Book Review: Byrd, by Kerry
McCarthy (Oxford University Press, 2013)
An eagerly anticipated
biography of Essex composer William Byrd (c.1540-1623) has just been published
by Oxford University Press in their ‘The Master Musicians’ series – Byrd, by
American musicologist Kerry McCarthy. Naturally
it brings together all the latest thinking on the composer’s enigmatic life as
a Catholic living in Elizabethan England at a time of persecution. Recent
discoveries of the composer include the books he owned – some being tirades
against Papists – and his age: he was 58 or thereabouts in 1598, so did not die
at the age of eighty as previously (i.e. before the 1990s) thought.
The book presents, for me, a
fresh emphasis on Byrd’s religious beliefs suggesting a gradual sympathy and
conversion to Catholicism. He married a
Catholic, and as an artist was appalled by the treatment of Jesuits such as
Robert Campion so as to be moved to write a lament. We read again of the protection he received
from Queen Elizabeth I through her personal intervention into a case brought
before Byrd of non-attendance at his parish church before his move to Stondon
Massey, perhaps in January 1595. But it
was the Stondon Massey years, in semi-retirement from the Chapel Royal, where
he advanced further his Catholic beliefs through the writing of Latin set text
for the clandestine Catholic worship of his friends, for example the powerful
Petre family of Ingatestone Hall.
Andrew Smith
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