Sheppard's 'Media Vita'

Composers Datebook

Synopsis

In December of 2020, during the first, bleak winter of the worldwide Covid pandemic, The New York Times ran a story about the English Renaissance composer John Sheppard, who, as a member of the Chapel Royal, the household choir of the English monarchs, was buried in London on today’s date in 1558.

Shepard lived during the turbulent English Reformation, and as a church musician composed liturgical works in both English and Latin, probably reflecting whether the Protestant king Edward VI or the Catholic Queen Mary I was seated on the throne.

We know little about Sheppard’s life and nothing about his own religious inclinations. His most famous work, an elaborately polyphonic compline setting of a Latin text, “Media vita in morte sumus” (In the midst of life we are in death), might have been written for the funeral for a fellow composer who died from what was called the “new ague,” a pandemic that swept England in 1557, and returned the following year in a devasting second wave, killing one in ten Londoners.

One of them was John Sheppard. He died just after the strain claimed Reginald Pole, the archbishop of Canterbury, and probably Queen Mary as well.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Sheppard (1515-1558): Media Vita; Tallis Scholars; Peter Phillips, conductor; Gimell 16