). These texts recur over and over again
on occasions when supplication to or celebration of the Virgin Mary
transpires. In the printed Roman Graduals of the later sixteenth
century, economies were made by printing each chant associated with
these texts once only (usually under the heading of an important feast
such as the Nativity of the Virgin), the singers being referred to the
appropriate folio when they needed to sing that chant in another
liturgical context.
Byrd emulated this system from his Gradual,
but was able to take it much further because, ignoring the chant, he was
free to make one polyphonic setting do for any replication of text. In
the opening Mass of the Purification, for instance, the Introit and
Gradual require two separate chants, but because they both employ the
same verses of Psalm 47 (the Gradual stopping slightly earlier than the
Introit), Byrd was able to make do with one setting for both. With
characteristic doggedness, Byrd followed this scheme to its logical
conclusion. In so doing he created ‘motets’ like Diffusa est gratia (22)
that are a collection of verses never performed exactly as they stand
on any single liturgical occasion. Gaudeamus omnes, which follows it, is
the head of the ‘Assumption Introit’ joined unceremoniously to the rump
of the Alleluia for that feast. And inevitably the composer made some
mistakes, leaving out a phrase here (as in the Offertory of the
Purification), reversing the order of a set of verses there (as in
Alleluia, Ave Maria, Alleluia, Virga Iesse, whose verses are the wrong
way round for the Eastertide votive Mass, one of the two occasions they
serve).
The wonder is that Byrd managed to pull off this
cut-and-paste scheme at all. For what it entailed musically was the
writing of twenty-five pieces, many of them extensive, in the same mode
and with the same voice ranges. It also entailed striving for a certain
unity of expressive effect—not of course because of any anachronistic
ideals of musical organization but simply to observe liturgical decorum,
a quality which Byrd’s intimate, low-keyed and ultimately rewarding
polyphony admirably reflects. This music has a restrained but intense
devotional spirit for which parallels are hard to find. It repays
frequent and attentive hearings.
These twenty-five pieces, then,
contain the music for Mass at eight feasts of the Church (including one
with a Vigil—Mass celebrated the day before—and two with Octaves—Masses
celebrated during the week terminating with the eighth day after the
feast), and for the five different seasons of Lady Mass. Of these Byrd
acknowledged only four feasts and two (or possibly three) votive Masses
in the headings he distributed somewhat laconically throughout the
publication. The feasts (in the order of the print) are those of the
Purification (2 February), the Nativity of the Virgin (8 September), the
Annunciation (25 March), and the Assumption (15 August). The votive
Masses are those of Advent and ‘post Nativitatem Domini’ (i.e. after
Christmas) with a cryptic and incorrect reference to the season after
Septuagesima Sunday. The Nativity’s Propers were also sung on the Feasts
of the Visitation (2 July) and the Conception (8 December). The Feasts
of the Dedication of Our Lady of the Snow (5 August) and of the
Presentation (21 November) derive their Mass Propers from the votive
Mass of the season (although Venetian Graduals from which Byrd worked
assign to the Presentation the Propers of the Nativity). These were the
only Marian occasions generally authorized by the Roman Missal in 1605;
Catholics familiar with the Missal immediately before Vatican II will be
surprised by the modesty of the late sixteenth-century liturgy of the
Virgin compared with its later, more prodigal manifestations.
Byrd’s rubrics are as laconic as his liturgical headings, and a good
deal less frequent, but they confirm the nature of this cryptic scheme.
Following it through and singing it feast by feast and Lady Mass by Lady
Mass would entail enormous repetition, especially of such perennial
texts as the verse ‘Eructavit cor meum’. With the aid of technology we
are fortunately able to preserve Byrd’s order and to do our own cutting
and pasting at the controls of the compact-disc player.
The
system is particularly advantageous to modern listeners because it puts
them in a position comparable to that of contemporary users of Byrd’s
publication. By those for whom the liturgy means nothing (and there were
contemporary Anglican music lovers who presumably enjoyed these pieces
as ‘Latin songs’ without scrutinizing them for liturgical function), the
music can be heard in its printed order with no repetition. The care
Byrd took to shape the pieces (ending settings of the Gradual verse, for
instance, with a full-voiced alleluia, even though that alleluia
belongs, liturgically speaking, to its own subsequent verse) is an
indication that he was concerned about his numbers as individual pieces
of music, observing an aesthetic decorum which governed all his actions.
