Programme Notes

This recording, the first in the series devoted to the complete works of Thomas Tallis, includes church music written during the first decade of his career, probably between about 1530 and 1540.

Relatively little is known about Tallis’s life, particularly about his early years. He was probably born in Kent during the first decade of the sixteenth century. When we first hear of him, in 1532, he is organist of Dover Priory, a small Benedictine monastery consisting of about a dozen monks. We do not know whether Tallis’s duties were restricted to organ-playing, or whether he also had the opportunity to work with professional singers. The more affluent monastic houses of the period certainly endeavoured to participate in the fashionable cultivation of elaborate church music by employing a small choir of professional lay singers; such a choir, which was quite distinct from the monks’ own choir, would usually have performed in the Lady Chapel of the monastery, because this was often the only part of the monastic church to which the laity had access. Dover Priory, however, was far from wealthy—in the early 1530s its annual income was about £170, less than a tenth of that of a major Benedictine abbey such as St Alban’s—and it can hardly have been in a position to spend lavishly on music. On the other hand, the fact that the priory employed a lay organist at all could be taken to imply quite a serious commitment to music. In addition, Dover was a cell or dependent house of Canterbury Cathedral, which was itself a Benedictine priory. The cathedral had a long and lively musical tradition involving not only the maintenance of a professional Lady Chapel choir but also the encouragement of the monks’ own musical talents; it seems quite possible that this could have assisted the exploitation of music at Dover. Even so, any choir available to Tallis at Dover Priory must surely have been tiny—perhaps solo voices on each of the lower lines and three or four boys at the top of the texture.

There seems to be no record of Tallis’s departure from Dover, but the priory itself was dissolved in the autumn of 1535, very soon after it had been visited by the king’s commissioners. This could indicate that something was seriously amiss; before the government’s scheme for dissolving the smaller monasteries was put into general operation in 1536, only the most indigent, corrupt or otherwise decrepit houses were closed down immediately following an official visitation. We next encounter Tallis in 1537–8 in London, where he is employed (it is not clear whether as a singer or as organist) by the parish church of St Mary-at-Hill in Billingsgate, a little to the west of the Tower of London. Robert Okeland or Hockland, later to be one of Tallis’s colleagues in the Chapel Royal (the religious department of the royal household, including both clerics and musicians), had been organist of St Mary’s in 1534–5. St Mary’s seems to have been one of the most enterprising London churches in its promotion of music: it had bought a new organ in 1517–18, by the mid-1530s it was maintaining a choir capable of singing music in five parts, and its repertory included Masses, antiphons, music for the Lady Mass, and ‘carolles for cristmas’. London, with its teeming social, religious, intellectual and commercial activity, and its proximity to the main centres of government and patronage, must surely have been a far more stimulating environment than Dover. Some four miles south-east of St Mary’s lay the royal palace of Greenwich, Henry VIII’s favourite residence during the latter part of his life; Tallis may well have come into contact with the singers of the Chapel Royal and the chamber musicians of the king and queen, some of whom owned or rented property in Greenwich or in the city. He may even have met some of the Chapel Royal singers in a professional capacity: several times during the 1510s and 20s some of them had sung at St Mary’s on major feast days, and it is possible that this practice continued in the 1530s.

Whatever its attractions, London proved to be only a staging post for Tallis. It was probably in the autumn of 1538 that he moved to the Augustinian abbey of Holy Cross at Waltham in Essex; the closeness of the abbot’s London house to the church of St Mary-at-Hill may help to explain this move. With a yearly income of some £900 Waltham Abbey was well able to maintain a Lady Chapel choir; in the late 1530s this consisted of about half-a-dozen boys and probably a similar number of men, among whom Tallis was evidently one of the most senior. If the prospect of long-term security had lured Tallis to Waltham, his plans soon went awry. In the very same year that he moved to the abbey the government embarked on the dissolution of the greater monasteries; on 23 March 1540 Waltham became the last English abbey to be dissolved. Because Tallis had joined the staff only recently he was not awarded a pension; instead he received 20s. in outstanding wages and 20s. ‘reward’. Reflection on this phase of Tallis’s life may be instructive to those who use hindsight uncritically. It is tempting for us to see the course of the English Reformation as having been inevitable and predictable; yet here we observe Tallis, who was presumably as capable of sensing what was in the wind as any other professional musician in London, making a career move that would bring him to a dead end some eighteen months later. In fact, during the late 1530s and early 1540s government policy on religion was astonishingly unpredictable and sometimes contradictory, and this must have had an extremely unsettling effect on church music.

