Thomas Tallis (b. ca. 1505, place unknown; d. 1585, Greenwich, England)

 "Tallis is dead, and music dies.” These final words of his pupil and colleague William Byrd’s elegy on Thomas Tallis’s death reflect the loss of one of the major musical figures in sixteenth-century England. Tallis’s long career spanned the vicissitudes of political and religious change.

During all his adult life Tallis worked as a church musician—as an organist and a composer, presumably also a singer and a choirmaster—in various churches in England and then in the service of four successive English monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I. Many of his compositions, thus, were sacred; two masses, two magnificats, two lamentations, office hymns, and numerous motets survive. Some of his most famous works, though, show no evidence of having been composed for church use. His great, nostalgic forty-part motet, Spem in alium, is believed to have been commissioned by two members of the royal family and has no obvious religious tie. He also wrote numerous madrigals, pieces for virginal, and works for instrumental ensembles.

Many authorities consider Tallis, along with Byrd, the greatest of the Elizabethan composers.