Agnus Dei (Barber) Agnus Dei (Barber) Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) is a choral composition in one movement by Samuel Barber, his own arrangement of his "Adagio for Strings" (1936). In 1967, he set the Latin words of the liturgical Agnus Dei, a part of the Mass, for mixed chorus with optional organ or piano accompaniment. The music, in B-flat minor, has a duration of about eight minutes. Barber's "Adagio for Strings" began as the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, composed in 1936. At the request of Arturo Toscanini, he arranged it for string orchestra, and in January 1938 sent
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