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Desolata Est
The Ebor Singers
This disc presents an anthology of seventeenth century sacred works whose texts are thematically associated with human frailties, suffering and God’s intercession, and man’s mortality and hope for the life to come: while such texts are not as exclusively bleak as the title of this collection suggests, they have prompted expressive responses from composers through the centuries, not least in the turbulent years of the seventeenth century that saw much religious, political and social change.
With the exception of the Burial Sentences, the texts are votive rather than liturgical, though the despair of the psalmist (Aldrich, Haste thee, O Lord my God, to deliver me) and prophet (Byrd, Ne irascaris) at the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jews’ captivity in Babylon (Schütz, An den Wassern zu Babel) are features of the Catholic liturgy for Advent and Lent, in anticipation of God’s intervention through his Son, and the oratorio Le Reniement de Saint Pierre would be sung during Holy Week, depicting Jesus’ betrayal and dwelling on Peter’s weakness as he denies Jesus three times.
Just as Jewish traditions in the Old Testament - including the psalms and imagery of the desolation of Jerusalem - were absorbed into Christian worship, so such texts were set with specific resonance to contemporary events. The topicality of Jerusalem’s destruction was not lost on Byrd, a Catholic who was forced to worship in private in Protestant Elizabethan England; Psalm 137, set by Schütz, tells of musicians hanging up their harps in captivity, and by the publication of Psalmen Davids in 1619, Schütz would have been aware of the religious conflict brewing that was to envelop Central Europe for thirty years, and it was not until 1649 that he was to write on the same scale; Lawes, a friend and composer of Charles I, served in the Royalist Army: O God my strength and fortitude was performed during the Siege of York in 1644 and reflects the aspirations of the King’s supporters.
Historically, the works included here cover music by Catholic and Protestant composers, from the late flowering of the Renaissance in England (Byrd, Morley), the dissemination of Italian ideas through Europe in the 1610s-50s (Carissimi, Schütz, Lawes), and the the establishment of the oratorio in France at the end of the century.
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