One might expect that in 1540 the prospects of re-employment for a redundant church musician would have looked decidedly bleak. Paradoxically, however, the dissolution of the monasteries itself created some attractive opportunities. About half of the cathedrals of medieval England—Bath, Canterbury, Coventry, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester and Worcester—had been Benedictine priories. When these were dissolved most of them were promptly refounded as secular cathedrals, and in their new guise they were equipped with larger professional choirs than they had ever been able to maintain during their monastic existence. As a native of Kent and a former organist at Dover Priory, Tallis may have been able to pull a few strings at Canterbury, which had been surrendered to the Crown on 4 April. At any rate, his name is given pride of place among the lay-clerks in an undated list of recruits for the new choir that seems to have been drawn up in the summer of 1540. Consisting of ten boys and twelve men, the choir was clearly designed to be worthy of England’s mother-church. Here Tallis was a senior member of an ensemble probably at least twice as large as any to which he had hitherto belonged. He was a member of this choir during what must have been a very busy period while it rapidly built up an impressive and markedly conservative musical repertory. It is interesting to note that during the early 1540s Canterbury was a centre of fierce religious controversy: while the archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, was a leading advocate of religious reform, several influential members of the cathedral chapter were staunchly traditionalist (they were soon to attempt to prosecute their archbishop for heresy).

Despite this excitement—or perhaps because of it—Tallis stayed at Canterbury for only two years. In 1542 he was appointed a Gentleman (that is, a singer) of the Chapel Royal; he may have owed his good fortune to Archbishop Cranmer, who had become one of the king’s most trusted counsellors. Tallis had now risen as high in his profession as it was possible to rise, and it is no surprise that he remained a member of the Chapel Royal for the rest of his life. Even if he had desired to make another career move, the opportunities for doing so were shortly to become extremely limited because of the wholesale disbanding of church choirs that occurred during the reign of Edward VI (1547–53). Tallis may well have served as organist of the chapel throughout his membership of it, although he was not given this title until the 1570s. In about 1552 he married—an action often postponed until a man felt that he had achieved stability—but it appears that he and his wife Joan did not have children. Tallis’s later career will be covered in more detail in the notes to the recordings in this series devoted to his later music. By the time of his death in 1585 he had become the doyen of English music: a composer of immense and greatly varied experience, the mentor and business partner of William Byrd, and a link with a past that was rapidly receding beyond men’s memory. He had been born about a hundred years after the death of Chaucer; he died a hundred years before the birth of Handel.

Tallis embarked upon his musical career at a time when the culture of church music in England was at its zenith. A remarkably large number of religious foundations—royal and aristocratic household chapels, cathedrals, collegiate churches, the larger monasteries, even parish churches—were assiduously cultivating choral music of a particularly elaborate, colourful and virtuosic kind. Standards of choral singing in England seem to have been extremely high, and were applauded by observers from abroad, even though the idiom of English music might have seemed old-fashioned to anybody familiar with the work of Josquin. The culmination of this style was probably reached in the mid-1520s, when composers such as John Taverner, Nicholas Ludford, Richard Pygott and Hugh Aston infused into the established style a new sense of discipline and drive. Possibilities of change were, however, already in the air: by the late 1520s some composers were beginning to experiment with a more sober musical style which placed greater emphasis upon audibility of text and clarity of design rather than upon richness of sound and profusion of ornament. It is tempting but probably too glib to interpret such experiments as having been motivated exclusively by religious—let alone by Protestant—ideas; the motivation could have been partly or even purely musical, for it is difficult to see how the florid style of the 1520s could have developed except through quite radical change. On the other hand, church music can hardly have failed to be affected by the reformist ideas that the government found it expedient to tolerate for most of the 1530s, at least until the king himself laid out a very conservative religious position towards the end of the decade. For young composers like Tallis the times must surely have been both stimulating and confusing.

