Lamentations I

One of Tallis's two five-voice settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, dating from roughly the 1560s or 1570s and surviving only in manuscript; neither was published in his lifetime. The text comes from the opening of Lamentations, with each section headed by the name of a Hebrew letter. Music of this kind in Elizabethan England was largely for private use rather than public worship.