Phoenix.”^19 What the poem proclaims the music confirms. Joseph Kerman, who took the trouble to go
through the work of Alfonso Ferrabosco for the first time since the sixteenth century, was able to establish
that William Byrd owed his virtuosity in the techniques of the ars perfecta—a virtuosity the older Tallis
never quite achieved—directly to the example of Alfonso, his Bolognese contemporary and companion in
the royal service. The works of Byrd that show Ferrabosco’s impress most faithfully, moreover, were
precisely the ones he chose for his debut appearance in print.^20 The Italianate motets in the 1575
Cantiones, most of which have liturgical texts (though of course not Marian ones) and were clearly meant
for official service use, assert Byrd’s claim as a contender on the ecumenical stage.
As his career went on, however, he had less and less opportunity to play the role of official church
composer in the ars perfecta style. There was obviously no room for a Palestrina in England. There was
no chance to make one’s reputation composing Masses, and the range of suitable texts for motets was
stringently circumscribed by the narrow limits of Catholic-Anglican overlap (mainly psalms). A
composer like Byrd was thus confronted with a choice. One could shift one’s career focus over to the
Anglican sphere altogether, which (given Byrd’s connections) would by no means have required personal
conversion, but would have entailed renunciation of the calling for which one had trained—and
renunciation, too, perhaps, of a sense of personal authenticity. Or one could renounce the official arena
and withdraw into the closet world of recusancy.
As life became more difficult for Catholics in England, Byrd took the latter course. He and Palestrina
were comparably devoted to the universal church, but where Palestrina’s devotion brought him worldly
fame and fortune, Byrd’s meant the virtual relinquishment of his career. In contrast to Palestrina, Byrd’s
pursuit of the ars perfecta, while it arguably brought the style to its climax of perfection, ran entirely
counter to the composer’s worldly self-interest. There is not another case like it in the history of Western
church music, which, through Byrd, reached a stylistic climax on an agonizing note of personal sacrifice
and risk.
Withdrawal took place in stages. In 1589 and 1591, Byrd published two volumes of Cantiones
sacrae, the first dedicated to the Earl of Worcester. These were motets of a very different sort from the
ones in the book of 1575. Their texts, no longer liturgical, were biblical pastiches, mostly of intensely
plaintive or penitential character: O Domine, adjuva me (“Deliver me, O Lord”), Tristitia et anxietas
(“Sorrow and distress”), Infelix ego (“Unhappy am I”). Others, with texts lamenting the destruction of
Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity, easily support allegorical readings that may covertly have
expressed and solaced the sentiments of the oppressed Catholic minority. One in particular
—Circumspice, Jerusalem—has been linked persuasively with the arrival from France of a party of
Jesuit missionaries with whom Byrd is known to have consorted: “Look around toward the East, O
Jerusalem,” the text proclaims, “and see the joy that is coming to you from God! Behold, your sons are
coming, whom you sent away and dispersed!” These pastiche motets, it is now widely believed, were
never meant for service use, but rather provided (under cover of the irreproachable source of their
individual verses) a body of “pious chamber music,” as Kerman has called it, for the use of recusants at
home.
THE MUSIC OF DEFIANCE
The final stage was devoted to the setting of forbidden liturgical texts, coinciding with Byrd’s effective
retirement, at the age of fifty, from the royal chapel and his removal to a country home, where he joined a
recusant community headed by a noble family named Petre. It was for this community and others like it,
evidently, that his late work was intended. From 1593 to 1595, Byrd issued three settings of the Mass