In early Tudor England, until the abolition of the Latin rite and the introduction of The Booke of the Common Prayer on Whitsunday, 9 June 1549, composers produced four main types of church music: Masses, Magnificats, votive antiphons and smaller liturgical pieces. English Masses, which included large-scale settings intended for major feast days and smaller settings for more general use, usually had four movements—Gloria, Credo, Sanctus with Benedictus, and Agnus Dei—related to each other through shared musical material. The Magnificat was sung during the evening service of Vespers. Votive antiphons were settings of devotional texts sung after Compline, the final service of the day, in front of the image or altar of the saint to whom the text was addressed. The smaller liturgical pieces were fairly miscellaneous, but typically included settings of plainchant items sung in the Lady Mass (the special votive Mass of the Virgin) or on special days such as Easter and Christmas; the plainchant melody to which the text was normally sung was often incorporated into the polyphonic setting. During the 1530s the standard English choral texture consisted of five voices: treble, alto (usually called ‘mean’), high tenor, low tenor or baritone, and bass. Smaller choirs or more modest occasions might call for music in four or even three voices. It seems that the organ did not accompany vocal polyphony, although it sometimes alternated with the choir in a verse-by-verse performance of some polyphonic items; it could also reinforce or replace the choir in the performance of plainchant, and it certainly contributed voluntaries. Other instruments appear to have had no regular role in the performance of church music.

Of the four musical categories mentioned in the previous paragraph, only the Magnificat is not represented on this recording (Tallis’s four-part setting may nevertheless date from the 1530s). The votive antiphon is represented by three large-scale works—Ave dei patris, Ave rosa sine spinis and Salve intemerata; the Mass by a small-scale setting based on Salve intemerata; and the liturgical category by two items from the Lady Mass, Alleluia [Ora pro nobis] and Euge celi porta.

Dating these works—even placing them in chronological order—poses some interesting problems, because the evidence of the musical sources is sometimes at variance with that of the music. A chronology based solely on musical style would almost certainly place the four larger works in the order given above. Ave dei patris betrays distinct signs of inexperience; Ave rosa sine spinis resembles Ave dei patris quite closely but evinces a somewhat stronger sense of control; Salve intemerata is markedly better planned and more skilfully written than the other two antiphons, and must obviously pre-date the Mass derived from it. The source evidence, however, appears to throw doubt upon these conclusions. Ave rosa sine spinis and Salve intemerata and its associated Mass were all included in a set of partbooks (Cambridge, University Library, Peterhouse MSS 471–4) compiled for Canterbury Cathedral at about the time when Tallis joined the cathedral choir in 1540; Tallis himself may well have made these works available to the copyist. Yet Ave dei patris was not copied into this set of partbooks, and in fact survives only in late Elizabethan and Jacobean sources post-dating the composer’s death. If this really is the earliest of Tallis’s votive antiphons, why is it preserved only in very late sources? In this context the absence of Ave dei patris from the partbooks copied for Canterbury could be significant. Perhaps Tallis did not offer Ave dei patris for copying—perhaps he even tried to suppress it—because he regarded it as a student composition unrepresentative of his maturity.

