who have no peace. Once one has thought of this, one can hardly view this Agnus Dei as anything other
than a portrait of the artist as recusant—or, more appropriately perhaps, a portrait of the general mood
that reigned where such a Mass as this was sung.
The Mass in Five Parts, the last of the settings, displays a very different “reading” of the same text, yet
one just as complex and profound. Again there is a rhetorical progression of harmonic density that gives
shape to the threefold petition, from three parts to four to the full five. The first acclamation uses harmonic
color to distinguish Christ’s metaphorical name (“Lamb of God”) from the actual prayer. By first
withholding, then reintroducing the B-flat, Byrd reminds us that the flat has, ever since Guido of Arezzo,
been a “softening” device. The harmonic softening on miserere can only refer to the act of mercy itself,
rather than the petition. The emphasis, therefore, is not on what is lacking (as in the Mass in Four Parts)
but on what is given. That emphasis is maintained to the end.
In the second acclamation, like a magician, Byrd makes the conflict of B-durus and B-molle express
the same idea by reversing roles. By transposing the cadence from F to G, where the B-flat darkens the
tonic harmony and the B-natural brightens it, Byrd again makes the point that the Lamb of God will not fail
its pious petitioners. The third acclamation (Ex. 16-18) is again something different. The whole choir
gathers itself up for a pair of sudden homorhythmic outbursts—literal “calls” to the Lamb of a kind no
other composer had thought to make. Again we are reminded of the plight of the persecuted. But this time
the leisurely dona nobis pacem comes as a relief, and expression of confidence, of faith.
EX. 16-18 William Byrd, Mass in Five Parts, Agnus Dei, mm. 33–42The kind of detailed interpretive analysis these descriptions of Byrd’s Agnus Dei settings have
attempted is what literary scholars call hermeneutics. Byrd’s is the earliest music—certainly the earliest
Mass Ordinary music—to have called forth such interpretations from modern critics, because his Masses
and his alone seem to offer true interpretive readings of their texts. These are the kinds of readings
“official” settings like Palestrina’s do not encourage, precisely because they are official. That is,
precisely because they are official they take meaning as something vested and given rather than as
something that arises out of a human situation. Byrd’s Masses, precisely because they are written out of a