9 - The Day of Wrath

Summary

Sacred judgment is the slowly emerging but central theme of Tallis and Byrd’s Cantiones. In terms of the auditor's expected reception, part of what the English Renaissance writer Philip Sidney, following Aristotle, would call the poetic delight of the cycle lies in the way the composers’ chosen theme gains significance, weight, and clarity as the story progresses. The overall effect is to turn the set into a kind of harmonia, where small seemingly independent parts add up to one larger, discernable, whole. As far as the immediate aesthetic experience is concerned, because revelations are meant to engulf the engaged auditor in a series of accumulating waves, the collection's ideal active listener is someone who knows the story well enough to appreciate how it might be retold with such a focused theme, but still begins unsuspectingly. Only as the clues mount up does this person come to realize the importance of the musico-textually depicted acts of judgment in the collection.

One who suspects, however, that Tallis and Byrd may have been foreshadowing the set's sacred judgment theme in their preface – by presenting a form of the word “judgment” twelve times – would probably have their suspicions confirmed if instead of moving song by song through the book, he or she simply skips all the way to the last two of the set to see and hear the words addressed to Christ – dum veneris iudicare saeculum per ignem (Thou shalt come to judge the world by fire) – in Byrd's Libera me Domine de morte aeterna (33), followed by a plea for His “mercy” in Tallis and Byrd's Miserere nostri (34). By the sheer force of their musical rhetoric, the composers ensure that anyone listening to musical performances of these last songs is prepared for a cathartic experience after their deepest fears are played out before their ears: as here the unsettling sound of a frightened voice from the dead is followed by a thrilling depiction of the Opening of the Seven Seals with the dreaded Apocalyptic Four Horsemen arriving on the scene, via a tour de force canon. The texts involved are shown in Table 6.