There is also a problem concerning the dating of Salve intemerata. The musical evidence suggests that this is the latest of the three votive antiphons under consideration, and yet it is preserved in what is generally thought to be the oldest source to contain any music by Tallis, a single partbook (London, British Library, Harley MS 1709) whose other contents are more redolent of the 1520s than of the 1530s. Furthermore, the text set by Tallis appeared in print for the first time in a book of hours published in 1527. It might therefore seem tempting to place the composition of Salve intemerata in the late 1520s, and to push Ave dei patris and Ave rosa sine spinis back into the mid-1520s to allow time for the process of maturation that seems to have taken place between the composition of these works. However, the implications need to be thought through, because they pose some awkward questions. If Tallis was composing music of this quality in the 1520s, why was he still occupying an extremely minor musical position in 1532? Why did his career take so long to gain momentum? Why, having just moved to Canterbury in 1540, did he contribute only three works to the set of partbooks currently being compiled for the cathedral?

If we accept the conclusion, based on the evidence of musical style, that the four large works on this recording were composed in the order Ave dei patris, Ave rosa sine spinis, Salve intemerata, and the Mass Salve intemerata, it is very difficult to avoid the inference that Tallis’s career as a composer must have begun in the 1530s, not in the 1520s. The position of organist at Dover Priory would have been suitable for a young man on the threshold of a musical career; the move to London would have presented a more experienced but still unestablished musician with greater challenge and opportunity, albeit with less security; the post at Waltham Abbey seems to have offered seniority and perhaps a return to security; the moves to Canterbury and the Chapel Royal marked further progress up the professional ladder. If this hypothesis is correct, Tallis may well have been born some five years later than is generally thought, around 1510 rather than around 1505.

Any attempt to attach these compositions to particular stages in Tallis’s early career will necessarily be speculative. The evident immaturity of Ave dei patris makes one wonder whether it might have been composed during the years at Dover Priory. Ave dei patris reveals its immaturity in several ways: the melodic writing is rather aimless, unbalanced and inconsistent, with little of the pungency that we associate with Tallis; the internal proportions are not always convincing, particularly in the frequent changes of texture towards the end of the piece; and some of the part-writing is less than deft. In addition, there are some remarkable similarities of rhetorical gesture, scoring and even musical material between Tallis’s and Robert Fayrfax’s settings of this text, as though Tallis were basing his work on an approved model. Fayrfax, who died in 1521, was apparently regarded as the greatest composer of his day, and his setting of Ave dei patris was one of his most popular works—just the sort of work, in fact, that an apprentice composer might choose as a model.

It would be wrong to imply that Tallis’s Ave dei patris is unworthy of our attention. The work has a distinct personality—in particular, the qualities of sobriety and restraint that inform so much of Tallis’s later music are already in evidence—and it gives us a rare opportunity to observe an early Tudor composer learning his craft. Until recently, Ave dei patris has been considered unperformable because it survives in a very incomplete and corrupt state: large portions of the treble and tenor parts are missing, and some sources apparently preserve the music in a modernised form reflecting the taste of the 1600s rather than that of the 1530s. The edition used in this performance is one of two recently published which attempt to restore the piece to something like its original state.

Ave rosa sine spinis is essentially very similar to Ave dei patris except that the composer seems rather more sure of himself. The melodic writing has a slightly greater sense of logic and purpose, the part-writing is a little less clumsy, and the composition seems to be more successfully shaped and paced. Where the ‘Amen’ section of Ave dei patris sounds almost like a perfunctory afterthought, that of Ave rosa makes a very effective and well-sustained climax. Like Ave dei patris, Ave rosa also survives in an incomplete state. In this case, however, far less is missing; all that has to be supplied is the treble voice in the treble-bass duet beginning ‘Benedicta tu in mulieribus’. On this recording Ave rosa is sung by five solo voices, as it might well have been if it was performed at Dover Priory.

