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Updated: June 29, 2025
Fetis, I believe, called him "the English Palestrina"; but I do not recall whether he meant that Byrde was as great as Palestrina or merely great amongst the English whether a "lord amongst wits," or simply "a wit amongst lords."
As generation succeeded generation, a certain body of technique was built up and a mode of expression found; and at length the first great wave of music culminated in the works of Tallis and Byrde.
The formal outlines had not been invented, for rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day.
Let those who doubt it turn to his setting of "All we like sheep have gone astray," in the "Messiah," and ask whether a religious man, whether Byrde or Palestrina, would have painted that exciting picture on those words. Imagine how Bach would have set them. That Handel lived an intense inner life we know, but what that life was no man can ever know.
In it the old modes of his mighty predecessors Byrde and Tallis are left an eternity behind; they belong to a forgotten order. Of the crabbedness of Harry Lawes there is scarcely a trace: that belonged to an era of experiments.
I do not mean that it is inappropriate in the church for nothing more appropriate was ever written nor that Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it. I do mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace.
Their technique and mode of expression I shall say something about presently; and all the criticism I have to pass on them is that Byrde is infinitely greater than Tallis, and seems worthy indeed to stand beside Palestrina and Sweelinck. The learned branch of the English school reached its climax.
So it is time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the eighteenth-century doctors' eyes; and when we do that we find the early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and quite as well constructed. There are, as I have said, people who to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde.
The modern men who care nothing for rules for instance Wagner and Tschaikowsky could not have come immediately after Byrde; even Beethoven could not have come immediately after Byrde and Sweelinck and Palestrina, all of whom thought nothing of the rules that had not been definitely stated in their time.
He was organist of Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing of music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which it is a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays. In 1585 he died.
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