William Byrd maintained a precarious position as a Catholic in Protestant England. He dutifully provided Protestant church music of a very high caliber, as well as a wealth of courtly instrumental and vocal music. The resultant favor of the Queen and the potency of his noble patrons also allowed Byrd to compose and print music for the Catholic liturgy under his own name, even during times of crackdown when possession of the same books could be grounds for suspicion and arrest. In 1591, the year of his retirement to a recusant Catholic home in Stondon Massey, Byrd released through the press of Thomas East the second volume of his Cantiones sacrae, containing Miserere mei Deus and 20 other Latin motets. It seems that his intention in the print was twofold: he was first providing functional music for domestic performance in the private chapels of his Catholic patrons such as Sir John Petre and Edward Somerset. At the same time, the careful ordering of music within the 1591 print, which creates a large-scale modal descent through several keys, and the overwhelming number of mournful texts Byrd selected, suggest he was also expressing his own spiritual travail.

Miserere mei Deus shows both of these characteristics. Though Byrd set the plaintive text from Psalm 51 to a full five-voiced texture, only the two tenor parts are particularly broad in range, and the composer's frequent recourse to chordal homophony makes Miserere mei Deus quite accessible (perfect for domestic performance). At the same time, Byrd took a lot of care in crafting the little motet. It concludes the five-voiced section of the 1591 printed anthology, and thus represents the deepest modal descent, into a G mode with fully two flats in its key signature; it does, however, begin quite naturally as an echo to the final chord of the preceding motet, Exsurge Domine. And despite the superficial simplicity of the music, Byrd wrought in it a powerfully affective cry for God's mercy. It opens with two homophonic invocations to God, unified in texture and poignancy of cadence (plagal and Phrygian). The composer breaks into polyphony in the following phrase, "according to thy great mercy"; the imitative motives both rise aspirantly upwards and offer a subtle pun on the Latin secundum (after). A second homophonic passage is again answered with polyphony, this time a painfully extended passage of repeated cries, each reiterating the manifold sins of those praying for release.

© Timothy Dickey, Rovi