Ave dei patris and Ave rosa sine spinis resemble each other not only in their general style but also in their texts, which are rather feeble effusions to Our Lady of a kind all too common in the early Tudor votive antiphon. The text of Ave dei patris is simply a series of threadbare compliments to the Virgin, ending with a request for her intercession. The text of Ave rosa is somewhat more enterprising: an expansion of the ‘Hail Mary’ in which each word or phrase of the parent prayer—‘Ave’, ‘Maria’, ‘gratia plena’, ‘dominus tecum’ and so on—begins a stanza of the poem. The text of Salve intemerata, on the other hand, is a very different matter: it is a lengthy, complex and carefully argued prose prayer to Mary. Devotional texts of this type, addressed either to Mary or to Jesus and tenaciously dialectic in character, seem to have become popular with some English composers—or with their patrons—during the 1530s and early 1540s. Taverner’s Gaude plurimum and O splendor glorie and Ludford’s Domine Jesu Christe are comparable texts set by two of Tallis’s senior contemporaries, and Domine deus celestis is one set by a slightly younger man, Christopher Tye. Salve intemerata is just the kind of text that one might expect Tallis to have come across in London rather than in the more conservative atmosphere of Dover or Waltham. There is no obvious reason why the 1527 book of hours in which the text first appeared could not have been available to Tallis some ten years later, or why the set of partbooks to which Harley 1709 belonged could not still have been in use in the late 1530s.

The challenge of setting the Salve intemerata text to music must surely have seemed daunting to a composer of Tallis’s generation. Being in prose, it did not provide a stanzaic structure or rhyme scheme that the composer could incorporate into his musical construction; being verbose and rhetorical, it demanded a musical setting that was both concise and imposing; being intricate and carefully argued, it required music that would both clarify and adorn. Tallis’s achievement in meeting the challenge is astonishing. The music is just as closely argued as the text, and is patently designed to suit its rhetorical purpose. Two compositional techniques—imitation and motivic writing—make an especially significant contribution to this compelling musical argument. Imitation, involving the passing of musical ideas from one voice to another, creates the impression of a topic being argued out by a group of people; it is noteworthy how Tallis tends to make all the voices except the imitating voice melismatic, so that the texted voice carries even more effectively through the texture. Motivic writing, which entails the generation of melodic lines out of constantly re-used and subtly varied components, creates the impression of a developing train of thought, highly appropriate to the character of the text being set. The suggestion by some commentators that in Salve intemerata Tallis is too disciplined and single-minded, too earnest about demonstrating his abilities, underestimates the cogency of this massive work, and its significance for Tallis’s own musical development. If the forty-part motet Spem in alium was to be Tallis’s musical Everest, Salve intemerata was his Matterhorn.

Tallis’s Mass Salve intemerata is closely based upon his votive antiphon. The relationship between the two works is especially close in the Gloria, where Tallis adds hardly any new material, merely making rhythmic alterations in order to accommodate the new text. The other movements become progressively less reliant upon the material of the antiphon, so that about a quarter of the Credo, a third of the Sanctus and half of the Agnus Dei are freely composed. Although the tenor part of the entire Mass is missing, it can be restored with certainty wherever the Mass quotes from the antiphon, because the quotation is literal; in the freely-composed sections there is more room for manoeuvre, but Tallis’s fondness for imitative writing is often helpful to the restorer. The idea of composing a Mass by re-using the music of an existing composition was not new—Fayrfax had tried it in his votive antiphon and Mass O bone Jesu about a generation earlier—but it seems to have attracted renewed interest in the 1530s. Tallis’s immediate models were probably Taverner’s Masses Mater Christi and Small devotion/Sancti Wilhelmi, derived from the composer’s own votive antiphons Mater Christi and Christe Jesu respectively, but in one respect Tallis is a great deal bolder than Taverner. Where Taverner redeployed his material in an essentially similar context, Tallis’s re-use of his material shows it in a radically new light: where the antiphon is a large-scale public work, the Mass is concise and intimate. Tallis’s dexterity in adapting the pre-existing music to its new environment and blending it with the new material is quite remarkable, the more so because it is so unobtrusive: the craftsmanship is of the highest order.

