Haec dies

The jubilant words of “Haec dies” from Psalm 117 celebrate Christ’s Resurrection on Easter Sunday: “This is the day the Lord has made: let us rejoice and be glad in it, Alleluia.” Byrd’s setting, with its bright scoring, dancing rhythms and constantly rising melodic motifs, is aptly exultant. For Byrd and his fellow Catholic recusants, though, “Haec dies” would have had other resonances. Its words were declaimed by the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion when he was sentenced to death in 1581 for carrying out underground Catholic ministries in Protestant England. Written in the shadow of Campion’s brutal execution, Byrd’s motet parallels Christ’s Resurrection with the English martyr’s triumph over mortal life in heaven. Byrd’s use of different metres heightens the work’s symbolic meaning: duple time (in the opening section) is associated with the transience of human life, while triple time (in the ecstatic second section) relates to the Holy Trinity and eternal life in Paradise.