A wide array of song-types is represented in William Byrd's final publication (the 1611 Psalmes, songs, and sonnets), from the truly madrigalian four-voice This sweet and merry month of May to a pair of three- voice Psalm settings and some five-voice motet-anthems. From the stylistic point of view, however, the most interesting of all may well be the highly chromatic five-voice Come, woeful Orpheus, thought by some to be a mockery of the modern Italian madrigal style that Byrd, while admittedly allowing some of its superficial characteristics to creep into his own language, never really accepted as a valid means of musical expression.

The text of Come woeful Orpheus is certainly evocative enough:

Come woeful Orpheus with thy charming lyre, And tune my voice unto thy skilful wire, Some strange chromatic Notes do you devise, That best with mournful accents do sympathize, Of sourest Sharps, and uncouth Flats make choice, And I'll thereto compassionate my voice.

Clearly, the text positively begs for a musical representation of the "strange chromatic notes", "sourest Sharps", and "uncouth flats", and here we really get the feeling that Byrd takes the text at its word: the sharps do seem sour, the flats uncouth, all very purposefully so (certainly A flat is not a pitch we find in Byrd's music with any great frequency).

The work's forty-five-or-so bars (as transcribed into modern 4-2 meter) are divided right down the middle by a clear sectional at bar 22/23, boundary marking off the first four lines of text from the last two. As is typical of this sort of composition, the last two lines of text are given far more musical weight than either of the other two couplets, the final line of text being sung no fewer than three times by each voice.

The piece opens with a brief duet in the homophonic, alla breve style (not at all characteristic of the composer) that will continue throughout the piece. Soon the other voices join in, the first soprano giving an exact echo of the phrase that the second soprano started the piece with-this use of two equal but distinct sopranos is a characteristic that runs throughout the five-voice pieces in the 1611 publication, such exact imitation of the opening gesture being a vital corollary. After the chromatic stresses that mark the opening of the second half, Byrd moves us steadily and surely in the direction of the final cadence to G minor, set with the usual Picardy third.



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