Those who do care about liturgical occasion, or who wish to explore the
ideal scheme that lurked behind Byrd’s cryptic presentation, have the
ability with the track guide to realize any aspect of the scheme in a
way comparable to that available to a contemporary Roman Catholic
extremely well versed in the 1570 Missal. It could be argued that the
repetition of the Introit after the psalm verse and doxology ought to
have been obligatory, but that would have meant another disc and the
impossibility of easily exploring the more ingenious and out-of-the-way
aspects of Byrd’s transfer scheme. As it is, the interested student of
Byrd may compare the effect of the Nativity and Advent votive Mass
Propers with or without the alleluias which occur with them in the print
but which belong only to Paschal time (between Easter and Pentecost);
and such portmanteau numbers as Diffusa est gratia can be distributed
into their correct liturgical allocations instead of being heard as a
lump.
For those who tend to regard Gradualia (or any other
historical document) as unambiguously intended and to interpret it
accordingly, history has preserved a suitably enigmatic piece of
evidence. Among contemporary manuscripts which contain pieces from
Gradualia, one (and only one) is given over largely to a copy of the
contents of the first book. It comes from the household of a Roman
Catholic squire of north Norfolk, Edward Paston (1550–1630). By a
supreme stroke of historical irony it includes among its many pieces no
single set of Propers: there is always one piece missing, and of course
this missing link can indicate a variety of explanations. But it is
clear that even among the circles in which Byrd was most likely to be
appreciated (I have argued elsewhere that Byrd wrote songs celebrating
events in Paston’s family life), the understanding of his grand design
may well have been less complete or more complicated than we can now
appreciate.
It is fortunate that we can recapture an ideal form
of that design today, and follow through the many permutations of the
material in this kaleidoscopic collection of pieces. We will perhaps
acknowledge, while doing so, the extraordinary courage it must have
taken to publish the book at all during a time when, as it turned out
during the fateful events of 5 November 1605, simply being Roman
Catholic was itself grounds for suspicion of treason and sedition. In
the aftermath of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, a man from Cambrai
named Charles de Ligny was arrested at an inn near the Tower of London
and thrown into Newgate prison ‘on account of certain papistical books
written by William Byrd, and dedicated to the Seigneur Henry Houardo
(Howard), Earl of Northampton’, which were found on him, i.e. the
partbooks of the first book of Gradualia. It is possible that the book
was hurriedly withdrawn or recalled—only one copy of the original
edition survives. But as early as 1607 Byrd could publish a second book
of the collection, and in 1610 he managed to reissue both books with a
fresh imprint. It is difficult to assess the true impact on an
illustrious citizen of the effect of religious persecution and political
coercion during an age as far distant as Jacobean England, but Byrd’s
dogged pursuit of his Roman Catholic faith and of his grand musical
design is a special illustration from those difficult times of the power
of the human spirit and the intensity of the artistic endeavour that it
can engender.»
In words of David Skinner:
«Perhaps the most
popular and widely performed of all Byrd’s compositions is the
exquisitely understated Ave verum corpus. Written in G dorian against
the mixolydian Propers it is an almost unique example of modal mismatch
in the Gradualia. As befits Byrd’s earlier devotional motets for
penitence Ave verum corpus contains intense homophonic statements
coupled with lucid counterpoint (most notably at the plea ‘miserere
mei’), which suggests that the work may significantly predate its
publication. The lesser-known companion Hymn O salutaris hostia is also
thought to be an early work. Here Byrd fully exploits his technical
mastery of interlocking imitative phrases; the polyphony gradually
intensifies and with the words ‘bella premunt’ climaxes with
trumpet-like entries.»
At last, Peter Phillips said:
«Finally
we come to a composition from the 1605 Gradualia, a set of liturgical
settings which were amongst the last things Byrd wrote. The famous hymn
to the Blessed Sacrament, customarily sung as a Communion motet, Ave
verum corpus, has the same intensity of expression as the Mass for four
voices, though its compositional style is even more direct. Here he took
a leaf out of the Protestants’ book and set the words in chords, so
that they may be heard. True, they are in Latin, but every Catholic knew
the meaning of this text. The only slight elaboration in the music is
at the words ‘miserere mei’, where there is some simple imitation
between the voices and a beautiful semitonal clash in the harmony.
The music on this disc has shown that Byrd was capable both of great
complexity and great simplicity; but for many people there is enough
power in the Ave verum corpus for them to need nothing more.»
This is a fantastic live performance by Stile Antico, recorded in
concert at the Wigmore Hall on 30th May 2013 and later broadcast by Sky
Arts. Their sonority is simply exquisite. Stile Antico is for me one
of the best five vocal ensembles in the world. Renaissance polyphony is
simply stunning in their voices and versions. Here, elegance, delicacy,
expression and an impressive and an impressive and deep knowledge of
the characteristics of the particular language of Byrd's compositions.
One of the best pieces in Western Music History in voices of one of the best ensembles in this moment.
Absolute paradise!
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