Byrd, William

Byrd, William (c.1543–1623). Britain's leading composer during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Byrd's large, varied output included English anthems and consort songs, Latin motets and masses, and keyboard and instrumental consort music. A pupil of Thomas Tallis, he was appointed organist and choirmaster at Lincoln cathedral in 1563. In 1570 he became a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he was joint organist with Tallis, with whom he was granted a royal monopoly of music printing. Byrd published three collections setting English texts (1588, 1589, and 1611), yet he wrote few true madrigals, preferring the contrapuntal consort song for solo voice and viols (such as the elegy ‘Ye sacred muses’, written on Tallis's death in 1585).

Byrd's finest music was inspired by Latin texts. He was regularly listed as a recusant, virtually retiring from the Chapel Royal (where Elizabeth allowed Latin in the services) to live in Essex close to leading members of the catholic nobility. His two books of Gradualia (1605, 1607) supply music for the proper of the mass, complementing three masterly settings of the ordinary, whose finely balanced counterpoint matches the best of Palestrina and Lassus. Many of Byrd's Latin motets set penitential texts, treating Jerusalem as a metaphor for catholic England with powerfully expressive music. Joyful exuberance, however, pervades works like the madrigalian ‘Laudibus in sanctis’, as it does his virtuoso keyboard variations.

Eric Cross