The Composition
Tallis's motet 'Spem in alium nunquam habui' ('I have never placed my hope in any other') is scored for forty independent voices in eight choirs of five (SATTB each), making it the most technically complex choral work of the Renaissance and one of the most intricate pieces of music ever composed. The work runs approximately ten minutes and was almost certainly composed around 1570, probably for the fortieth birthday of either Queen Elizabeth I (born 1533, who turned forty in 1573) or Queen Mary I (born 1516, who would have turned forty in 1556 - making the earlier date 1556 equally plausible). The exact occasion remains disputed among scholars.
The manuscript evidence places the work's composition in the late Elizabethan period, when Tallis was in his sixties - and the forty-voice texture may be a deliberate tribute to the number forty, which in biblical tradition signifies completeness, testing, and divine encounter (forty days of flood, forty years in the wilderness, forty days of Jesus's temptation). The work is written in eight separate choir books, one for each five-voice choir, with the choirs arranged spatially in a semicircle or in two facing rows, so that the sound moves around and through the listening space.
Biblical Text
The text is drawn from Judith 9:16-17 in the Vulgate Bible: 'I have never placed my hope in any other but in you, O God of Israel, whose anger will quickly pass, whose mercy to those who turn from sin is gracious. O God, you are the Creator, humble and gentle, adorable, the Savior of those in despair.' The Book of Judith is part of the Catholic Deuterocanonical canon (accepted by Catholics but not by Protestants) and tells the story of the Jewish widow Judith who saves her city from the Assyrian general Holofernes by decapitating him - one of the most dramatic stories in the apocryphal books. The prayer from which Tallis draws his text is Judith's prayer before undertaking her mission.
The theological content of the text is pure trust: the complete orientation of hope toward God alone, to the exclusion of every earthly alternative. This totality of hope is enacted musically by the totality of forty voices: the whole sonic universe of Renaissance polyphony - from the lowest bass notes to the highest soprano - is oriented simultaneously toward a single musical destination.
The Composer
Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) served as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal under four monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I - a remarkable feat of survival and musical adaptation across the most turbulent period of English religious history. Under Henry VIII he composed Catholic polyphony; under the Protestant Edward VI he adapted to the simpler English anthems required by the Reformed liturgy; under the Catholic Mary I he returned to Latin polyphony; under the Protestant Elizabeth I he composed both English anthems and Latin motets for the Queen's private musical pleasure. The Tallis who composed 'Spem in alium' was sixty-something, one of the most experienced musicians in England, and the acknowledged master of English polyphony.
His partnership and friendship with William Byrd - thirty years his junior - produced the first publication of keyboard music in England (Cantiones Quae ab Argumento Sacrae Vocantur, 1575, dedicated to Elizabeth I) and a model of inter-generational musical collaboration. 'Spem in alium' may be related to this partnership: Byrd later composed a motet for eight voices as a scaled-down response to Tallis's achievement.
Musical Analysis
The technical achievement of 'Spem in alium' is the maintenance of forty genuinely independent vocal lines over a ten-minute span. The work opens with a single choir (Choir 1) alone, its five voices weaving in imitative polyphony in the manner of a standard Renaissance motet. Progressively, each additional choir enters, building from the single choir to the full forty-voice texture in a gradual crescendo of sound that takes approximately half the work's duration.
The climax - the moment when all forty voices enter simultaneously, converging on a single chord from eight different directions - is described by listeners and critics as one of the most overwhelming sonic experiences available to the human ear. The acoustic effect of forty independent voices in a large reverberant space (as designed for - the Chapel Royal and the great cathedrals of Elizabethan England) fills every frequency range simultaneously, creating a sound that is both completely harmonic and completely enveloping.
After the climax, Tallis reverses the process: the choirs begin to disengage, the texture thinning as individual choirs withdraw, until the work ends with all eight choirs together again on the final cadence - but now the full forty-voice sound carries the weight of everything that has been accumulated in the preceding minutes.
Theological Content
The theological statement of 'Spem in alium' is made as much by its musical architecture as by its text. The totality of forty independent voices, all oriented toward the same tonal destination, is a musical image of absolute trust: not the trust of a single individual but the trust of an entire community - every voice, every register, every harmonic function - placed simultaneously in the single God of Israel. The biblical tradition of the number forty as the number of testing, waiting, and divine encounter gives the forty-voice texture a typological resonance that Tallis and his sixteenth-century listeners would have recognized immediately.
Performance History
The motet was performed at the English court in Elizabethan times and has been associated ever since with royal and great ceremonial occasions. Its modern performance history is particularly remarkable: in 1968 the musicologist Paul Doe organized a reconstruction performance using a semicircular arrangement of eight choirs, and the resulting acoustic experience is described by those present as transformative. The 1968 performance launched the modern performance tradition. Since then the work has been performed at significant public and sacred occasions, including the consecration of the rebuilt Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.
Notable Recordings
The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips (Gimell, 1985) produced the defining modern recording, using a resonant acoustic at Merton College, Oxford, that captures the spatial character of the eight-choir arrangement. Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (Coro, 2007) offer an alternative approach with somewhat warmer choral tone. Many cathedral choirs have recorded it in situ, allowing the building's acoustic to become part of the musical texture.
Legacy
Tallis's forty-voice motet is the supreme achievement of Renaissance polyphony and one of the most challenging large-scale works ever composed. Its influence on subsequent generations was initially indirect - the work was little known outside English manuscript traditions until the twentieth century - but since its modern rediscovery it has become an icon of musical ambition and a touchstone for any discussion of what large-scale choral music can achieve. Composers from Peter Maxwell Davies through Gavin Bryars have acknowledged its influence. It also demonstrates that the most complex musical architecture can be placed entirely at the service of the simplest theological statement: I have placed all my hope in God.