Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

The lectionary directs us to a beautiful reading from the Gospel of John, in which John the Baptist declares his faith in Jesus as the Son of God, calling him the Lamb of God.

This name of Jesus as the Lamb of God has been so important to Christians that it has become part of our ordinary liturgical language. The ‘Agnus Dei’ is one of five ‘Ordinary’ parts of the Eucharistic liturgy, one that is repeated at every mass:

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.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world,
grant us thy peace.

Due to the generally penitential bent in Western Eucharistic piety, the Agnus Dei has tended to receive a melancholic, contemplative treatment by composers of the mass. As a result, we have some particularly evocative settings from widely separated periods.

Where to start? I will suggest four settings that will give you a sense for the territory. Two are personal favorites, but all are stunningly beautiful:

1. Agnus Dei II from the Missa Brevis by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, sung by Siglio d’Oro. This music transports one to the enormous vaulted spaces of the churches in which Palestrina worked as a choir director: the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Lateran Basilica, and St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City. This is gorgeous writing, in spite of it’s conservative bent, and one cannot but feel moved by the large-scale architecture of the music itself.

2. Agnus Dei from Mass for Five Voices by William Byrd, sung by the Gesualdo Six. By comparison, Byrd’s treatment feels more compact and declamatory, though full of that sunny, English consonance.

3. Agnus Dei from the Adagio from the String Quartet Op. 11 by Samuel Barber, sung by the Flemish Radio Choir. Although not written for the text, it’s telling that Barber chose to use the Agnus Dei text to arrange the Adagio for choral ensemble. Incidentally, I find the combination of older and younger voices in this performance to be especially moving.

4. Agnus Dei from the Mass for Double Choir by Frank Martin, sung by the Netherlands Radio Choir. This brooding yet ecstatic setting has a deeply personal quality: after all, the Reformed tradition Martin belonged to could not use a liturgical mass setting, nor did not wish for it to be performed publicly. What a marvelous contribution to our material culture is this mass!

Yours in Christ,
Justin