The other two polyphonic works on this recording are of a rather different character. They are four-part settings of plainchant items sung during the Lady Mass. Alleluia [Ora pro nobis] is the Alleluia sung in the Lady Mass on Tuesdays from Purification to Advent. Tallis sets only the choral Alleluia, and places the plainchant monorhythmically in the second highest of the four voices; the opening Alleluia and the verse Ora pro nobis would have been sung in plainchant by soloists. Euge celi porta is the second verse of the Sequence Ave preclara maris stella, sung in the Lady Mass on Sundays (and also on the octave of the Assumption); here the plainchant is sung in a decorated form in the tenor line. It is possible that Tallis originally composed music for all the even-numbered verses of the Sequence, so that a complete liturgical performance would have alternated polyphony and plainchant or organ. Both of these pieces survive only in the Gyffard partbooks (London, British Library, Additional MSS 17802–5) which date from the reign of Mary, but on grounds of style they seem to belong to an earlier stage of Tallis’s career. The Alleluia, in fact, sounds more like Taverner than Tallis, and both pieces contain some rather surprising noises which may be the result of inaccurate copying.

Nick Sandon, 6th January 1997

Texts and Translations

[1] Ave Dei Patris Filia

Ave Dei patris filia nobilissima
Dei filii mater dignissima
Dei spiritus sponsa venustissima
Dei unius et trini ancilla subiectissima.

Ave summe eternitatis filia clementissima
Summe veritatis mater piissima
Summe bonitatis sponsa benignissima
Summe trinitatis ancilla mitissima.

Ave eterne caritatis desideratissima filia
Eterne sapientie mater gratissima
Eterne spiracionis sponsa sacratissima
Coeterne majestatis ancilla sincerissima.

Ave Jesu tui filii dulcis filia
Christi Dei tui mater alma
Sponsi sponsa sine ulla macula
Deitatis ancilla sessioni proxima.

Ave Domini filia singulariter generosa
Domini mater singulariter gloriosa
Domini sponsa singulariter speciosa
Domini ancilla singulariter obsequiosa.

Ave plena gracia poli regina
Misericordie mater meritis preclara
Mundi domina a patriarchis presignata
Imperatrix inferni a prophetis preconizata.

Ave virgo feta ut sol preelecta
Mater intacta sicut luna perpulcra
Salve parens inclita enixa puerpera
Stella maris prefulgida felix celi porta.

Esto nobis via recta ad eterna gaudia
ubi pax est gloria. O gloriosissima semper virgo Maria. Amen.

Hail, most noble daughter of God the Father,
most worthy mother of the Son of God
most lovely bride of the Holy Spirit
most humble handmaid of God the Three in One.

Hail, most merciful daughter of the supreme eternity,
most faithful mother of the supreme truth,
most kindly bride of the supreme good,
most gentle handmaid of the supreme Trinity.

Hail, most beloved daughter of eternal love,
most gracious mother of eternal wisdom,
most holy bride of eternal spirit,
most pure handmaid of coeternal majesty.

Hail, daughter of your dear son Jesus,
kindly mother of Christ your God,
spotless bride of the bridegroom,
handmaid of the Almighty beside his throne.

Hail, only noble daughter of the Lord,
only glorious mother of the Lord,
only excellent bride of the Lord,
only obedient handmaid of the Lord.

Hail, full of grace, queen of heaven,
mother of mercy, famed for your benefits,
lady of this world, foretold by the patriarchs,
empress of hell, foreknown by the prophets.

Hail, fruitful maiden, predestined like the sun,
mother unsullied, lovely like the moon,
hail, most glorious parent who laboured in childbirth,
brilliant star of the sea, blessed gate of heaven.

Be to us a straight road to eternal joys
where is peace and glory, O most glorious ever-virgin Mary. Amen.

[2] Ave rosa sine spinis

Ave rosa sine spinis
Tu quam pater in divinis
Majestate sublimavit,
Et ab omni vae purgavit.

Maria stella dicta maris
Tuo nato illustraris
Luce clara deitatis,
Qua praefulges cunctis datis.

Gratia plena te perfecit
Spiritus Sanctus, dum te fecit
Vas divinae bonitatis
Et totius pietatis.

