On the 25th October 1970 Pope Paul VIth canonized the "40 Martyrs of England and Wales", and being a Lancastrian it's a sense of great pride to me that many of them (SS John Rigby, Edmund Arrowsmith, John Southworth, John Almond, Ambrose Barlow OSB, Luke Kirby, John Plessington, and John Wall) all come from my home county whose regional seat is Preston, a city whose name derives from the enclosed estate of a priest. At the time of the Reformation there were a number of Catholic families who continued the practice of their faith in the face of great danger and some of those martyrs lost their lives for hiding priests in their homes. Many homes, such as Ladywell at Fernyhalgh just outside the city, have priest holes for hiding clergy, secret passages to enable their escape, and altar rederos hidden behind the facade of what appears to be large items of furniture such as wardrobes and sideboards so they could hide their recusantry.
It is in this context that masses were heard secretly by families and their close associates. If we look at Byrd's output during this time, it is noticeable that some years after his association with Lord Thomas Paget and his marriage to a Catholic and his conversion to the faith that the motets in the Cantiones Sacrae take on a different tone from his earlier collection of works with Tallis and become more lacrimosal in tone and move away from High Anglicanism towards subtle messages in their themes and incorporate those of the persecution of the chosen people (such as Domine praestolamur a5), or which can be interpreted as hidden warnings such as Vigilate. Between 1592 and 1595 he published his masses for 3, 4 and 5 voices.
Each of these masses "works" when sung by large choirs, and the Papal Mass at Westminster Cathedral was centred around Byrd 5, but in context I much prefer them as more intimate pieces sung by one or two per part. The reason for this is Byrd's masses will always be inextricably linked for me to the hidden Catholicism of the North West of England and are very much the mass settings of the martyrs and the Jesuits who went from house to house saying mass. I can picture a small group of a family and friends, a priest saying mass on a side-board altar like the one pictured from Ladywell House, and 4 singers quietly singing Byrd.
For me, the most moving part is the Agnus Dei because of its poignancy. From the very first notes of the soprano and alto singing aganst each other they cry out with a power that stands in complete contrast to the simplicty of the writing. The addition of the tenor and bass at the second invocation adds to the depth and colour of the lacrimosal tone and the real solemnity and pleading comes in the bass part with its gentle syncopation and desent in scale. The voices linger on the qui tollis before taking a more dramatic turn and darker sound as Byrd pleads further in dona nobis pacem - bring us peace, where again the bass cries out as the tension builds and then resolves in a manner similar to Victoria's Tenebrae Factae Sunt where the tenor line exposes the "Deus meus et me dereliquisti?" (My God why hast thou forsaken me?). The final bars bring that sense of peace, and unusually for Byrd he doesn't place any passing notes in any of the voices as he usually does at the conclusion of a motet.
For me, Byrd's masses are the high point of English choral composing for all manner of reasons. While I do think that many compositions benefit from the purity of boys and mens voices in the manner of a traditional cathedral or collegiate choir, Byrd speaks to me in many different ways and from many different places and I enjoy him most in the simplicity of 3, 4, or 5 singers performing his masses as I imagine they would have been when he was alive and catholicism in my home county was a secretive affair.
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