Christe, du Lamm Gottes Christe, du Lamm Gottes "" (Christ, you Lamb of God) is a Lutheran hymn, often referred to as the German Agnus Dei. Martin Luther derived the words as a translation of the Latin Agnus Dei from the liturgy of the mass, and the tune from an older model. The hymn was first published in 1528. It has been the basis for several musical settings by composers such as Bach, Mendelssohn and Hessenberg. It appears in the current German hymnals, both the Protestant "Evangelisches Gesangbuch" (EG 190:2) and the Catholic "Gotteslob" (GL 208). When Luther introduced the Reformation, he tried to
Mass for Four Voices the B flat strikingly changes to a B natural, producing an unexpected major chord at a key point in the music. A special feature of the mass (as also of the Five-Part Mass) is the final clause of the Agnus Dei. Although text-expression is not generally a feature of sixteenth-century Mass cycles, Byrd clearly regarded the ending of the Agnus Dei text ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem’ as an opportunity for an expressive treatment of the words. He almost certainly identified ‘nobis’ as the persecuted Tudor Catholic community, as he had done with many of the