Dominus tecum miro pacto
Verbo vite carne facto
Opere trini conditoris:
O quam dulce vas amoris.

Benedicta tu in muleribus,
Hoc testatur omnis tribus,
Celi fantur te beatum,
Super omnes exaltatam.

Et benedictus fructus ventris tui,
Quo nos dona semper frui
Per praegustum hic internum,
Et post mortem in eternum.

Hunc, Virgo, Salutis sensum,
Tue laudis gratum pensum,
Corde tuo sinu pia,
Clemens sume, O Maria. Amen.

Hail, rose without thorns, whom the Father set on high in divine majesty and made free from all sorrow.

Mary, called the star of the sea, by your son you are made resplendent with the bright light of divinity, through which you shine with every virtue.

Full of grace the Holy Spirit filled you while it made you the vessel of divine goodness and total obedience.

The Lord is with you in a wondrous way, the word of life made flesh by the deed of the triune creator: Oh, how sweet a vessel of love.

Blessed are you among women: this is declared to all nations. The Heavens acknowledge you to be blessed and raised high above all.

And blessed is the fruit of your womb, a gift for us always to enjoy here as an inner foretaste, and after death in perpetuity.

O merciful virgin Mary, receive into the holy refuge of your heart this perception of salvation, the grateful object of your prayers. Amen.

[3] Alleluia, Ora pro nobis

Alleluia, Ora pro nobis pia virgo Maria. Unde Christum natus est pro nobis pecatoribus. Ora.

Ave preclara maris stella in lucem gentium Maria divinitus orta.

Alleluia, pray for us, devout virgin Mary, from whom Christ was born for our sins. Pray.

Hail, noble star of the sea, Mary, divinely born into the view of the heathen.

[4] Euge celi porta (Ave preclara)

Ave preclara maris stella in lucem gentium Maria divinitus orta.

Euge caeli porta quae non aperta veritatis lumen, ipsum solem iustitiae, indutum carne, ducis in orbem.

Hail, noble star of the sea, Mary, divinely born into the view of the heathen.

Welcome gate of heaven which, having not been open, the light of truth now opens to the sun of justice, dressed in flesh, the leader of the world.

[5] Kyrie Deus Creator

Deus creator omnium tu theos ymon nostri pie eleyson.
Tibi laudes coniubilantes regum rex Christe oramus te eleyson.
Laus virtus pax et imperium cui est semper sine fine eleyson.
Christe rex unice Patris almi nate coeterne eleyson.
Qui perditum hominem salvasti de morte reddens vite eleyson.
Ne pereant pascue oves tue Jesu pastor bone eleyson
Consolator Spiritus supplices ymas te exoramus eleyson.
Virtus nostra Domine atque salus nostra in eternum eleyson.
Summe Deus et une vite dona nobis tribue misertus nostrique tu digneris eleyson.
O God, creator of everything, Thou, our benevolent God, have mercy upon us.
O Christ, king of kings, we pray to Thee, rejoicing together; have mercy.

Praise, strength, peace and power are given to him always and without end; have mercy.
O Christ, the coeternal king, the only offspring of a kindly father; have mercy.
Who hast saved lost mankind from death, restoring us to life; have mercy.
Jesus good shepherd let not the sheep of thy pasture perish; have mercy.
O Holy Spirit, the Comforter, we entreat Thee to pray for us; have mercy.
O Lord, our strength and our safety for eternity; have mercy.
O highest and everliving God, Thou who hast had pity on us, grant Thy gifts to those whom Thou shalt consider worthy; have mercy.

[6] Gloria in excelsis

Gloria in excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bone voluntatis. Laudamus te. Benedicimus te. Adoramus te. Glorificamus te. Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. Domine Deus, Rex celestis, Deus Pater omnipotens. 

Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe, Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris, Qui tollis peccata mundi miserere nobis. Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram. Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis. 

