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Published: Thursday, 02 January 2025 at 15:50 PM
Thomas Tallis: the ultimate Tudor survivor
‘Tallis is dead, and music dies’. So runs the final line of Ye sacred muses, a consort song composed by William Byrd to mourn the passing of his friend and mentor Thomas Tallis in 1585.
Probably a pupil of Tallis at one point, Byrd was not alone in considering the latter the greatest choral composer of his era. Tallis was, as one writer puts it, ‘the first important English composer’, and pieces such as the tender anthem If ye love me and the intricate 40-part motet Spem in alium are among the many works from his extensive output still performed today.
Yet while the broad pillars of Tallis’s achievement are obvious, detailed facts about his life are notoriously hard to come by. He may or may not have been born in 1805, perhaps in Kent in England’s south-east corner: no birth record survives, and we have no details of his family. Tallis’s childhood also remains a blank. We know nothing about his early education, and there is no record of formative experiences he may have had while growing from a child into a teenager.
Early days: Henry VIII and the monasteries
The first sure-fire glimpse we get of Thomas Tallis is in 1530, probably in his mid-twenties. In September of that year his name is listed in an accounts book at Dover Priory (a Benedictine establishment), where he is labelled ‘player of the organs’. In that capacity, the young Tallis would have absorbed the hundreds of plainsong chants used by the monks in daily worship, some of which he used as building blocks for later, multi-part pieces. Most of the Priory has since been built over, but the refectory still stands.
It is unclear how long Tallis stayed at Dover, or whether his career as a composer started there. Scholarship suggests that the expansive Marian setting Ave dei patris filia and the Magnificat for four voices may date from this period, when Tallis was involved daily in Catholic worship using Latin texts. The days of Dover Priory were, in any case, numbered: it closed in 1535, an early casualty of King Henry VIII’s break with papal authority and his dissolution of the Catholic monasteries.
Where would Tallis fetch up next? Like the majority of English citizens in the 1530s he was a Catholic, and might have expected his musical career to hit a solid wall in Henry’s reconstituted Church of England, now increasingly aligned to the Protestant Reformation in Europe.
Thomas Tallis and the last monastery to be dissolved
At this point, however, Tallis’s ability to navigate nimbly the extreme religious and political turbulence of his period kicked in. A year spent working as a singer (or possibly organist) at St Mary-at-Hill Church, Billingsgate, bought him time to gauge how Henry’s revolutionary distancing from Rome might impact in practical terms on patterns of daily worship.
Then, in 1538, Tallis went back to a monastic setting at Waltham Abbey, perhaps judging that the effect of Henry’s ecclesiastical re-shapings would not after all be so wide-reaching. He was wrong. In 1540, Waltham Abbey too was closed by Henry, the last working monastery to be dissolved in England. Tallis’s position at Waltham had been a good one. He was the highest paid of over 60 lay workers, a clear step up on the professional ladder. But now Thomas Tallis was jobless again, stranded at a career crossroads somewhere in his mid-thirties.
He was, though, nothing if not a survivor. By now he also had a reputation as one of England’s brightest and most versatile church musicians. That is no doubt why we find his name heading a list of 22 singers recruited to the new professional choir at Canterbury Cathedral, where the Benedictine monks had formally surrendered governance to Henry’s ‘secularising’ regime in April 1541.
Being a ‘Gentleman’ was a job for life
Canterbury was Tallis’s fourth job in a little over a decade, as he ricocheted from one appointment to the next, seeking a stable place to settle in the jagged ecclesiastical landscape created by Henry’s decoupling from Catholic authority. Then, in 1543-44, an oasis of stability finally beckoned.
Around that time, Tallis was appointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, a body of priests and singers who accompanied the King wherever he went, supplying his needs for daily worship and spiritual sustenance. Being a ‘Gentleman’ was a job for life: it is some measure of Tallis’s standing among his peers that he had reached this career zenith amid the volatility created by Henry’s re-casting of the church in a more Protestant mould, while himself remaining a Catholic.
But where, in these years, does Tallis’s composing fit in? When did he do it, and why? It is notoriously difficult to answer these questions, as dating Tallis’s numerous works is far from an exact science. It may be, for instance, that the votive antiphon Salve intemerata had already been written, the measured intricacies of its vocal part-writing a clear flexing of Tallis’s compositional muscles.
The less florid Mass for Four Voices, much of it written with just one note for each syllable, may also date from the 1540s, as guidelines demanding more simplicity and clarity in vocal music filtered down from the Reformation-minded authorities.
Tudor England: a volatile and dangerous place
Three further monarchs reigned during Tallis’s lengthy career – the Protestant Edward VI (1547-53), the Catholic Mary I (1553-58) and the Protestant Elizabeth I (1558-1603). The effect on the Church of England was dizzying. Which language should be used in worship: the Catholic Latin or the Protestant English? What shape should services take liturgically? Which style of music – plain, decorative, or something in between – should church composers be writing?
We have no written record of Tallis’s feelings on these hotly contested matters. What we do know is that a stream of high-quality choral compositions flowed from his pen in the years of his maturity, in both Latin and English, and in formats ranging from humble psalm tunes to multi-stranded polyphonic masterpieces. The most famous of these is the remarkable Spem in alium, a motet for 40 voices divided into eight choirs of five singers each. In its teeming richness of texture and swirling spatial perspectives, it is widely viewed as the greatest choral work of the 16th century.
