Motet: William Byrd is the greatest of the late Renaissance English composers. Although a Catholic, his religious music was both in English and Latin. Our motet today, "Laetentur coeli," was published in the 1589 collection of Latin motets entitled Cantiones Sacrae. Here Byrd's predilection for a beautiful and personal kind of dense counterpoint is in evidence. Byrd and his friend Thomas Tallis had gained in 1575 the exclusive patent for contrapuntal religious music from Queen Elizabeth. It had proved to be less of a financial bonanza than they had hoped. This later collection of motets then must have come from a personal need to express rather than for financial gain. Certainly all of the motets in this collection are masterpieces of the first water.

Cantata: The cantata BWV 104 was one of six cantatas published in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In that respect it was certainly one of the first well-known cantatas in nineteenth century Germany. It is a work of suave beauty and thus a perfect choice to introduce what was then perceived as a rather difficult austere style to the music-loving public. The opening chorus is ravishing in its pastoral character. The two fugues are so congenial that their considerable contrapuntal ingenuity is almost not noticeable. This chorus was the model for the beautiful "He watching over Israel" in Mendelssohn's Elijah. It is probable that Mendelssohn knew this work before the St. Matthew Passion which he presented to the public in 1829, The tenor aria with two oboes d'amore has some of the most detailed and slippery chromaticism in all of Bach, but again is so suavely written than it goes by unnoticed. The bass aria resumes the pastoral character of the opening chorus and brings the cantata to a peaceful and charming close. The final chorale is a setting of the great tune "Allein Gott."

©Craig Smith

Translation