Quoniam tu solus sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus altissimus, Jesu Christe, cum Sancto Spiritu, in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.

Glory be to God on high, and in earth peace, towards men of goodwill. We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.

O Lord, the only-begotten Son Jesu Christ; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the Father, have mercy upon us.

For thou only art holy; thou only art the Lord; thou only, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

[7] Credo

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem celi et terre, visibilium omnium et invisibilium. 

Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum Filium Dei unigenitum. Et ex Patre natum ante omnia secula. Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero. Genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri: per quem omnia facta sunt. Qui propter nos homines, et propter nostram salutem descendit de celis. Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine: et homo factus est. Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus est. Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas. Et ascendit in celum: sedet ad dexteram Patris. Et iterum venturus est cum gloria, judicare vivos et mortuos: cujus regni non erit finis. Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum. 

Et vitam venturi seculi. Amen.

I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible. 

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds. God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten not made; Being of one substance with the Father; By Whom all things were made: Who for us men, and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man. And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, And the third day He rose again according to the scriptures, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father. And He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end. 

And I look for the Resurrection of the dead, And the life of the world to come. Amen.

[8] Sanctus and Benedictus

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis.

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

[9] Agnus Dei

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.

Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world: grant us peace.

[10] Salve intemerata

Salve intemerata Virgo Maria, filii Dei genetrix, prae ceteris electa virginibus: quae ex utero tuae matris Annae, mulieris sanctissimae, sic a Spiritu Sancto tum sanctificata tum illuminata fuisti, munitaque tantopere Dei omnipotentis gratia, ut usque ad conceptum Filii tui, Domini nostri Jesu Christe. Et dum eum conciperes, ac usque ad partum, et dum eum pareres, semperque post partum, virgo omnium quae natae sunt castissima incorruptissima et immaculatissima et corpore et animo tota vita permanseris. 

Tu nimirum universas alias longe superasti virgines sincerra mentis impollutae concientia, quotquot vel adhuc fuerunt ab ipso mundi primordio, vel unquam futurae sunt usque in finem mundi.

Per haec nos praecellentissima gratiae celestis dona tibi, virgo et mater Maria, prae ceteris omnibus mulieribus et virginibus a Deo singularitur infusa. Te precamur, quae miseris mortalibus misericors patrona es, ut pro peccatis nostris nobis condonandis intercedere digneris apud Deum patrem omnipotentem eiusque Filium Jesum Christum, secundum divinitatem quidem ex Patre ante omnia saecula genitum. Secundum humanitatem autem ex te natum; atque apud Spiritum Sanctum, ut peccatorum nostrorum maculis tua absteris intercessione, tecum, sancta Virgo, semper congaudere, teque in regno caelorum sine fine laudare mereamur. Amen. 

Hail, pure virgin Mary, Mother of the Son of God, chosen above all other virgins; who from the womb of thy mother Anna, most holy of women, was by the Holy Spirit first made holy, then filled with light, and was so greatly fortified by the grace of almighty God, that until the conception of thy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and while thou were conceiving Him, and until the birth and while thou were bearing Him, and always after the birth, remained in body and spirit for your whole life the Virgin most pure, most incorruptible, most chaste of all who were born. 

Thou truly has surpassed, by the blamelessness of thy pure mind, all other virgins as many soever as have been either hitherto, from the beginning of the world, or ever shall be, or ever shall be until the end of the world.

We beseech thee, by this most excellent gift of heavenly grace imparted particularly from God to thee, Virgin and Mother Mary, above all other women and virgins, thou who art the merciful protector of unhappy mortals, to deem it right to intercede with Almighty God and His son Jesus Christ for our sins to be pardoned, according to the divinity of One who was begotten of the Father before all worlds, in accordance with His humanity because he was born of thee; so we pray to thee, who livest with the Holy Spirit, Holy Virgin, that when the stains of our sins have been taken away by thy intercession, we may be considered worthy to rejoice for ever with thee, praising thee in the Kingdom of Heaven for ever. Amen.