William Byrd

William Byrd was, by any measure, one of the greatest composers of the late 16th century. England’s answer to Italy’s Palestrina, the Munich-based Lassus and the Spaniard Victoria, Byrd harnessed his consummate mastery of counterpoint to an endlessly inventive feeling for melodic line and the heightened expression of individual words and moods. His sacred and secular compositions belonged to a revolutionary new trend in the European music of his time, one that trained the spotlight on human emotions while preserving more austere, emotion-lite past traditions of polyphonic writing. Born to a prosperous family in London around 1540, Byrd was probably a chorister of the Chapel Royal and certainly studied with its organist and leading composer, Thomas Tallis. He became organist and choirmaster at Lincoln Cathedral in 1563 and returned to the Chapel Royal a decade later as an admired young composer. Before his gradual retirement from public life in the early 1600s, he introduced continental styles of music to the English royal court in his motets and keyboard works and made them his own. Byrd’s independence of mind is reflected in his defiant, indeed outlawed, spiritual practice as a Roman Catholic in a Protestant land, and the belligerent legal actions he took in the years before his death in 1623. It runs through his music, touching such early works as the Easter motet “Christus resurgens” (mid-1550s), the blockbuster psalm settings “Ad Dominum cum tribularer” and “Domine, quis habitabit” (both 1560s), the joyful motet “Laudibus In Sanctis” from his second Cantiones Sacrae anthology (1591), three sublime Latin masses (1590s), and his late compositions for the Catholic liturgy, none finer than “Justorum Animae” (early 1600s). Byrd also pioneered and promoted the English madrigal and underlined his credentials as Elizabethan England’s preeminent composer with a series of jaw-dropping keyboard works and pieces for small bands of instruments.