Thomas Tallis, master of the musical about-turn
When the Catholic Mary Tudor succeeded her half-brother Edward VI in 1553, Tallis retraced his musical roots and supplied her Chapel Royal with a Latin festal mass, soaring antiphons and responsories. His seven-voice Mass Puer natus est nobis was probably first heard at Christmas 1554 while Philip II of Spain was in London. Tallis drew on his experience of writing for the Latin liturgy in the time of Mary’s father, Henry VIII. He helped revive and preserve an old tradition, surpassing the sacred compositions of his youth.
Within the time it took to change royal regimes and their attendant religious practices, Tallis was able to shift from Anglican innovator to Catholic renovator, polishing and perfecting past techniques in his works for the old queen. His votive antiphon Gaude gloriosa Dei mater, for example, possibly began life as an English-texted piece in the last years of Henry VIII. In its final Latin form, Gaude gloriosa is the most impressive of all works written during Mary’s reign.
Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558 called for a second about-turn. Under the puritanical terms of the early Elizabethan religious settlement, Tallis proceeded to dust down techniques pioneered in his experimental compositions for Edward VI’s church. His English church music includes functional settings of the new Anglican liturgy, the nine four-voice psalm tunes for Archbishop Matthew Parker’s Psalter of 1567 sublime among them.
The latter includes a memorable setting of Psalm 2, ‘Why fum’th in fight the Gentiles spite’, which supplied Vaughan Williams with the raw material for his agelessly evocative Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in 1910.
What were Tallis’s own religious beliefs?
Tallis’s ability to compose ‘with Calvinist severity or with unreconstructed Catholic extravagance as his current monarch demanded’ (as his biographer Kerry McCarthy puts it) undoubtedly helped him to evade controversy in an era when men were executed for their religious allegiances. But does this chameleon-like quality automatically imply that he had no deeply held personal beliefs of his own, and was happy to sway with the prevailing wind?
Works such as the profoundly felt Lamentations of Jeremiah and the ardently worshipful Gaude Gloriosa suggest not. Both pieces, and many others by him, glow with a spiritual warmth and commitment not easily conjured by those producing music for purely professional reasons.
When did Thomas Tallis die?
Despite his establishment of a pioneering music printing business with Byrd in 1575 (under Elizabeth I’s patronage), there is evidence that Tallis gradually withdrew from the world of music-making and composing in the final decade of his life. He wrote his will in 1583, declaring himself to be still ‘whole in body, of good and perfect memory’. In November 1585 Thomas Tallis died, perhaps aged 80, and was buried at St Alfege Church in Greenwich, London. The original Medieval structure was rebuilt after a violent storm in 1710, and it is not known where precisely the composer’s remains are located.
Tallis’s will provides one of the few reliable insights we have into the private personality behind the notes which made his public reputation. In it, he leaves all the household goods and his share of the printing business to his wife Joan, whom he’d married three decades previously. Alms were provided for ‘the poor people of the same parish’, and to his old colleagues at the Chapel Royal he left over £1,000 in today’s money ‘towards their feast’ – an annual event at which the monarch’s private singing corps made merry. Glasses will undoubtedly have been raised to Tallis’s memory at the 1586 gathering.
Longevity in a restless, violent age
The will also harbours an intriguing clue to Tallis’s apparently unruffled career longevity, in a religiously restless and often violent age. Bequeathing his soul ‘unto Almighty God, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the only redeemer of the world’, Tallis makes no specific reference to his Catholicism – unlike the more confrontationally inclined Byrd in his will of 1623. Tallis was, it seems, temperamentally averse to conflict, a man secure enough in his own beliefs to benignly tolerate those of others.
However unassuming he may have seemed – one epitaph describes him as ‘modest’ and ‘virtuous’, living ‘in patient, quiet sort’ – his music tells a different story. Exquisitely textured, and anchored by an empathy with spiritual values, it resonated strongly in his own era and across the centuries since. ‘If any musician in their time was to be considered outstanding’, as another epitaphist put it, ‘Tallis was always their chief glory.’
A guide to Thomas Tallis’s style
Polyphony
Few composers knew better than Tallis the art of weaving multiple strands of music together to create a complex vocal tapestry. In works such as the seven-part Missa Puer natus est nobis and the famous 40-part motet Spem in alium he hits glorious heights of intricacy and invention.
Intimacy
While much of Tallis’s music grandly communicates the fervour and veneration involved in acts of Christian worship, he is also capable of more intimate emotions. His well-known anthem If ye love me has a disarming sense of tenderness, while the Lamentations of Jeremiah is notably melancholic and introspective.
Melody
While shifting waves of harmony and rich, multi-layered textures are often more important in Tallis than individual melodies, concise, memorable tunes were also part of his armoury. The nine settings he wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter show this gift for melody, the third forming the basis of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Talllis by Vaughan Williams.
Versatility
Tallis was the ultimate professional, able to flip easily from one type of work to another – in Latin or English, for the Catholic or Anglican liturgy, for four voices or 40 – as the presiding monarch demanded. A sincere spirituality informs all of his work, regardless of the circumstances he was writing in.